Keywords

1 Introduction

EE has expanded rapidly. Interest in EE, both from practitioners and scholars, persists. With this expansion, a broadening of focus in EE research is being witnessed, and while research on EE is still lagging behind its growth (Neck & Corbett, 2018), we are progressing beyond the “what” of EE, moving to questions about the “how” and “for whom” and also “for what purpose” (Fayolle & Gailly, 2008; Lackéus, 2015). This chapter contributes to these developments by exploring one aspect of EE that has been largely ignored to date. This is the political association of EE, and here the question as to its potential political impact at the level of the individual. While political change is not typically the primary concern of EE, this does not mean potential political implications should be ignored. We argue that EE shares some characteristics with Critical Theory, and in particular Critical Pedagogy’s focus on emancipation as propounded by Freire (2005), where education’s political dimension is not just tangential, but essential. Thus, an exploration of EE’s impact on political attributes is warranted; a more emancipated individual should be more politically engaged.

2 Critical Theory, Critical Pedagogy, and Entrepreneurship Education

The nature and purpose of higher education continue to evolve. For policymakers in many countries, the positive relationship between education and economic growth has led to a climate where HE is largely seen as a means to serve economic ends, in many respects reinforcing rather than challenging socioeconomic structures. Unsurprisingly, this has drawn criticism and concern from many who point to education’s emancipatory and even moral purpose (Lyotard, 1984; Maskell & Robinson, 2001; Delanty, 2001).

These allegations, i.e., that an excessive focus on the economic dimension instrumentalizes higher education, have also been levied against entrepreneurship (Lambert et al., 2007). The typical delivery or manifestation of EE has overridden or denied the full appreciation of its wider social benefits (Lambert et al., 2007). To our minds, a tension exists that in fact goes to the heart of the notion of the enterprise. As innovation and entrepreneurship may be regarded as the building blocks of capitalism and economic development (Schumpeter, 1961; Kirzner, 1997), rather than EE challenging the existing status quo of socioeconomic structures in society, it maintains them. The expansion of EE may then be seen as further entrenching neoliberal discourses and structural inequalities (Lackéus, 2017, 2018). On this basis, calls for more work in the area of EE’s role in neoliberal societies have been made (Berglund et al., 2020).

Nonetheless, and despite much emphasis on the economic developmental purpose in the provision of EE, following works as that by Lambert et al. (2007), a growing number of voices recognize that the reach of EE extends beyond economic concerns. For example, Bandera et al. (2020) write of unintended “dark” consequences of EE and Kuckertz (2021) mentions “higher order” goals of EE drawing on Humboldtian ideals of higher education. Others such as Rindova et al. (2009) or Calás et al. (2009) focus on the sociocultural benefits that EE can bring about, arguing there should be greater attention on this aspect of EE.

In accordance with these developments, a key idea underpinning this chapter and one we expand upon elsewhere (Walmsley & Wraae, 2022) is that EE shares many of the underpinnings of liberatory, emancipatory education. Thus, in a material sense (enrichment of poor communities), Santos et al. (2019) explain how EE can lead to empowerment. We argue though that in its focus on autonomy (Van Gelderen, 2010) and transformation (Neergaard et al., 2020; Wraae et al., 2020), EE is not just empowering, but essentially emancipatory in nature. As such, in this respect, it aligns with the purpose of Critical Theory and within the context of education with Critical Pedagogy (Freire, 2005).

The proximity between Critical Pedagogy and EE has been recognized by others, although discussions in this area are still relatively scarce. Hägg and Kurczewska (2016) do so, for example, where they make reference to Freire’s notion of Praxis as involving reflection and action. Hägg and Kurczewska (2016) recognize education “as a means for democratization and the development of liberate free-thinking individuals” and relate these ideas to EE. Despite the emergence of alternative discourses as to EE’s purpose, what has to date not happened, however, is a deliberate and targeted exploration of EE’s impact on political constructs at the level of the individual (which we go on to explain below). If indeed EE is empowering and emancipatory, then we might assume this should be reflected in political constructs as they relate to students.

3 Political Change at the Level of the Individual

As far as we are aware, this is the first study of its kind that seeks to understand the extent to which EE changes political attributes at the level of the individual. As such, there is no precedent upon which to build in relation to which political attributes to include. We reviewed the broader literature in Political Science to gain some inspiration and consequently decided to focus on four measures that appear regularly in the literature: political orientation, political interest, civic engagement, and sociopolitical control. These constructs will now be presented.

3.1 Political Interest

Political interest (PI) has been defined as “the relatively enduring predisposition to reengage with political content over time” (Hidi & Renninger, 2006). We decided to include political interest (PI) because we wanted to move beyond a straightforward potential change in political attitudes or political beliefs, which in itself is interesting, but understand the extent to which students had become more interested, indeed involved, in politics generally (see also Civic Engagement below). PI is a recognized indicator of political involvement (Prior & Bougher, 2018), both cognitive and behavioral, and according to Prior (2018), serves as a strong predictor of political engagement. We measured PI using the following statement as recommended by Prior and Bougher (2018), who point to its widespread use: “Would you say you follow what’s going on in government and public affairs most of the time, some of the time, only now and then, or hardly at all?”

3.2 Political Orientation

Political orientation (PO) was selected because we wanted to understand the extent to which there had been both a change in interest in politics as well as how EE had affected students’ PO. There were no compelling reasons to believe why students might have changed PO one way or the other (i.e., move to the left or the right of the political spectrum, or become more liberal or conservative in their political beliefs). We can speculate that on the one hand given the admittedly mythical/heroic status of entrepreneurs as maverick “go-getters” or archetypal capitalists, a shift to the right could have been expected, but on the other hand, universities tend to be associated with more left-leaning political thinking (Van de Werfhorst, 2020) and so a shift to the left might equally have been anticipated. Our measure of PO draws primarily on Oskarsson et al. (2015) though to an extent also on van de Werfhorst (2020). Five statements were presented about government policy on redistribution of wealth and immigration, including one question where respondents were asked to place themselves politically.

3.3 Civic Engagement

With this measure, we were seeking to understand the extent to which EE leads to an increase in civic engagement, which can be understood both as a measure of political interest and willingness to engage in civic engagement activities such as volunteering [see, for example, Hsu et al. (2021)]. The Active and Engaged Citizenship Scale is an integrated measure that assesses civic engagement (Zaff et al., 2017) and was used by Chan and Mak (2020). We adopted this 30-item measure tailoring it in small ways to suit our sample (e.g., instead of “My teachers really care about me,” we change this to “My tutors really care about me”).

3.4 Sociopolitical Control

The Sociopolitical Control Scale (Chan & Mak, 2020) was used to measure participants’ beliefs about their ability to influence social and political systems. It consists of 17 items that assess two dimensions of sociopolitical control, including leadership competence (i.e., perceived ability to organize a group of people) and policy control (i.e., perceived ability to influence policy decisions in an organization or community) (Chan & Mak, 2020). It was decided to include this measure because it relates to both self-efficacy beliefs (Bandura, 1982) and locus of control (Rotter, 1966), which themselves are covered in some detail in the entrepreneurship literature.

4 Methodology

We employed a pre- and post-test survey on a cohort of freshman students in an entrepreneurship program at a university of applied sciences in Denmark. The bachelor program is a 1.5-year top-up study. The first semester consists of different subjects related to innovation and entrepreneurship, for instance, entrepreneurship, the entrepreneurial mindset, the entreprenurial ecosystem, creative processes, and business models combined with traditional subjects such as project management and philosophy of science.

The overarching frame for teaching entrepreneurship at the program is “entrepreneurship as a method” (Neck & Greene, 2011; Neck et al., 2017), which implies an acceptance of the unpredictability of learning entrepreneurship as well as giving the students a body of skills that includes creativity, experimentation, play, and reflection. The students are expected to work with a business idea, which along with a prototype is assessed at an exam at the end of the semester.

Students were provided with the link to the first of the two surveys on the first day of the program in early September. Due to the pandemic, the classes went from physical presence at the university to online teaching. Therefore, the second link was distributed as a part of an online class in late November (i.e., at the end of the semester). The links were also posted on an online learning portal along with reminders. A total of 59 usable responses (out of 67) were received at timepoint 1 (T1) and 47 at timepoint 2 (T2). Although we asked students to provide a unique identifier across the two time points, only 14 did. As such, this limited the possibility of matching pairs which restricted the available tests for statistical analysis. For this reason, we have focused on using descriptive statistics (e.g., frequencies, means, etc.), although we also draw on tests of significance, specifically chi-squared tests, given their versatility.

Matching issues aside, a further limitation relates to the small sample size and hence the difficulty in extricating the causal relationship between EE and political impact and other factors that may have contributed to this, not least HE attendance itself. However, students did engage quite heavily in EE as their first semester consisted of six subjects related to EE (see above), for instance, entrepreneurship, the entrepreneurial mindset, the entreprenurial ecosystem, creative processes, and business models combined with traditional subjects such as project management and philosophy of science. We also asked a series of open-ended questions at the end of the second survey (T2) to help us further explain our quantitative results, which helped explain the observed results.

The sample (at T1 + T2) consisted of a fairly even split of males and females (54% and 46%, respectively). There was a slight majority of international students (quite typical in Denmark for this kind of program) at 54%, with most of these from Europe (49% of the total number of students) and 5% of students came from countries beyond Europe. The mean age was 26 years, higher than for similar undergraduate programs but reflecting the type of student who typically takes this kind of course in Denmark.

5 Results

Our results were structured as follows: First, we looked at political interest, then whether there had been a change in political orientation before looking at civic engagement and sociopolitical control. Before we explored the results, we noted that we also measured entrepreneurial intent (EI) at timepoints T1 and T2 using Thompson’s (2009) measure. We identified a small increase in the measure (the mean increased from 3.65 to 3.79) though the result was not significant (p < 0.05). We tested relationships between EI and our measures below, but none of these results were significant.Footnote 1

Starting with political interest, we asked participants the following question: “Would you say you follow what’s going on in government and public affairs most of the time, some of the time, only now and then, or hardly at all?” The results were significant (using a chi-squared test, p < 0.05). Looking at responses in more detail, there appears to have been a jump in respondents who went from answering “some of the time” to “most of the time.” A cross-tabulation by gender indicated that females were more likely to demonstrate political interest than males, though the relationship was not significant.Footnote 2 No statistically significant relationships were found either by nationality or social class (perceived social class: “where are you on the social ladder”), though political interest scores were somewhat lower for those who placed themselves in the lowest social classes (given low numbers this result is very tentative).

We also tried to understand whether and how EE had affected students’ political orientation. As shown in Table 1, in four out of five measures, we can see a shift to the left of the political spectrum (albeit a small shift). Looking at the distributions more generally (not included here) for items 1 and 2, the distribution approximated a normal distribution. However, for items 3–5, there was a relatively large group of individuals who were clearly highly in favor of immigration as there was a skew in the distributions at the end of the scale (higher scores = more left-leaning). Immigration brought forth a more divisive response than the other items.

Table 1 Shift in political orientation
Full size table

The 30-item scale we used for Civic Engagement indicated little variation of mean values between T1 and T2. None of the chi-squares tests manifested themselves as significant, offering evidence for no (or very limited) change. Civic engagement was also cross-tabulated by gender and five items presented a significant difference (p < 0.05), indicating greater civic engagement on the part of females as follows:

  • “I feel sorry for other people who do not have what I have”

  • “Contacting an elected official about a problem is something I would do”

  • “Contacting or visiting someone in government who represents my community is something I would do”

  • “Volunteering time (at a hospital, daycare center, food bank, etc., is something I would do”

  • “Help out at school is something I would do”

There was an additional significant difference for one item where males scored higher, which was: “Being a leader in a group or organization is something I would do.”

The final aspect we looked at was sociopolitical control (SPC). This was measured using a 17-item scale (5-point Likert; 1 = strongly disagree and 5 = strongly agree). The mean value for the measure was slightly higher at T2 than at T1, indicating a small shift in SPC, though this change did not reveal itself as significant. Across all 17 items, only two scored higher at T1 than at T2, indicating further there had been an increase in SPC. Scores tended to be lower for overt political statements as opposed to leadership statements. Analysis by gender indicated few notable differences. Males expressed greater ambition to be leaders rather than followers, but apart from that, no results were significant. Analysis by perceived social class did not reveal any significant relationships.

The survey also asked some open-ended questions giving participants the opportunity of explaining whether they felt they had changed (in terms of political outlook) and if so, how/why? Quite often, respondents simply (but usefully from a point of validity) confirmed that they did not feel they had changed. Students did mention growth in confidence and skills, and this was confirmed via some of the items in the SPC measure, especially those relating to leadership. In some instances, students appeared reluctant to acknowledge change. As one student put it: “There have been no changes because I have fixed convictions,” or “It didn’t change much because education like this one can change how I think and what tools I have but cannot change how I am.”

Many students were candid in their responses, highlighting both the pleasures and frustrations of studying. It would be hard to draw the conclusion from the qualitative data that students recognized a link between EE and any of the political measures used in this study. There was an indication from some that coming together with people from different backgrounds had made them more open-minded, potentially confirming the results from the analysis of political orientation (the measures relating to immigration). Given the relatively small changes highlighted by the quantitative results, it is possible that respondents had changed though not so much that they were aware of it. Of course, as one respondent also suggested, the limited time students had been in higher education (just over three months) was perhaps not long enough for change to occur.

6 Discussion and Conclusion

The starting point of the chapter was the suggestion that EE, in sharing many of the principles underpinning CT and specifically CP (e.g., a focus on autonomy and individual transformation), thus in many respects emancipatory in nature, could be expected to have an impact on political attributes. Emancipation understood as the freeing of oneself from oppression does not only have to occur through conventional political means (e.g., via the ballot box), and yet this is the focus here. We assumed that more emancipated (and empowered) students would become more interested in politics (political interest, civic engagement) and more confident in their ability to bring about change to the political system (sociopolitical control). We did not have any firm a priori assumptions about whether EE would lead to a change in political orientation (left/liberal vs. right/conservative).

Even though a traditional view of higher education would suggest its transformative potential beyond the pure economic (Mezirow, 2000), also identified by Kuckertz (2021) and Lambert et al. (2007) with respect to EE, it is not apparent (to us) that other studies have explored these hypothesized relationships empirically. This is where we believe the chapter undertakes some early, tentative steps in exploring this issue.

Perhaps the best way to summarize the data was expressed by one of the respondents as follows: “Same as before but even more.” Thus, we have found some evidence of change in our political measures. Limitations surrounding small sample size (which contributes to the difficulty in establishing statistical significance), the possibility of confounding variables, and a relatively short time frame aside, for many (but not all) of our measures’ scores, were already relatively high, limiting the scope for change in the direction of the variable’s manifestation. Thus, students became (even) more politically interested, they became (even) more civically engaged, and perceived levels of sociopolitical control increased. They also became (even) more liberal (to the left of the political spectrum) at least with regard to immigration policy. Generally though, political orientation was a more evenly distributed variable, with similar numbers of students on either side of the right/left or conservative/liberal political divide.

Although the primary purpose of the study was to assess the impact of EE on political measures, we have also been able to make some inroads into understanding the political characteristics of the entrepreneurship student. The study is localized but offers a benchmark for others to investigate whether students in their constituencies mirror our characteristics. Interestingly, for example, we were unable to identify any differences in our political measures based on how students perceived their position in the social hierarchy and save a slightly lower level of political interest in those who placed themselves at the lowest end of the socioeconomic hierarchy. We also identified some differences between genders in their levels of civic engagement. There was some indication that males were more likely to see themselves in a leadership role. That said, the small(ish) sample size limited the number of reliable cross-tabulations that could be performed.

We encourage other scholars to use our study as a platform to further explore this still relatively unknown world of the political dimensions of EE. This could be done with larger and more diverse samples, for example. We do not believe our respondents represented a typical undergraduate student, given the mean age of 26. It is possible given that our respondents were older (on average) that their political views and attributes were more stable than those of younger students. We can only speculate that had the sample been younger, we may have seen a greater change in our measures.

Larger samples and more robust experimentation methods (e.g., using control groups primarily, as employing randomized allocation is not a viable option) would similarly open up avenues for claiming with greater certainty the impact (or lack of it) of EE on political attributes. Studies could then begin to explore the extent to which different pedagogical approaches in EE lead to what outcomes (Nabi et al., 2017; Bechard & Gregoire, 2005) and also how individual factors (age, gender, ethnicity, work experience, etc.) might moderate relationships. Thus, there is still much scope for further study in this area, and as research in EE matures, we for one welcome greater engagement with this political dimension.