komulainen, k. et al. enterprising self education

Gender and EducationVol. 21, No. 6, November 2009, 631649

ISSN 0954-0253 print/ISSN 1360-0516 online 2009 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/09540250802680032http://www.informaworld.com

Risk-taking abilities for everyone? Finnish entrepreneurship education and the enterprising selves imagined by pupils

Katri Komulainen*, Maija Korhonen and Hannu Rty

Department of Psychology, University of Joensuu, Joensuu, FinlandTaylor and FrancisCGEE_A_368173.sgm(Received 5 December 2007; final version received 11 November 2008)10.1080/09540250802680032Gender and Education0954-0253 (print)/1360-0516 (online)Original Article2009Taylor & Francis0000000002009Dr. [email protected]

This article examines the spread of the neo-liberal educational policy in Finnishschools by considering entrepreneurship education. We examined the kinds ofgendered and classed enterprising selves that were narrated in the Finnish writingcompetition Good Enterprise! written by pupils in the 9th grade of comprehensiveschool. In their narratives of enterprising selves, the pupils constructed the middle-class version of the self, where the person was not contingent upon external effectsbut an autonomous self-governing individual. Moreover, the possible selves of boysmatched the culturally valued representations of the autonomous, risk-takingentrepreneurial individual more closely than the self-representations of girls did.However, it was especially the boys narratives of modest entrepreneurship withthe traditional virtues of the respectable citizen that were successful in thecompetition. This finding is in conflict with the educational policies of the EuropeanUnion, which call for risk-taking abilities and competition as pre-conditions forachieving progress.

Keywords: neo-liberalism; entrepreneurship education; pupils narratives;enterprising self; gender; class

Introduction

In 2004 the Finnish Ministry of Education started an action plan which aims topromote a general enterprising attitude inner entrepreneurship and to make entre-preneurship a new basic skill and competence for every citizen (Finnish Ministry ofEducation 2004; European Commission 2004). In Finland, the support of entrepre-neurship education is the latest manifestation of the restructuring of education to be inline with the neo-liberal spirit.

Most European countries have a policy commitment to promote learning aboutentrepreneurship, but this has not yet made it a widespread subject in European educa-tional systems (European Commission 2006). Finland, however, has turned out to bean early adopter and reformer, and entrepreneurship education is now taken intoconsideration throughout the school system, from primary schools to universities. Forexample, participatory citizenship and entrepreneurship is a new module in theFinnish national core curriculum for comprehensive schools (Finnish National Boardof Education 2007). As the schools have traditionally socialised citizens into paidwork and encouraged them to develop such abilities and gifts as are particularly usefulin paid work (Willis 1978), entrepreneurship education poses new sorts of demands to

*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

632 K. Komulainen et al.

the school (for these demands, see Gibb 2002; Hytti and OGorman 2004). Entrepre-neurship education seeks not only to affect young peoples career choices but also torecast their attitudes and values and their conceptions of their own abilities, skills, andintelligence.

The Finnish Ministry of Education (2004) presents entrepreneurship as a class- andgender-neutral, inclusive route to employment for every citizen. Citizens are defined,above all, as individuals and are taken to be active subjects, not passive objects. Asa construction, however, the entrepreneur is far from a gender- and class-neutral one:entrepreneurship is historically located in the symbolic universe of maleness, andhegemonic masculinity is also embodied in the figure of the entrepreneur (Mulholland1996; Bruni, Gerhardi, and Poggio 2004). The middle-class, masculine representationof the entrepreneur is constructed above all in the textbooks of entrepreneurship educa-tion. Finnish textbooks emphasise gender and class differences at the cost of equality,highlighting the interconnections that link entrepreneurship, leadership, individuality,and middle-class masculinity (Komulainen 2006).

In this article we examine the new task of educating enterprising citizens that theschool now faces by analysing the kinds of gendered and classed enterprising self thatare created in the annual Finnish writing competition Good Enterprise! (Yritys hyv!in Finnish). The research is part of the larger research project Enterprising Self Education, Subjectivity and the Processes of Inclusion and Exclusion in Late ModernSociety funded by the Academy of Finland. The competition, which has been organ-ised since 1986, is targeted at pupils in the 9th grade of comprehensive school andpupils in upper secondary school. About 4801150 essays have been sent to thecompetition every year. To find out what kinds of enterprising selves the schoolsregard as desirable, we compared the successful, prize-winning narratives with theassessed but unrewarded ones. By the concept of the enterprising self, we refer to theethos, shaped in various institutions such as the school system, in which an entrepre-neur-like line of action and self-relationship, or a certain way of seeing oneself, areoffered as models for wage-workers, too. The concept of the enterprising self ties inwith various moral models of the good life (Rose 1992). The concept also includes theconceptions of abilities, by which we refer to different conceptions of the individualcharacteristics and attitudes that are necessary in entrepreneurship, such as initiative,independence, risk-taking, self-reliance, and self-responsibility (Rty and Snellman1998). Koski (2008) argues that the emergence of the enterprising self in educationalpolicy-making throughout the European Union is a symbol of the new technologies ofmoral regulation. As a moral precept, the enterprising self has ambivalent and contra-dictory dimensions: it endorses one set of personal properties and defines others asdeviant.

In our analysis we are particularly interested in the kinds of narratives of the enter-prising self that pupils write in the competition and the kinds of gendered and classedsubject positions that are created in these narratives (cf. Skeggs 1997, 12). Do pupilsconstruct masculine, middle-class enterprising selves, or do their narratives reflectalternative meanings attached to entrepreneurship? In addition, we reflect on the differ-ent ways pupils are positioned in relation to the ideals of the enterprising self. Even ifour information on the participating pupils is limited to their school, grade level, andgender, we suggest that the resources for writing, representing and displaying theenterprising self are not equally available to them. Thus, our study is about the differentgendered and classed positions that the competition offers to girls and boys fromdifferent class backgrounds as they write a story about themselves as entrepreneurs.

Gender and Education 633

Moreover, we reflect on the kinds of narratives of the enterprising self that are success-ful in the competition.

Our approach, then, is the cultural study of class that, according to Diane Reay,

focus[es] on class processes and practices, the everyday workings of social class, devel-oping conceptualisations that move beyond economic and exchange to understand theconsequences of cultural struggle and how this is part of new marketisation, new attri-butions of value, new forms of appropriation, exploitation and governance, and newselves. (2006, 289)

Class as a discursive construction includes elements of fantasy and projection (Skeggs1997). Class and gender as social divisions involve a classification of the population(i.e. a taxonomy of persons) and a range of systematic social processes that relate tothat taxonomy and serve to produce socially meaningful and systematic practices andoutcomes of inequality (Anthias 2001). We are especially interested in the class- andgender-specific taxonomies of entrepreneurial abilities. The class-bound taxonomiesof abilities that are based on such divisions as the mind and the body or the mental andthe manual are morally loaded (Skeggs 2004; Rty, Kasanen, and Krkkinen 2006)and structurally extant and continue to infest class-bound classifications, identifica-tions, and cultures (Thiel 2007).

In most of the research on entrepreneurship and the education for it, the unques-tioned and unspoken backdrop is the idea that entrepreneurship is good because itcontributes to economic growth (Ahl 2002). Hence, entrepreneurship is analysed ingender- and class-neutral ways, and questions of power and inequality are ignored.Although the European Union promotes entrepreneurship education in Europeanschools systems, feminist research on entrepreneurship education is almost non-existent. Our analysis provides feminist and social psychological perspectives toentrepreneurship education and to the formation of subjectivities under the aegis of theneo-liberal governance of education.

The context of the analysis the neo-liberal educational policy

Following the theoretical ideas of Foucault (1991), we approach the enterprising selfnot as a collection of individual traits but as a process created through governance ineducation. Governmentality can be understood as a way of explaining the establish-ment and exercise of political power in which the concept of government is broaderthan management by the state. Governance is a productive power that is embodied inthe rules through which individuality is understood, acted on and differentiated insocial practices (Popkewitz and Lindblad 2004). Both liberalism and neo-liberalismconstitute political rationalities or mentalities of government. According to Olssen,Codd, and ONeill (2004, 136), however, to understand the transformation of thecurrent politics of education, it is absolutely essential to understand the differencesbetween liberalism and neo-liberalism. Whereas classical liberalism represented anegative conception of state power in that the individual was seen as an object to befreed from the interventions of the state, neo-liberalism has come to represent a posi-tive conception of the states role: in neo-liberalism the state seeks to create an indi-vidual that is an enterprising and competitive entrepreneur.

Lahelma and hrn (2003) argue that the neo-liberal restructuring of education hasweakened the politics of equal opportunity in Finland as well as the other Nordic coun-tries. Therefore, making the gender and class differences constructed in entrepreneurship


education visible is especially important where the effects of neo-liberal educationalpolicies on equality and social justice are analysed. However, the extent to which Finnishschools have already been affected by neo-liberalism is under debate. According toSimola, Rinne, and Kivirauma (2002), an essential political shift to the right has beenrealised in Finnish educational policy during the last 10 years. Antikainen (2006) arguesthat although the economic integration of Europe is also leading to educational inte-gration, the Nordic education systems are a part of the Nordic welfare state. It remainsto be seen whether the Nordic models of education will be valued in Europe.

The data the writing competition as a pedagogical tool for producingcitizens-to-be

As mentioned earlier, we approach the writing competition from the viewpoints ofgovernmentality and narrative social psychology. On the one hand, the writing compe-tition is a pedagogical practice that invites the pupils to consider who they are andwhat they are to become. It functions as a system of discipline by which hierarchies,i.e. markers of social distinctions and aspirations, are established (Popkewitz andLindblad 2004). On the other hand, the competition is a technology of the self bywhich the pupils shape their visions of themselves and of others (Rose 1992). In thisarticle we concentrate especially on the latter aspect of the writing competition.

The competition encourages pupils to form future-oriented self-conceptions, whichMarkus and Nurius (1986) call possible selves. Possible selves are the selves the personcould become, would like to become, or are afraid of becoming. They build a bridgebetween the current state and the desired outcome. When creating their possible selves,the pupils make use of the cultural stock of narratives and myths that are accessible tothem. Cultural story models can act as normative, ideological schemes prescribing howone should act and feel in a certain position or situation; the cultural warehousecontains model stories and separate departments for people of different classes, ages,and genders (Hnninen 1999). Moreover, the narrative approach focuses on the dramarather than the economy of entrepreneurship and situates the social processes of entre-preneurship in everyday social interaction (Hjorth and Steyart 2004).

Our data consisted of two samples. The primary one consisted of the writings sentto the competition every second year since 2000. These writings were assessed but notrewarded by the jury. We analysed essays from the years 2000, 2002, 2004, and 2006written in Finnish by pupils in the 9th grade of comprehensive school (1999 essays inall). The secondary sample consisted of the prize-winning writings from the years19862006 (210 essays in all). In the 9th grade of comprehensive school pupils are15 years old.

In both samples, we distinguished between the narratives and the argumentativeessays and focused on the narratives. The primary sample included 368 (18%) andthe secondary sample 40 (19%) argumentative essays. These essays were excludedfrom the present set of analyses because argumentative essays are general consider-ations of the nature of entrepreneurship whereas the constructions of possible enter-prising selves that we were after occur only in the narratives (Korhonen, Komulainen,and Rty 2008). Besides, as a different text type, argumentative essays would requirean interpretative approach rising from the rhetorical, rather than the narrative, analytictradition. Accordingly, our final samples consisted of 1631 unrewarded narratives,76% of which were written by girls and 24% by boys, and 170 prize-winning narra-tives, 64% of which were written by girls and 36% by boys.


The annual writing competition is organised by Finnish local schools in coopera-tion with the Foundation of Entrepreneurs and the Centre for School Clubs which is asupport and service organisation promoting the schools educational work. Accordingto the Centre for School Clubs (2008), the original purpose of the competition was togive young people who were about to complete comprehensive school, beginning togain independence, and seeking a direction for their careers an opportunity to experi-entially enter into the world of the entrepreneur. In the early days the viewpoint ofvocational guidance and advancing the knowledge of working life figured promi-nently in the objectives and task-setting of the competition. In the twenty-first centurythe viewpoint of vocational guidance continues to be present, but the task-settings arebroader and encourage the writers to ponder on entrepreneurship not only as a voca-tion but also as a mentality (Paakkunainen 2007; Korhonen, Komulainen, and Rty2008). For example, the 2003 competition brochure makes mention, for the first time,of the concept inner entrepreneurship.

At the time the competition was introduced, entrepreneurship education had notyet been entered into the school curricula. The Good Enterprise! competition wasbegun at a stage when young peoples attitudes towards work became objects ofspecial attention as the rapid economic growth was creating new trades and jobs(Harinen 2000). At the beginning of the 1990s, Finland experienced an economiccrash. In the depression years, the special concern was the passivisation and displace-ment of young people (Harinen 2000). As a consequence of the economic crisis,Finland shifted to new economic thinking, to market-driven policies (Kantola 2002).After the depression, the educating of active, self-helping citizens and the increasingof interaction between the school and economic life came to the fore, and in 1994,entrepreneurship education was entered into the school curriculum as a new theme(Finnish National Board of Education 1994; Gordon and Lahelma 2004). In 2004, theFinnish Ministry of Education came out with an action plan for entrepreneurshipeducation, which extended entrepreneurship education to all school levels. The needfor entrepreneurship education was now justified by referring to the competitivestrength of Finland and the European Union: The Lisbon European Council in 2000set the aim to develop the Union into the most competitive economy in the world. Thisrequires measures for promoting entrepreneurship (Finnish Ministry of Education2004).

Participation in the competition is voluntary for the schools. If the school takespart, then all 9th-graders, boys and girls alike, will write an essay. The pupils write theessays in a mother-tongue class in Finnish or in Swedish, and the mother-tongueteachers then select the best two essays from each class and send them to the compe-tition. Pupils can write on one of the offered titles or make a title of their own. Everyyear, the organisers have offered titles such as I will start that shop/salon/garage oneday, Should I become an entrepreneur? or My dream enterprise in the instructions.However, the instructions and the titles offered are important and require an analysisand discussion of their own; the writing of this is in its preparation stage.

Out of all narratives in our data sent to the competition, the proportion of girlsnarratives is 76%. The high representation of girls could be partly explained by thefact that in Finland girls do clearly better than boys, on average, in the mother tongue(Finnish National Board of Education 2003). Achievements of school students areregularly tested in core subjects. However, as Arnesen, Lahelma, and hrn (2008)argue, outcomes are routinely classified by gender, which is an easy, taken-for-granted category. In Finland, categorisations by social class or ethnicity are not made


as often, because they are regarded as more sensitive classifications. Moreover, differ-ences in averages, for example the higher scores of girls than those of boys in sometests, are easily interpreted so that every girl is better than every boy. On the otherhand, when selecting the best two essays from their class for the competition, theteachers are acting as gate-holders for specific notions of entrepreneurship. Girlsconceptions of entrepreneurship may be closer to the teachers set of values. The finalselection of the prize-winning essays is made by a jury. The jury consists of represen-tatives from the Foundation of Entrepreneurs, the National Board of Education, theCentre for School Clubs, the Trade Union of Education in Finland, the Finnish Head-masters Association, the Mother-tongue Teachers Association, and the HistoryTeachers Association. The jury does not have a set of coherent and official criteriafor the selection at their disposal but the members each emphasise their own notionsof a good competition entry. However, the nature of the prize-winning essays informsus not only about the notions, values and norms of entrepreneurship held by thejury, the teachers and the school but also about the competition itself as a context ofwriting. The descriptions of entrepreneurs the pupils give in their narratives are verypositive. The tone of the narratives is affected by the pupils possible desire to win thecompetition and their striving to communicate that they value entrepreneurship.

In our analysis we firstly explored the myths contained in the narratives. Despitethe diversity, there is a finite number of basic story forms, myths that people tend toadopt in trying to understand their lives. Frye (1957) distinguishes four mythic formu-las: comedy, romance, tragedy, and satire. Comic plots, whether they are funny or not,are about the ways people find happiness and stability in life by minimising the obsta-cles and constraints. The hero or heroine is typically an ordinary person in search ofthe pure and simple pleasures of life. Success is achieved in romance, too, but in thiscase it involves a more abstract victory of good over evil. In this myth, the focus is onthe individual hero/ine and his or her adventures in conquering the evil forces. It isnotable that in the scientific and commonsense understanding of entrepreneurship, theentrepreneur is often presented as a mythic figure, a superhero with supernaturalpowers (Ogbor 2000; Ahl 2002). Murray (1985) argues that in marked contrast tocomedy and romance, tragedy suggests a negative narrative tone. The ironic or satiricmyth attempts to sort out the shifting ambiguities and complexities of human exist-ence. The ironic protagonist may be a fool or an antihero whose world manifestsitself as a puzzle with the solution forever withheld (Murray 1985). Secondly, wefocused on the romances and explored the kinds of gendered and classed representa-tions of good selves and good, respectable lives created in the narratives. Weconcentrated on the narrated traits, motives, abilities and physical features of theentrepreneur, feelings associated with entrepreneurship, the threats to the business,the signs of success, and the scenes of action. We assumed that these elements of thenarrative were connected to intimate and implicit areas of producing class and gender(Skeggs 1997, 6).

The focus of the analysis romances of entrepreneurship

Among 1631 narratives there were 1533 (94%) stories that we identified as romancesor hero stories. The fact that a vast majority of the narratives are hero stories reflectsthe influence of the competition as the context of writing. In hero stories, unlike trag-edies or ironic narratives, entrepreneurship and its overtones of independence andperseverance are promoted as good things (Ahl 2002).


In our analysis, we distinguished two kinds of heroes: the modest entrepreneur andthe growth-oriented entrepreneur. These two kinds of heroes are pictured through twokinds of interpretative frames. The distinction is based not only on the data but alsoon economic and social psychological research on entrepreneurship: in economictheories of entrepreneurship (cf. Vesala, Peura, and McElwee 2007; Stanworth andCurran 1976), three dimensions are prominent: risk-taking, growth-orientation, andinnovativeness. The risk-taking dimension carries the assumption that an entrepreneurtakes a calculated economic risk but also maximises the profit. Growth-orientationrefers to the aim of maximising the profit by expanding the firm and its business activ-ities. Innovativeness means the searching and developing of new products andmarkets. The implicit expectation in all three dimensions is that a proper entrepreneuris continuously engaged in an active, dynamic and competitive pursuit of economicopportunity.

The pupils stories of the growth-oriented entrepreneur construct a representationof the proper entrepreneur. In these stories it is the liberalist idea of markets, with itsprinciples of voluntary exchange and rational individual economic actors with profit-maximising motives, that serves as the interpretative frame through which the possibleentrepreneurial self is pictured. At the beginning of these narratives the protagonistfounds a small company with a feasible business idea. The successful timing of thebusiness, convenient markets, and the talents and efforts of the entrepreneur lead tothe expansion of the company and its business operations. In these stories, the threatsto the business are associated with the market forces such as rapid changes in stockmarket prices. Along with self-actualisation, the aim and motive of entrepreneurshipis to gain fame, power, and status in social relations and to make a profit. Entrepre-neurship is a step in the direction of upward mobility. The success stories describe theentrepreneur as someone different from the ordinary wage-worker.

In the stories of the modest entrepreneur, the interpretative frame is the Protestantwork ethics with its values of hard work and frugality (Weber 1978). According to thisethics, work is the basic human good, and the aims and motives of entrepreneurshipare not the accumulation of material wealth but the fulfilling of ones calling find-ing ones self and serving ones community, family, village, and nation. In thesestories the protagonist sets up a small company, such as a flower shop, thus employingher/himself. The entrepreneur wants to settle down, and the home and the locality areimportant for the protagonist. The stories describe everyday social relations andduties. The entrepreneur is respectable, honest, and modest. The threats to the businessare non-normative life events such as sickness, burnout or drugs rather than marketmechanisms, personal incapacities, or inabilities.

Table 1 presents the classification of the romances into narratives of the modestentrepreneur and those of the growth-oriented entrepreneur. The distribution intonarratives of the modest and of the growth-oriented entrepreneur was strongly relatedwith the writers gender. In the unrewarded stories, the modest entrepreneur wasdescribed by 78% of the girls and 43% of the boys, whereas the growth-oriented entre-preneur was pictured by 22% of the girls and 57% of the boys. In the prize-winningstories, modest entrepreneurship was pictured by 81% of the girls and 68% of theboys, whereas growth-oriented entrepreneurship was pictured by 19% of the girls and32% of the boys.

On the basis of the above figures we can conclude that the proportions of the twotypes of entrepreneur are about the same in both unrewarded and prize-winningstories by girls. In other words, a majority of the unrewarded stories by girls describe


the modest entrepreneur, and an equal proportion of the prize-winning stories bygirls do the same. But as regards the stories by boys, the decisions of the jury seemto exert an influence on the type of entrepreneur that is described in the boys storiesthat the jury rewards. In boys writings the jury favours the descriptions of themodest entrepreneur, which account for 43% of the unrewarded stories but as manyas 68% of the prize-winning ones. Boys stories of the growth-oriented entrepreneurare not rewarded to the same extent, for they account for 57% of the unrewardedwritings but only 32% of the prize-winning ones. We will reflect on this finding inthe conclusion.

The most popular five business ideas of girls in their modest entrepreneur storiesconcern the domains of cafeterias/restaurants/catering, tourism, animal care, nursing,and agriculture, as shown in Table 2. They emphasise the domestic skills in theirstories of the growth-oriented entrepreneur, too; they picture themselves becominggrowth-oriented entrepreneurs especially in the field of textiles, i.e. as fashion design-ers and owners of fashion houses. The most popular fields in boys stories are engi-neering, leisure-time services (such as having a sporting equipment store), informationtechnology, tourism, media/entertainment services, and utopian innovations. Whilethe growth-oriented entrepreneur in the boys stories works in technological fields, themodest male entrepreneur is a farmer or an artisan. When comparing the prize-winning narratives with the unrewarded ones, we found no differences among thefields of entrepreneurship.

According to Vainio-Korhonen (2002), female entrepreneurs in Finland and inother Nordic countries have operated in the domestic sectors until the present day, andwomens businesses have always been characterised by small size. Vainio-Korhonenargues that although Finnish women have achieved the freedom to trade and an accessto all training courses and occupations, the clear division of the society into male andfemale realms seems to remain unchanged. The pupils narratives do not question thedivision into male and female realms, either. While the home and the family shape andorient the girls business ideas, the boys interpret entrepreneurship as an activityoutside the home and in contrast to domesticity. Moreover, the boys narrate moreoften than the girls about growth-oriented entrepreneurship and describe how theyexpand their businesses, lead their companies, and beat their competitors. Besidesleadership and profit-making, the signs of success include signs of heterosexualmasculinity such as having a good-looking secretary (Mulholland 1996). Next, we

Table 1. Classification of the romances into narratives of the modest and the growth-orientedentrepreneur.

Unrewarded romances Prize-winning romances

Modest Growth-oriented Total Modest Growth-oriented Total

Girls 92586%/78%

26457%/22%

118978%/100%

8670%/81%

2054%/19%

10667%/100%

Boys 14814%/43%

19643%/57%

34422%/100%

3630%/68%

1746%/32%

5333%/100%

Total 1073100%/70%

460100%/30%

1533100%/100%

122100%/77%

37100%/23%

159100%/100%

Note: The notation x%/y% means that x% (respectively y%) of all narratives in the relevant column(respectively row) belong to this subcategory.


Tabl

e 2.

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f th

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man

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of t

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r fi

eld

and

the

wri

ters

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der.

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N =

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oys

(N =

344

)

Imag

ined

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trep

rene

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ipM

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tG

row

th-o

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th-o

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Tot

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eter

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esta

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129

170

711

1818

8T

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sm/a

ccom

mod

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3212

512

1830

155

Agr

icul

ture

/for

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695

252

2712

2L

eisu

re-t

ime

serv

ices

4431

7517

2744

119

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mal

car

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36

109

31

411

3C

are/

nurs

ing,

dom

esti

c he

lp93

497

11

299

Gro

cery

sto

re/m

erch

andi

se71

576

175

2298

Eng

inee

ring

/mec

hani

cs/m

anuf

actu

ring

2117

3819

3453

91T

exti

le i

ndus

try,

sel

ling

/des

igni

ng c

loth

es48

3785

01

186

Art

s (a

ctor

, aut

hor,

mus

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n)52

1365

51

671

Uto

pian

inn

ovat

ions

1228

401

2728

68B

ook

stor

e/fl

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sho

p/in

teri

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n51

1465

10

166

Med

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nter

tain

men

t se

rvic

es22

1335

1315

2862

Exp

ert/

spec

iali

st16

1733

115

1649

Art

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cra

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243

2717

320

47In

form

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n te

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logy

66

125

3035

47B

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tyli

ng30

333

10

134

Tra

nspo

rt9

09

35

817

Tot

al92

5 (7

8%)

264

(22%

)11

89 (

78%

)14

8 (4

3%)

196

(57%

)34

4 (2

2%)

1533

(10

0%)


illustrate our analysis with narratives that are rich in the characteristics we haveidentified as relating to the modest entrepreneur and the growth-oriented entrepre-neur. The narratives have been abridged in the English translation.

The model stories of entrepreneurship masculinity in the romances of thegrowth-oriented entrepreneur

More than half (57%) of the boys have a coherent entrepreneur story to tell that fits inwell with the cultural ideals and values of proper entrepreneurship: because entrepre-neurship is supposed to be the engine of economic growth, a large firm is regarded asbetter than a small one and a fast-growing firm as better than a bread-and-butter one.Firms in high-tech and manufacturing are better than those in retail and services becausethey are more likely to grow big (see also Ahl 2002). In other words, entrepreneurshipis assessed in terms of size, growth, profit, and the industrial sector involved. In thefollowing story, the entrepreneur is placed in the high-tech sector, and the growth andprofit of the firm are the criteria for assessing the writers entrepreneurial acumen.

My Firm is a Part of Me

WOLF.group (Wireless Opinion for Life) produces different kinds of IT services. It isdistinguished from the competition by its versatility. WOLF.group aims to create aprofessional but still rather relaxed and pleasant picture of itself. For the work force, alot of different kinds of professionals will be needed who have the ambition and creativ-ity to produce something totally new and magnificent. My vision for the future ofWOLF.group would be that our locales and services would spread throughout Finlandand the neighbouring countries. Leadership involves a lot of responsibility. You have tobe able to see to the future and envision it. I clearly have leadership qualities. I do not letother people tell me what to do but I am good at taking other peoples needs into account.I am proud of WOLF.group, my idea, and it will be wonderful to see from my directorschair how it becomes the biggest and most popular producer of IT services in the Nordiccountries.

The boys imagine their possible selves through the lens of the liberalist marketplacemore often than the girls, and their protagonist is a rational economic agent, Homoeconomicus. As the story My firm is a part of me illustrates, a majority of the boyslocate their imagined economic action in public national and global venues. Being anentrepreneur requires a distance from immobility, femininity, and place-bounddomesticity (cf. Skeggs 2004, 50). Moreover, being an entrepreneur means being self-reliant, creative, competitive, willing to take risks, and having a strong personalitywith leadership qualities and ambition.

According to Connell (2005), hegemonic forms of masculinity are historicallyderived from the growth of industrial capitalism and imperialism. Although bourgeoismasculinities produced by these processes have many variations, they share some keyfeatures: association with authority, social conservatism, compulsory heterosexuality,integration with a familial division of labour, strongly marked symbolic genderdifferences, and an emotional distance between women and men. Even if the boystend to challenge some of the traditional meanings of bourgeois masculinity in theirgrowth-oriented narratives, the distinction between women and men remains: in theboys narratives, the world of information technology is masculine. However, theauthoritarianism and social conservatism associated with paternal entrepreneurship


are rejected (Reed 1996). Instead of viewing their possible selves as distant andauthoritarian, the boys frequently imagine equality and companionship at the work-place. The boys also reject the old-style business masculinity and the social conserva-tism associated with it. In the boys narratives, information technology is thetechnology of young, well-educated, and wealthy white men (Vehvilinen 2001). Theimage of the entrepreneur that the boys wish to convey is a young dynamic personwith a sense of relaxed superiority and the ability to look at things afresh and to trans-form them (Connell 2005).

Heroic men working for the fatherland and family

In the boys model stories, technical superiority is a sign of masculinity. The meaningof machines and technology is significantly different, however, for middle-class andworking-class masculinity: in the narratives that reflect middle-class masculinity, menare the masters of machines through their logical-mathematical skills which areculturally seen as manifestations of rationality, inborn giftedness, and intelligence(Rty et al. 2002). In the narratives of growth-oriented entrepreneurship, machines aremastered without physical strength. In the narratives that construct working-classmasculinity, in contrast, the power over the machine symbolises the strength andtoughness of the person. The following story illustrates how technical artefactsbecome a part of the identity of a man, making the machine a symbolic extension ofhim (Mellstm 2004). At any rate, technological skills and interaction with machinesproduce pleasure for men in both cultures.

A Hero Story

The sound of a hydraulic pump is heard in the woods and the red cabin of the harvestercan be seen moving among the pine trunks. I slap my steel fist on the trunk of a pine anda sharp screech fells the tree. Here, under the Northern star, everyone has to get theirbread where they can. Here nature determines what kind of crop people get to harvest.My father was a lumberjack all his life. Wood has been floated or driven from the forestwith a horse. Many a drop of sweat and blood has been shed so that the wives at homeshould have flour to bake bread for the children. I have worked as an entrepreneur all mylife. In the same role of lumberjack as my father but a little better equipped. And whenI walk my ultra modern six-legged harvester, something moves in my heart. You feel likeyou are the hero of this society. A lonely rider, an entrepreneur, who is one of the pillarsof the society. The independence of this country was mainly determined in the forest.The welfare of this country has been created with the wood from the forest.

According to Pys (1997), the old-time lumberjack (jtk in Finnish) working inFinnish forests has become a dominant cultural theme in the popular imagination.Even today, Finnish literature, film, and popular songs draw from the idealised jtkimage with its idealised characteristics of the masculine, independent, hard-working,honest fellow. As a Finnish cultural hero, the jtk emerges as a symbol of masculinepower, integrity, and positively valued frontier mentality. The jtk folklore hasengendered two cultural stereotypes the small farm owner with a family to supportand the carefree wandering bachelor.

The protagonist in the narratives of modest male entrepreneurship strongly resem-bles the heroic jtk. As the above story illustrates, however, the boys narrativesexclude the carefree wandering bachelor type, which carries overtones of sexuality,


hedonism, and a sense of otherness. Instead, they create respectable selves in theirstories by stressing the importance of generational continuity and the breadwinningrole of men. In these stories, hard-working males are idealised and sanctified byconnecting their work to the fatherland and family. Ultimately, these men work for thewhole nation.

The caring self

The stories of modest entrepreneurs reflect common ideals and norms of the respect-able and proper citizen rather than just the ideals of the market. Respectability is,however, gender-specific. In their narratives of the modest female entrepreneur, thegirls substantially describe the abilities and dispositions that are seen, according toSkeggs (1997, 68), as essential to the caring self: kind and loving, warm and friendly,reliable, gentle, patient, clean and tidy. In the following story, entrepreneurship isdescribed as coming straight from the heart.

Entrepreneurship Straight from the Heart

It started with a newspaper advert: the idea of starting my own business, day careplaces were sought for young children. I had graduated as a nanny and was looking fora job that would correspond to my occupation. Because my husband showed a greenlight even at the thought, I was ecstatic. I would be able to work at home. I decided togo see a business counsellor the following day. The counsellor was happy that I wasplanning to start my own day care centre, and in that way the day care issues could beorganised differently in our town. Today my day care centre employs five peoplebesides myself. My day care centre immediately got a good clientele and I have alreadypaid back my bank loan. When I realised that I wanted a day care centre of my own, Iknew that it would always be a part of me. It would bring out my great love ofchildren. The day care centre looks just like me; the atmosphere is loving, warm andhomely. It is important to realise your own entrepreneurship and it must come straightfrom the heart.

In this story, the protagonist sees engagement in caring practices as a fundamentalcharacteristic of the female enterprising self. In the girls narratives in general, thecaring and serving role, which includes moral responsibility, gives the female protag-onist status, self-worth and pleasure (cf. Skeggs 1997). The narratives of the modestfemale entrepreneur steer clear of the masculine, rational, risk-taking and profit-seeking entrepreneur (Nadin 2007). The middle-class caring and serving femininity,located in the spheres of the home and domesticity, is perceived as cultural andemotional capital that is productised through entrepreneurship.

Bourdieu (1986) argues that the dimensions, shapes and forms of the body(expressed through treating it, caring for it, and maintaining it) reveal the deepestdispositions of a class and gender. In their narratives of the modest entrepreneur, thegirls construct not only a caring and serving self but also a body that fits into the signsystem of the caring self: the body, too, is to be taken care of (Skeggs 1997, 102). Theprotagonists body is a sign-wearing body above all. It represents the protagonistsinner character: investments in bodily appearance, such as dressing and makeup, aresignificant descriptors of the caring and respectable self. Thus the practices of lookinggood and proper are not trivial but central to constructing the sense and image of thecaring self.


However, physical appearance has to be coded in the correct way: too much concen-tration on appearance is seen as a sign of female deviancy (Skeggs 1997, 99104).Bodily practices are sites of both pleasure and fear: they enable the caring entrepreneurto display her caring character, but they also entail the fear of becoming viewed as anarrogant and self-centred person. The girls emphasise in their stories that an entrepre-neur should not differ too much from her clients in bodily appearance and behaviour.On the contrary, she should be at the same level and always be easily approachable.

I the Young Entrepreneur

It is nice to start the day fresh and clean, and the customers would not dare to approacha service person that was lurking under a layer of dust, either. I do not wear a lot ofmakeup; I just put on some mascara and lip gloss. I look good, I think. Clean but notoverly done. Our shop is fresh the wallpaper is light blue, the ceiling dark blue with astarry sky. Luckily we learned customer service and counselling at school. You just haveto remember to smile and be helpful. A young entrepreneur should be happy, nice,competent, and friendly, and above all, she should know what she is doing. I think I amjust like that.

Having a good and sophisticated taste in clothing and in decorating and styling herworking environment are regarded as important for the caring and serving femaleentrepreneur. By observing these she moves away from the vulgar and the sexual,which have historically been seen as tasteless and associated with working-class femi-ninity (Skeggs 1997, 100). In the girls stories, a significant difference is drawnbetween looking feminine and looking sexy: the caring and serving entrepreneurdesires to be viewed as a pleasant and charming but restrained person, not as a sexobject.

Glamorous feminine entrepreneurship

Femininity is a discursive position available through gender relations that women areencouraged to inhabit and use (Skeggs 1997, 10). In the competition, the girls inhabitnot only the caring and serving middle-class femininity but also the glamorous femi-ninity pictured through the lens of the markets. In the girls stories of the growth-oriented entrepreneur, the female entrepreneur is no longer located in the spheres ofthe home and domesticity but acts in the global markets. The field of the growth-oriented female entrepreneur is most often fashion. In this field, femininity is a formof cultural and psychological capital. Fashion offers an imaginary space where it ispossible and acceptable to combine femininity, sexuality and desirability.

Moonlight

Now, Katariina, I want to tell you about the history of the enterprise you are about to takeover. When I was 25 I had the desire to start a clothing company. I wanted to design fineevening gowns and sell them. I decided to start my own business. I wanted the space tobe pleasant and soft but at the same time elegant. I felt an enormous sense of success, forthe first step towards realising my dream had been taken. The boutique did surprisinglywell. I got married. Even when pregnant, I did not want to stay at home. Your motherwas born a few months after the second boutique opened. A few years passed until I feltthe urge to conquer again. I wanted to conquer Paris, that magnificent city where fashion


flourishes and is appreciated. Henna and I closed both my boutiques for a week, and wemade an agreement on business premises. The boutique is still located at the GalleriesLafayette shopping centre, which is held in high esteem. Years sped past running thethree boutiques. I travelled a lot between them and was happy with the results. Thensomething surprising happened that I was not ready for. I realised that my children werenearly adults. I had been working all through their childhood and deprived them of theirmother! I promised myself and my whole family that I would hire more employees. Eversince that decision we spent our holidays together in Paris, and the whole family fell inlove with it.

If the signs of success in the boys stories of the growth-oriented entrepreneur areleadership and profit-making, in the girls stories it is glamour. Their fantasies ofelegance and sophistication demonstrate a drawing away from the working class andemulation of the middle class (Skeggs 1997). Glamour is also a way of transcendingthe banalities of the caring and serving entrepreneurial femininity that renders womenpassive objects, mere signs of appearance without a strong agency. Through glamour,the girls present themselves as active and autonomous individuals making choices.

In the girls success stories, the glamorous middle-class entrepreneurial femininityoffers a space for hedonism, autonomy, camaraderie, pleasure and fun, but it alsogenerates insecurities. Even if glamour challenges the banalities of femininity, it is acontradictory subject position. As Skeggs (1997, 110) points out, glamour is alwaysregarded as degrading unless protected and defended by other marks of middle-class respectability, such as proper motherhood. In the boys stories of the growth-oriented entrepreneur, the protagonist is separate and detached from private life anddomesticity. In the girls stories of proper entrepreneurship, the protagonist is also aspouse and a mother who takes care of her family. The criteria of the good self andgood life require that they combine glamorous femininity with motherhood.

Conclusion

The conventional theory of entrepreneurship is justified in terms of its appeal to a freemarket system, the capitalist state, and the rather utopian goal of economic freedomfor everyone (Ogbor 2000). However, the idea of a neutral market, a market whereeverybody competes from an equal position, needs to be questioned. Instead of discur-sively neutralising capitalism, we see the market not as a neutral playing field but asan already divided historical entity, premised upon classification with historicallygenerated value, into which we enter with differential access to different types ofresources (Skeggs 2004). Being gendered and classed, the market shapes individualinterest and engagement in the practices of entrepreneurship.

According to Connell (2005), neo-liberalism can function as a form of masculinitypolitics largely because of the powerful role of the state in the gender order. The stateconstitutes the gender relation in multiple ways, and all of its gender policies affectmen. Many mainstream policies (e.g. in economic and security affairs) are substan-tially about men without acknowledging it. Although the entrepreneur is presented asgender-neutral in policy documents such as the Report on Education and Training forEntrepreneurship by the European Commission (2004), the entrepreneur is a mascu-line construction that sets the norm whereby feminine characteristics are excludedfrom the ideals of the proper entrepreneur, and simultaneously bourgeois values andpersonality dispositions, such as profit-seeking and the need for achievement, arejustified as bases for entrepreneurial citizenship (Komulainen 2006).


According to our findings from the entrepreneurial writing competition, the pupilstry on the middle-class version of the self, where the person is not contingent uponexternal effects but an autonomous self-governing individual. As a pedagogical toolfor educating enterprising citizens, the competition emphasises individual entrepre-neurial initiative, flexibility, self-reliance and self-responsibility, and challenges theroutine, rule-following behaviour demanded by Fordist production. Not all imaginedselves, however, are equally valued in the markets. Entrepreneurship education offersboys and girls different and unequal subject positions to be tried on. Boys possibleselves match the culturally shared and valued representations of the proper entrepre-neurial individual more closely than the self-representations of girls do. Boys have anaccess and entitlement to a range of powerful narratives of entrepreneurship thatresource their self-making. In their growth-oriented narratives boys do not questiontheir access to power. Although girls also imagine growth-oriented entrepreneurshipwithin the interpretative frames of free markets, they do not have an access to the samediscourses as boys for the production of their enterprising selves (cf. Skeggs 2005).Being a woman and an entrepreneur at the same time means that one has had to posi-tion oneself simultaneously in regard to two conflicting sets of discourses those offemininity and those of entrepreneurship. Ahl (2002, 133) argues that the discoursesof femininity exclude growth-oriented entrepreneurship and that men are culturallyperceived to be more entrepreneurial than women. Women are rated lower on lead-ership, autonomy, risk-taking propensity, readiness for change, endurance, and a lowneed for support. The cultural model stories of female entrepreneurs function asresources for girls to construct their possible selves in the competition. These modelstories marginalise women as economic actors and offer them such subject positionsas leave them without a strong agency.

According to McDowell (2000), the new forms of work open to working-classpupils (both male and female) are located in the service sector. Such employmentdemands deference to superiors and clients, polite behaviour, cleanness, subdueddress and bodily presentation, and the personal skills of pleasant social interaction.Walkerdine (2003) argues that such demands of the new labour market can be under-stood as aiming to produce a subject in the image of the middle class. In the writingcompetition, most of the narratives are written about the field of service-sectorentrepreneurship. In their narratives, the girls describe their essential nature as beinga serving person. The product service and caring is seen as inseparable from theirbeings as persons and entrepreneurs. McDowell (2000) argues that young working-class men may find themselves disadvantaged in this kind of interactive work.Neither do the masculinities pictured in our data fit into the attributes of the newservice-sector labour. The masculinities pictured in the boys stories are more remi-niscent of the traditional working-class masculinities. However, even if working-classmasculinities do not provide as powerful subject positions as their imagined middle-class counterparts do, both types of entrepreneurial masculinities are compatible withcapital accumulation (see also Mulholland 1996). In comparison to the imaginedmasculinities, the female entrepreneurs in the narratives (as in real life) are second-class citizens when it comes to access and entry into the resources and profits ofentrepreneurship.

As we stated above, the majority (77%) of the girls and boys prize-winningromances were stories of the modest entrepreneur. The heroism in these storieshighlights common moral virtues and the qualities of the respectable citizen, such asdiligence, honesty, and self-responsibility. Historically, the virtues of modesty have


been essential in the process of socialisation at school, and they have been offered topupils from working-class and lower middle-class families (Koski 2001). In thewriting competition, portrayals of possible selves that associate entrepreneurship withrisk-taking and profit-seeking and locate it in the global markets are not regarded asdesirable as pictures of the virtues of modesty. This finding of ours is at odds with thefact that it is the growth-oriented entrepreneurial action that is pursued in the policydocuments of the European Union and the Commission and in the textbooks ofentrepreneurship education (Komulainen 2006).

Koski (2008) has explored the differences and similarities between the curricula ofthe Finnish vocational school and the upper secondary school (gymnasium) in regardto education for entrepreneurship. She finds that academic and vocational studies havedifferent moral aims: the enterprising self constructed in the vocational curriculumis founded on the traditional Protestant ideal of duty. The aim of education for entre-preneurship is to imbue the student with such qualifications that she or he will becomea resourceful, dutiful, courageous and inventive worker, craftsman or entrepreneurwho values his/her work. The aim of entrepreneurship studies in the gymnasium, incontrast, is to educate the pupils into participatory, responsible and critical citizenswho contribute to the local, national, European and global levels of society. Koski(2008) concludes that the pupils in the gymnasiums are offered tools to become some-body while the ideal vocational pupil is expected to become an obedient worker. Thegoal for the former category of pupils is to participate in the reformation of society,and for the latter, to adapt to changes.

Following Koski (2008), we suggest that the large representation of narratives ofthe modest entrepreneur and the rewarding of these narratives in the competitionreflect ambivalent and class- and gender-specific underpinnings in the education forentrepreneurship: in its effort to educate children into good citizens, the Finnishcomprehensive school strives to equip them all with the entrepreneurial attitudes,abilities and skills of responsibility, flexibility and diligence that are required foradaptation into the postmodern labour market. As the service sector expands, theNordic welfare state is dismantled, and the care services are privatised, working-class and middle-class women, too, need attitudes and skills pertaining to serviceand care entrepreneurship. We assume that the kind of innovative, risk-taking expertentrepreneurship that reforms the society and secures the nations competitivepower is reserved for males that opt for academic education in the technologicalfields.

It is noteworthy, though, that it is the modest-entrepreneur narratives of boys thatare most likely to be rewarded in the competition (see Table 1). We thereforeassume that entrepreneurial education at the comprehensive school is meant forthose boys in particular that are thought to be at the risk of being displaced from thepostmodern labour market, which requires skills seen to be feminine (see Weaver-Hightower 2003). Underachieving boys, who do not like school and do not necessar-ily do well in academic studies but are considered to have the kind of courage andinventiveness that is required of entrepreneurs, are often considered to need sucheducation (Komulainen 2006; Lahelma 2005). In entrepreneurial education theseboys get respect, whereas mainstream comprehensive education, which rewardsadaptability, is thought to serve academically oriented boys and, in particular, girlsbetter. We are in the process of interviewing comprehensive-school teachers ofentrepreneurship at the moment, and our provisional analysis of these interviewssupports the above conclusions.


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