Contextualized agency - an investigation of entrepreneurship education as enacted practice

Purpose of the research
The purpose of the study is to investigate contextualized agency in the field of entrepreneurship education (EE) through the lens of an as-practice perspective (AP).

Relevance of the problem
EE is to a high extent facilitated by the doings and practices of institutional agents (educators, students, consultants, researchers) that ideate, plan, execute, and asses the learning processes (Cope, 2005). Albeit the vast amount of EE literature, the field struggle to provide in-depth explanations towards what practices EE educators apply in the classroom, and how these practices impact the learning journey (Cooper et al., 2004). This further accentuates the need to investigate the agency side of enacted practices, when embedded in an educational context. Furthermore, because of the complexity of the setting of higher education institutions, many different stakeholders are involved in learning processes around EE (Gibb & Haskins, 2014). In particular, when it comes to practicing “learning-through” processes (Hannon, 2005) the complexity of stakeholder relationships is prevalent because these processes often involve companies or organizations as providers of case-challenges or internship settings (Alderman & Milne, 1998).
When educators pedagogically plan and execute curriculum designs (Hägg & Gabrielsson, 2019), these sets of practices are influenced both by the contemporary understanding of the entrepreneurial process (Fayolle & Gailly, 2012; Harrison & Leitch, 2005), and the pedagogical sides of this. Often learning designs in EE tend to consists of action- or experience-based approaches (Cope & Watts, 2000; Hägg & Kurczewska, 2019; Kolb, 2014). The diversity of the EE literature does however not provide much clarity towards, what methods educators can rely on (Balan & Metcalfe, 2012; Segal et al., 2007). This leaves the educators – the most important agent – without much guidance in relation to the behavioral side (Warhuus et al., 2020).
The puzzle addressed in the study relates to, how the different actors of EE construct, influence, and enact EE as a practice thus placing the study within the AP perspective (Neil A. Thompson et al., 2020) which in other fields has investigated for instance organizational coordination (Jarzabkowski et al., 2012) or routines (Pentland et al., 2010). The field of EE has struggled providing adequate explanations towards why some practices work in one context why the study of micro constituents of EE is crucial.