Search results

This paper explores perceptions of entrepreneurship among educators from several disciplines, to understand the circumstances for embedded entrepreneurship education across the university.

This qualitative study is based on eight online focus-group interviews with 44 university educators from different departments. Their experience with entrepreneurship ranged from being unfamiliar with entrepreneurship to being experienced entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship educators. We used social identity theory to analyse the data by theoretical thematic analysis.

The results show that educators may take the positions of “entrepreneurial outsiders” or “entrepreneurial insiders”, depending on their perceptions of entrepreneurship, as well as their ability to articulate and teach entrepreneurship. This study finds that educators often see themselves as “entrepreneurial outsiders”, lacking the competence to teach entrepreneurship. The findings highlight the importance of inclusive entrepreneurship discourse and innovation culture for educators to experience and acknowledge their “entrepreneurial insiderness”; the importance of contextual adaptation when teaching entrepreneurship in different disciplines and the importance of educators being contextualisation-bearers in entrepreneurship education for their students, bridging disciplines and showing that multiple social identities may co-exist.

This paper bridges a gap in the literature by looking at the educators’ perspective on entrepreneurship. The development of the two concepts of “entrepreneurial outsiderness” and “entrepreneurial insiderness” serves as an original contribution to social identity theory and the conversation of entrepreneurial identity, expanding our understanding of the complexity of enablers and barriers to embedded entrepreneurship education.