Educating towards the prudent entrepreneurial self – an educational journey including agency and social awareness to handle the unknown

Colin Jones,Gustav Hägg

doi:10.1108/ijebr-10-2020-0668

Abstract

PurposeThis paper explores the idea of the prudent entrepreneurial self, through re-conceptualizing prudence into the domain of entrepreneurial education, to unite the two processes of becoming enterprising and entrepreneurial. It is argued that developing a capacity for prudence among graduates involves past, present and conjecture forms of knowledge that the authors find in the interplay between individuation and social awareness.Design/methodology/approachBuilding on Palmer's idea of wholeness, the authors discuss six poles of paradoxes in entrepreneurial education and in conjunction establish a philosophical argument for the idea of stimulating the development of prudence as fundamentally important to contemporary notions of entrepreneurial education.FindingsThe paper presents a model to develop a schema that moves students towards becoming prudent entrepreneurial selves. The model rests on two interrelated developmental processes – individuation and social awareness – conditional for developing the three forms of knowledge (past, present and conjecture) that makes up prudence where developing prudence is a means to handle or cope with the unknown.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper argues that for enterprise and entrepreneurship education to realize their potential contributions, both the relationships between each field and the overarching purpose that ties the fields together need to be rethought, and the poles of paradoxes need to be connected to further develop both fields and creating wholeness for the emerging scholarly discipline.Practical implicationsTo educate towards the prudent entrepreneurial self means educating towards an unknown end where student development aims to meet both the objectives of individual development and the growth in social awareness required to handle the changing nature of contemporary society.Originality/valueThis study philosophically conceives a united enterprise and entrepreneurship education landscape in which deeper student learning makes possible the notion of the prudent entrepreneurial self.

Highlights

Educating the Entrepreneurial education is in vogue and has seen an exponential growth of interest in the last four decades (H€agg and Gabrielsson, 2019; Nabi et al, 2017)
In this paper, building on an Aristotelian view based on phronesis, which has later been discussed by Aquinas, being the one cardinal virtue encompassing past, present and conjecture forms of knowledge, central we argue, to the process of learning in unpredictable times
We argue that the educational process is only one part of one’s learning journey towards prudence; the process is highly predictable, the disclosing of new worlds (Barnett, 2004) to students provides various educative entrepreneurial experiences full of uncertainty and potential learning from failures

Summary

Introduction

Educating the Entrepreneurial education is in vogue and has seen an exponential growth of interest in the last four decades (H€agg and Gabrielsson, 2019; Nabi et al, 2017). Given the inherent unpredictability of attempting to create new value, the development of mental abilities that reduce the possibilities of past experiences being rendered “mis-educative” (Dewey, 1946) and naturally increasing the precision of trial-and-error learning, ensuring more past experiences are educative vis-a-vis future actions In both the narrow start-up sense and broad enterprising approach, collectively, the eight parts of prudence hold the potential (Huang, 2015) to increase the efficacy of entrepreneurial actions by contributing to the development of guidance routines (Nelson and Winter, 1982), increasing one’s awareness and understanding of past experiences relative to future actions (Tversky and Kahneman, 1974) and reducing overconfidence (Busenitz and Barney, 1997) as it applies to estimating both supply and demand possibilities as they are related to consumer behaviour and all critical factors for nascent entrepreneurs and enterprising graduates

Knowledge of conjecture

Conclusion