A Clash of Paradigms: Hidden Paradigms Within Entrepreneurship Pedagogy

Abstract

As the literature around entrepreneurship pedagogy matures and the number of entrepreneurship programmes continue to flourish, we see a clash of paradigms that hide assumptions about what success is and how success is internalised as an internal cognitive schema. This has implications for the way entrepreneurship is viewed by stakeholders, how behaviour success is measured and how it is taught to aspiring students. The goal of this paper is to examine two contradicting paradigms we propose underlie much of existing entrepreneurship pedagogy. Based on existing literature, this paper develops and draws on two main extreme alternative entrepreneurship approaches that is found in literature: The individualistic competitive approach (i.e. often populated by Individuals with problematic narcissistic tendencies) versus the collectivist team-based approach (i.e. embedding extensive psychological safety and a collectivist logic). The previous approach in some of the literature, have been proposed to give superior outcomes in terms of economic measures. More recent research however questions this approach and its outcomes. Among others, the dependent variables on which the more individualistic research orients do not account for the wider set of value(s) that mission-driven and sustainable entrepreneurship build. As such, the two approaches represent different paradigms of entrepreneurship and what entrepreneurship is about. The paper uses existing literature and document analysis of the entrepreneurship programme descriptions at the master level across Europe, Asia and the US. We classify the dominance of the different approaches across programmes and geographies using online available descriptions from the university’s sites. As such, we develop insights into the underlying values and assumptions on which the programmes are based and the consistency of their learning outcomes, given their orientation. The findings illustrate that both paradigms are found in most entrepreneurship programmes, but with different emphasis, while at the same time addressing the difficulties of integrating the two paradigms in the same educational programmes.