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ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND SITUATIONISM: CREATING SPACES OF THE POSSIBLE Jacqueline Fendt & Sylvain Bureau, ESCP Europe Business School & Ecole Polytechnique CRG, Paris France
ABSTRACT Our malaise with reigning unified thought about entrepreneurship education methods led us to experiment with novel pedagogic elements. We work with techniques originally applied by Dadaists and refined by the Situationists International (SI) around Guy Debord, namely the détournement (re-use of pre-existing artistic elements in a new ensemble) the creation of situation, and the dérive (drift; technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences). We share experimentations with such populations as students, nascent entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs, and evidence the relationship between such theories and methods and certain challenges encountered in entrepreneurship education and in entrepreneurship as a life experience, and share first reflections. This is work in progress.
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SOME INTERROGATIONS
“People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.” Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, 1968
Can entrepreneurship be learned? Can it be taught? It is two professors of entrepreneurship who ask this question and in consequence it would be helpful to find elements of answers. A good beginning is definitions: what is the essence of entrepreneurship? The “pursuit of opportunity” beyond available resources” (Stevenson, 1983)… A “way of thinking and acting, that is opportunity obsessed (…) with the purpose of value creation” (Timmons, 1994), a “…a subversive activity (that) upsets the status quo, disrupts accepted ways of doing things, and alters traditional patterns of behavior” (Smilor, 1997). How can entrepreneurship, defined in such a way, be learned or, for that matter, taught? Entrepreneurship education proliferates, from a handful in the 1980s to over 1600 in 2005 (Kuratko, 2005). Almost all are today built around a core module that seeks to simulate some type of venture creation: student teams are put together and, following a number of courses, are instructed to identify a market opportunity, develop a corresponding business model, build a community of stakeholders around their nascent project, write up a business plan and eventually pitch before a jury, usually made up of entrepreneurs, investors and lecturers. This permits interaction with protagonists from the real world, simulation and role modelling, which are all evidenced as effective pedagogic devices for entrepreneurship (Cope, 2005, Raelin, 2006). But does such exercises really prepare for entrepreneurship? And what kind of entrepreneurship, driven by what notion of value creation? Some research proposes to go beyond the business plan course to switch to perspectives with situated learning, ‘emotional exposure’ (Pittaway and Cope, 2007:211), exposure to discontinuation, to crises (Cope, 2005), and to extreme time pressure (Smilor, 1997:334). Students should step outside their ‘reality as a student’ (Pittaway & Cope, 2007:227) and actively engage in becoming ‘insiders’ (Brown & Duguid, 1991:48). Our malaise with the reigning unified thought about such education methods led us to experiment with novel elements. We seek a quality of radicality, and of emergence. Through Emergence, new knowledges can arise. We advocate that critical reasoning is indispensable to entrepreneurship learning in view of the non-linearity and complexity of the entrepreneur’s societal and economic reality. With Richardson we believe (1994) that such critical reflection can be enhanced, accompanied and conceptualized with writing, photographing, or other acts of creating. Such modes of expression and representation are iterative, and can be an effective game plan throughout any learning process. We consider writing and artistic creation as data collection, opportunity recognition, analysis and representation and consider learning and teaching through “drama, responsive readings, narrative poetry, pagan ritual, lyric poetry, prose poems and autobiography” (Richardson, 1997:3) as viable and inspiring vectors of critical thinking. Many entrepreneurial opportunities lie today in the addressing of important societal dysfunctions in a novel, entrepreneurial and sustainable manner. Rather than boxing such entrepreneurship
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separately, as ‘social entrepreneurship”, we understand this as a domain of opportunity, clearly addressed with market orientation, efficiency and business ambition, and where economic goals and societal objectives are considered of equal importance. In this sense, we propose to move away from the dominant structural, normative paradigm into exploring radical, transgressive forms that strive to open up and disrupt taken for granted ways of viewing the world.
REFLECTIONS ON LEARNING I had to grow foul with knowledge, realize the futility of everything, smash everything, grow desperate, then humble, then sponge myself off the slate, as it were, in order to recover my authenticity. I had to arrive at the brink and then take a leap in the dark. Henry Miller, Reflections on Writing, 1954
Concretely, three characteristics strike the reader of learning literature, be it entrepreneurship learning, management learning or organizational learning for that matter. All three characteristics may, as we try to develop, be grounded in epistemology. Firstly, the field of learning in organizations is radically multi-level in nature, characterized by the interplay between the individual (with different levels of managerial discretion), teams, the organization and the eminently dynamic world around it. We have summarized this phenomenon in a table (Table 1)1. Secondly, what baffles the learning scholar is that the field is almost unanimously handled in positive terms: learning is good; it must be facilitated and so on. Isolated voices criticize the concepts of organizational learning, or of the learning organization, or previous literature, but not the nature of learning in organizations per se. This uniformal thinking is rare in science, and somewhat preoccupying. It is always a problem when science agrees, and learning in organizations has clearly strong ideological implications and manipulative and discriminative potential. In fact, some callers in the desert have asked for more critical approaches, but with little success for now (Burgoyne, 1999; Contu & Willmott, 2003; Easterby-Smith et al., 1998; Örtenblad, 2002). Thirdly, and related to the second phenomenon, the field is historically grounded the functionalist stance, but with the interpretive perspective catching up very strongly over the past three decades and representing today the dominant paradigm (Addleson, 1996). We make our case along Burrell and Morgan’s sociological paradigms (1979) whereby the horizontal dimension concerns social science between objectivist (data-driven) and subjectivist (idea-driven) stances, and the vertical dimension concerns assumptions about the nature of society, from a concern with holding it together and stabilizing it (regulation) and, on the opposite end, one for contradiction and emancipation (radical change). The two dominant perspectives are briefly described in relation to their learning stance, and key protagonists and the four paradigms are summarized in Figure 1: -
Functionalist learning approach: This is historically the principal perspective: learning entity is the individual that learns as agent for the organization (Araujo, 1998), attention to people re-
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Such multi-level constructs and theories can be understood as emergent and grounded in complexity theory. We shall occasionally refer to the notion of emergence in this paper, but without going into depth on this discussion, which extends beyond the propositions and the possibilities of this paper and shall be developed elsewhere.
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sults from some type of shared understanding of the organization. Context is mostly described as objectively ‘out there’ and often the source of the knowledge to be learned. This knowledge is stored inside and outside individuals and therefore the institution learns like an individual, or “superperson” (Czarniawska, 2003, 2004). Organizations memorize routines, procedures, rules and documents, and shared mental maps (Kim, 1993; Kim & Miner, 2007). Diffusion is described as impact-free, sort of “from brain to brain” (Örtenblad, 2002, p. 90) and issues of manipulation, power and control remain unaddressed (Blackler, Crump, & McDonald, 2000). Some seminal contributions include: Argyris and Schön, 1978; Hedberg, 1981; March, 1991; Pedler et al, 1991; Senge, Simon, 1991; Swieringa and Wierdsma, 1992; Turner, 2002; Watkins and Marsick, 1993. -
Interpretivist learning approach: In this present and still upcoming paradigm, reality is constructed, therefore knowledge cannot be unequivocally described, learning is contextualized, situated (Lave & Wenger, 1991); the learning entity is not the cognitive individual, but a social practice (Gherardi, 2008; Gherardi & Nicolini, 2002), a relationship, an interaction between individuals or individuals and their work (Oswick, Anthony, Grant, Keenoy, & Mangham, 2000); learning is boundariless; communities of practice; knowledge is perceived as limitless and replaced by the term knowing. Although reality is socially constructed, hardly any attention is given to issues of power, ownership and control (Contu & Willmott, 2003; Fox, 2000). Principal contributions include Lave and Wenger, 1991; Brown & Duguid, 1991, Chaiklin and Lave, 2004; Gherardi and Nicolini, 2002;, 2001; Pittaway and Cope, 2007; Raelin, 2006; Richter, 1991, 2004, and Easterby-Smith et al, 1999, 2003. Some scholars have evolved over time and joined the interpretive paradigm, e.g. Pedler, 2005, Turner, 2007.
Both the functionalist and the reigning interpretivist dimensions of learning are dominantly regulatory in approach. We mostly stay under the radar of radical change, and the tough questions are rarely asked: Who learns? Who decides what is to be learned? Who is dominating the organizational learning process? Is all learning good learning? Can learning be nocuous and if yes, under what conditions? Some exceptions confirm this ascertainment, namely Fenwick’ s inquiry on ideology, and ideas discourse (2001), Samra-Frederick’s seminal work on CEO discourse and rhetorics (2000, 2004), and Contu’s surgically precise critique of the ‘no alternative' trope of learning, by evidencing the equivalence it creates between social inclusion, competitiveness, employability, empowerment and personal development. Her critique makes explicit how it is possible, and why it is important, to be ‘against learning' (2003; 2003). The assumptions of Postman and Weingartner’s seminal oeuvre on the need to introduce subversion into teaching are by and large still valid today, forty years down the road: “ …belief, that (a) in general, the survival of our society is threatened by an increasing number of unprecedented and, to date, insoluble problems; and (b) that something can be done to improve the situation” (1969:xi). The three problems the authors develop are still topical: i) the ‘communication revolution’ and its impact on society, ii) the ‘change revolution’ (i.e. change happens exponentially faster) and, last but by no means least, iii) the ‘burgeoning bureaucracy’ (1969: 6-14). And in this sense, their call, inspired by an anec-
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dote from Ernest Hemingway2, for an education paradigm that enhances the students’ capacity for “crap detection”, appears fresh and essential.
Figure 1: Burrell and Morgan’s Sociological Paradigms (1979): Toward Radicality
A CURIOUS INSPIRATION Such readings have inspired us to work with tools that open the self to radical transformations, allowing for critical appreciation, uncertainty and doubt. We draw on Trinh’s experiments with disrupted forms of representation with quotes, and film images juxtaposed intertextuality in am2
This term ‘crap detector’ has its origin in an interview of Ernest Hemingway in 1960, in which he is asked the secret of a good writer and answers, as Postman and Weingartner quote in their book: “Yes, there is. In order to be a great writer a person must have a built-in, shockproof crap detector” (1969:3). To the authors, this is also an “essential survival strategy and essential function of the schools” (ibid.).
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bitious discontinuous forms that challenge conventional meaning, “…incorporating the poetic into the analytic”, and unveil “decentred realities, fragmented selves and multiple identities, languages of rupture” (Trinh, 1989). We aim to demonstrate how such approaches in pedagogy can be acts of necessity, born out of the struggle of representation, the need to create new forms through which to represent alternative knowledges. Our further critical inquiry and strive for radicality have brought us to revisit International Situationism. Over a period of three years, and with diverse audiences (professional, executive, undergraduate and graduate) we have worked with techniques originally applied by Dadaists and then refined by the Situationists International (SI) in the 1950s around Guy Debord. Such techniques include the détournement (“the reuse of preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble”, Knabb, 2006:67) the creation of situation, and the dérive (drift; a “technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences” Knabb, 2006:63). Those who do not wish to copy others will never create anything. Salvador Dali
i) Détournement: Smilor’s entrepreneurship is “subversive” entrepreneurs must “upset the status quo, disrupt accepted ways of doing things and alter(s) traditional patterns of behavior.” (1997:341). Debord, in his User’s Guide to Détournement, explains the concept of educative propaganda and purports, for survival, that “the only historically justified tactic is extremist innovation (Knabb, 2006:14).” More precisely, and in relation, many great entrepreneurs were creative talents who mastered the art of appropriating other people’s work, improving on it and then marketing it. Both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs perfectly match this profile. The technique of détournement is reminiscent of the Schumpeterian thought that the entrepreneur relies on his intuition and strategy to construct “new combinations” which revolutionize existing situations through a process of “creative destruction” (Schumpeter, 1934), and that the very function of the entrepreneur is to steal concepts (inventions, products, processes) and compose something new, and that this is the root of all “recurrent economic prosperity”. This practice of détournement is provocative, and attracts extreme resistance, which the entrepreneur must face with courage and confidence (1950).
The systematic construction of situations will give rise to previously unknown sentiments. Guy Debord, 1997:41
ii) Constructing situations: An entrepreneur does not come across opportunities in nature: she constructs it. In any entrepreneur’s biography, chance plays an important role: encounters, a circumstance, an event. When listening to them, one might think that entrepreneurs are luckier than others: every single one has a story to tell about a moment, a situation that changed the course of her trajectory. But when you dig deeper, you notice that they often create the situation in which luck can happen (Cope, 2003). They use elements of the world, but do not submit to the world: they want to evolve. Just like the Situationists, entrepreneurs do not want to be “spectators” of history, but agents.” (Danesi, 2008:10). It is about getting one’s hands dirty, about being passionate about practice, and the real world (Fendt & Sachs, 2007), just as Debord writes:
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“nothing has ever interested me beyond a certain practice of life” (Wark, 2009:26). It is a matter of “intervening in events and taking part in transforming the real” (Debord, 1961) and about not letting everyday life get the upper hand: “Our central idea is that of constructing situations, i.e. constructing concrete, momentary ambiences in life and transforming them into a higher emotional quality. We need to perfect ordered intervention in the two complex factors of two major constituents which are in perpetual interaction: the decorative material of life and the behaviors it provokes and which upset it” (Debord, 1997:33). iii) Dérive On a theoretical level, the dérive originates from the psychogeographical current of the 1950s allowing to improve the study of “the precise effects of the geographical environment, whether it be consciously arranged or not, that influence directly the affective behavior of individuals (Violeau, 2006: 36-37). The dérive is defined here as a technique of “transient passage through various ambiences” (op. cit.). This type of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society is conceived to rethink the constraints of the city and thus reinvent it. Long strolls would allow the observation of different phenomena produced by the environment in order to eventually alter it. It was not so much a question of “transforming the course of things than to enter it and dally around with it according to one’s wishes” (Danesi, 2008:203). To do so, there were no maps, no planned trip nor even a walk, but a totally new way of moving about in the city which did not follow a pre-established model, or any rational logic. It was not a purely random stroll either, but a form of “controlled chance” where the fact of wandering through the streets for many hours with no destination and mostly under the influence was a way of bringing about encounters with total strangers: “The dérive did not, properly speaking, have a finality: it did not belong to a causal scheme with a goal and means to achieve it. In this perspective, where there were no destinations, the dérive combined chance and foreseeability. It consisted in a positive prompting of randomness to which it adapted more than submitted to” (Danesi, 2008: 203-204). This behavior described as “playful-constructive” by Guy Debord (1956) has to follow a certain number of rules to be completed in the best conditions. First of all, although the dérive can be realized by a single person, it should ideally be carried out by a group of two or three people. Beyond four or five people, “the specific properties of the dérive disappear quickly” (op. cit). The dérive also loses its interest if it is carried out in the middle of the countryside for the impact of chance is too weak. Its property is thus “mainly urban” (op. cit). To carry out a dérive well one ideally needs a full day, even if it can be realized in a few hours and in some cases over three or four days. The climate obviously has an impact on the dérive, and whereas storms are favorable for a dérive, uninterrupted rain limits it greatly. As for the area under study, it can be defined if one wishes to analyze a precise area or it can be totally open. It is for instance possible to take a taxi to “travel twenty minutes west” (op. cit.). As concerns meeting points, people must not agree on a usual place, but rather choose a “possible meeting point”: a place that one may know, or not, and where one will find, or not, the other participants of the dérive. In this way, “the schedule takes an “unexpected turn” (op. cit.). In practice, the dérive mostly turned out to be a series of stops in various bars and cafés, and each participant often ended up very intoxicated. The dérive must give rise to an account explaining its process. It is also possible to realize a “mapping of influences” revealing the effects of the environment beyond a purely physical analysis of con
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straints. The idea is to point out the units of ambience, the major routes, and draw “more or less broad frontiers” between the different “psychogeographical platforms” (op. cit.).The dérive may well appear as trivial and inconsistent, but according to the Situationist International, it is extremely powerful and is a source of a myriad of new ideas. This “pursuit of another Grail” (Debord, 1999 [1982], p.40) was expected to do no less than “overturn the world” (op. cit.).
Is it irony – or insolence, that lets business school professors succumb to the “desire of Debord”3, to the “…Debordology in its integrated stage… raging everywhere – just look who is behind which microphone, in front of which camera, in which newspaper, or speaking from what cesspit, openly quoting Guy Debord or going on record about him - people who, by the way, have liberally ignored him until now” (Martos, 1995:6). Why “borrow” from a way of thinking that was developed by an a priori anti-capitalist trend such as Situationist International, led by a thinker who had painted the slogan “Never work!” by the banks of the river Seine, and had done his utmost to live up to that injunction. The case seems lost in advance. Yet this method of taking old thinking to create new thinking is common throughout history and our search for novel and relevant pedagogic arrangements for future entrepreneurs have been intensely nourished over the past three years by Situationist tools. Indeed, Debord himself encouraged and justified generous “détournement”: “All the material published by the IS is, in principle, usable by everyone, even without acknowledgment, with no concerns as to literary property… You can make all the détournements that appear useful to you.” (Debord, as secretary of the SI journal, in Wark, 2009:7) “It is in fact necessary to eliminate all remnants of the notion of personal property in this area. The appearance of new necessities outmodes previous ‘inspired’ works. They become obstacles, dangerous habits. (…) Any elements, no matter where they are taken from, can be used to make new combinations. Restricting oneself to a personal arrangement of words is mere convention. The mutual interference of two worlds of feeling, or the juxtapositions of two independent expressions, supersedes the original elements and produces a synthetic organization of greater efficacy. Anything can be used. It goes without saying that one is not limited to correcting a work, or to integrating diverse fragments of out-of-date works into a new one; one can also alter the meaning of those fragments in any appropriate way, leaving the imbeciles to their slavish reference to “citations”. (Debord & Wolman, 1956:84). 4 Follow, thereafter, several pages of explanation on minor détournements, and deceptive détournements, and precise “laws” on their use. Without lingering over this strange regulation, we can say that détournement, or the appropriation and correction of culture as common property, was 3
“All Debordians: Léotard, the president, the rightwing of the rightwing and that of the leftwing, the ministries, the finances, all debordized from head to toes. Debord has fought capitalism, communism, leftism; the extreme rightwing, no need to mention it; the church, most obviously; the institutions, it goes without saying; the revolutionary impostors, this was almost like a mission; then work, reputation, big bosses, popes and underpopes, and yet they adore him (…) There is a desire of Debord that says it all.” Francis Marmande, 1997:9, (transl. f. French by authors). 4 Translation from Knabb, K. (Ed.). 2006. Situationist International: Anthology. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets.
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both a signature Situationist practice and a theory of how culture as a totality should work – and we shall take our entrepreneurial détournement quite far. The origin of our thinking is, to a certain extent, Situationist in itself: it came about from a meeting between an artist and a management professor at a provincial wedding. Creating hybrids, crossing, mixing, comparing our thoughts, having fun… this was the heart of our exchange, accompanied by a few glasses of something spiritual, admittedly. Who depraved the other person? Who won over the other person’s purity? The artist with his nonchalance and subversive thoughts, or the manager with his theories and models? We do not care, and we claim complete naivety. We played with words; we played with dogma and schools of thought to discover, and allow others to discover. Dérive, the method we are most interested in and currently experimenting with in the classroom, is related to a number of movements: Dadaism, Surrealism, Lettrism, and International Situationism, of course. All these movements have put forward different experiments aiming to rethink the world using processes where chance, the non-rational and a certain form of radicalism played a central role. Dérive did not take its “definitive form” until 1953. Debord was a member of the Lettrist International (LI) at the time, a movement founded by Isodore Isou. From 1952, there were some sharp tensions at the heart of the movement between the “Debord gang” and the “Isou gang”, resulting in a division between the two trends and the formation, in 1957, of Situationist International (SI)5. Despite this division, Debord was to retain a good number of LI concepts, and in particular this practice of dérive (Partouche, 2000:8). The technique of dérive transcends the different periods of the SI: it is practiced before, during and after. There were two phases of Situationist activity. From 1957 to 1962, the pursuit of superiority of art was the primary objective then, from 1962 to 1972, it became a more radical, more holistic revolutionary project (Knabb, 2006), concerned with a radical societal change. This part is what interested us for entrepreneurship education – or for education itself (savoir être), which in a graduate classroom is never far apart. The idea was to rethink life by rethinking modern cities. For this to be possible, new situations had to be constructed: everyone had to be permitted to create new situations in order to create a new reality and thus change life (Barnard, 2004). Urban planning was the pivot of this huge project. Thus, in “urban ambiences” envisaged by the Situationists, “residents would be invited to create their own environment” (Chollet, 2004:36). There was a need to reject the terrible approach to cities at the time (the construction of large satellite cities) to open up new cultural and political perspectives. This vision employed numerous theoretical and operational tools such as dérive, détournement and constructing situations. All these experimental elements aimed to result in “changing human behavior” (Comisso, 2000:12). They felt that the very place where “…repression and [or] urban planning happens, supports repression” (Violeau, 2006:128) and therefore the setting for urban life needed to be completely modified:
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These movements, while they received a lot of media attention in the 60s as well as more recently, had never counted many members. In the case of the SI, only 70 people, of which 7 women, were Situationists between 1957 and 1969. The main reason for these low membership numbers is a highly restrictive policy, because situationists reject "both disciples and followers" (15) and also have a tendency to exclude a lot of members (45 people over the same period) not to mention resignations (19). Raspaud, J.-J. & Voyer, J.-P. 1972. L'internationale situationniste : protagoniste/chronologi/bibliographie (avec un index des noms insultés). Paris: Champ libre. The Correspondence makes the case that the numerous exclusions were “the very practice through which the IS maintained its intellectual focus, and that Debord’s judgments, whether we agree with them or not, were not purely capricious (Wark, 2009:15)”.
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“To liberate life means first to liberate the city, which is life’s immediate environment. But this implies, most of all, that art and contemporary techniques must lose their aesthetic character or practices become divorced from the reality of daily life by melding into a superior activity, which alone will be worth living: the construction of life itself by knocking down its framework. This desire to create liberating urban planning in the search for a new way of living is the positive side to the destruction of art and this attack on culture, its dialectic superior” (Martos, 1995:15).
FIRST FINDINGS M. A. Rosanoff: Edison:
Mer Edison, please tell me what laboratory rules you want me to observe. Hell! There ain’t no rules around here! We’re trying to accomplish somep’n! Thomas Alva Edison, in Edison in his Laboratory by M. A. Rosanoff, Harper’s 1932.
In a separate meta-analytic research contribution, we first evidence and argue the need for novel approaches in entrepreneurship education (Fendt & Bureau, 2011), by synthesizing current preoccupations in contemporary entrepreneurship education. Grounded in this theory we develop here a model along the dimensions environment, process and decision, by which we confront entrepreneurs’ realities and current entrepreneurship teaching (Table 2). From this is clearly evidenced that more radical, more subversive approaches to entrepreneurship education are necessary. Approaches and tools are required that force students to take risk, to reflect critically and permit students and to juggle with chance, fortuitousness and serendipity. From our first years of experimentations we suggest that the creation of situations, the dérive and the détournement have the potential to respond to this need.
Table 2: Divergence Between Entrepreneurial Reality and Entrepreneurship Education
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We are at the beginning of our reflection but we are perceiving emergent support for our case from results of more than a dozen pedagogic experiments with diverse participant types over three years. In terms of emerging theoretical contributions we evidence and purport, for example, that ‘derive’ and ‘situation creation’ exercises: - are a potent means of subverting an largely conformist and homogenous audience, used to comply, and constrained by this duty of compliance, with the expectations and stereotypes of business school training: 1st hypothesis - facilitates the development of new methods of collaboration and communication in a different language: our students are engineers, entrepreneurs, designers, artists, urbanists, etc. or (depending on the context) future engineers, future entrepreneurs, future designers and so on. One objective is to define a kind of neutral ground, or a place that differs from the usual semantic field that is adopted in entrepreneurship teaching: 2nd hypothesis: - results in a reinvention of space (3rd) and of time (4th): we wanted to accelerate, or indeed slow down time, and change the usual frontiers – so as to ultimately, and literally, break out of the school walls – in order to see differently, to see different things, be different, see different beings, different sounds and different images.
PROVISIONAL CONCLUSION
For the world is a mountain of shit: if it's going to be moved at all, it's got to be taken by handfuls. Allen Ginsberg, The Terms in Which I Think of Reality, 1950 Each day we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. John Updike, Self-consciousness, 1986
We evidence the relationship between such SI theories and certain challenges encountered in entrepreneurship education and in entrepreneurship as a life experience. This is born from a chance encounter between an artist and management lecturers at a provincial wedding. Creating hybrids, crossing, mixing, comparing our thoughts, having fun… this was the heart of our exchange, accompanied by a few glasses of something spiritual, admittedly. We played with words; we played with dogma and schools of thought to discover, and allow others to discover. This was four years ago and since we have experimented with Situationist techniques in 12 different classes, with over 400 entrepreneurship students, with intriguing results. Based on these, we propose certain proximities between SI theories and entrepreneurship. We study specifically possible relationships between certain challenges of entrepreneurship education and the three creative tools at the core of Situationist thinking: the i) détournement, ii) the construction of situations and iii) the dérive. In sum, such techniques as presented here have the potential to address malaises and shortcomings, encountered in entrepreneurship training. It promotes attributes that can enable what
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Weick calls ‘disciplined imagination’ (2001), and what Chia dubs, more radically, ‘entrepreneurial imagination’. Today, in addition to and in the same vein as our regular work with the described Situationist techniques, namely the creation of situation, the détournement (“the reuse of preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble”, Knabb, 1981, p. 67) and the dérive (drift; a “technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences” Knabb, 1981, p. 63) we also: -
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stimulate both faculty and students, and to force an opening of mind from the analytic, problem-solving thought patterns toward discovery and new relationships of apparently disparate facts, we fully associate avant-garde often non-business thinkers (societal activists, philosophers, actors, painters, sculptors, film makers), and design students to our programs (final year master entrepreneurship major), both as faculty and students. This diversity in faculty and student population is trying, but worth every effort as it greatly increases our capacity for vision and paradigm discovery We give formal assignments to students to express their experience of entrepreneurial becoming in prototypes, physical models, and diverse works of representation, such as poems, essays, collages, foods, sounds, etc. This brings with it a whole series of problems to solve regarding comprehension first of all, and then in terms of “correction” and grading. It forces faculty to learn and apply new languages. What we have noticed in these first pilot terms, is that students that did not necessarily excel in traditional programs come forward in new and surprising manners We do, as all entrepreneurship programs, invite entrepreneurs to our classrooms for testimonials. We film these, discuss them in small teams of scholars and students, and have begun some narrative analyses We assign students to early-stage entrepreneurial ventures (usually ventures created by graduates of preceding classes), for interviews and for different types of consulting missions. We ask the students to translate their experiences in short video sequences.
These exercises that help us complement – and sometimes escape from – the rational, predictive, deterministic entrepreneurial toolbox of business plan writing and so on, go beyond the capacity of this synthesis and shall be developed and published further. Many of these classes figure today among the most coveted of our institution. Now, high student grades are just one of the criteria for quality and we have some doubts about it. But it is a fact that a much innovation is occurring in the field of entrepreneurship teaching and learning and that this regularly informs research and practice, and is in turns informed by research and practice. In this sense, we propose a fairly fresh and approximate sketch of a new framework of experience and action in which nascent entrepreneurs can construct new situations, deconstruct old ones, and thus enable individual and collective entrepreneurial ‘becoming’. This is a source of many types of learning toward essential skills (communication, bootstrapping, creative thinking…), challenge of stereotypes and behaviors, discovery of new attitudes (opening up toward others, doubting, taking risks, visualization, dealing with ambiguity…) for both the students and the experimenting faculty. Such exercises are found to have direct effects on the nascent venture, by the creation of situations and spaces that enlarge the field of the possible, and/or, on the contrary, by a confrontation with a reality in the field that might avoid cultural and/or classroom biases. Ventures resulting from these pedagogies seem to address, more often than not, societal dysfunctions, or at least display a
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ICSB Conference 2011, Stockholm, Sweden
strong sustainability in their strategy and operations. This is a first entirely non-representative observation that requires validity over much more time and data. What emerged, is a determination to orient our work in in the direction of more radicality. There are clearly opportunities to go further. Our paradigm is shifting toward a more radical humanist stance in terms of Burrell and Morgan (1979, Figure 1). Even in a relatively democratic western world, social opportunities appear increasingly stifled by institutions and their bureaucracies. Moreover, the world is facing social, economic, and ecological challenges that are no longer manageable within the boundaries of classical structures. And there is a new and powerful phenomenon: Internet. This serves both as a facilitator of institutional control (every move we make leaves an electronic spoor behind that renders our agency and therefore our whole individual and social being increasingly transparent) and as a liberator, in which individuals and small groups can freely create purposeful networks, raise consciousness and eventually change societal structures. Self-organized climates of learning are co-created in open networks along a sense-making logic; actors are free and self-empowered; they gain control over their learning and shared ownership over knowledge. Our intent is to theoretically and empirically apprehend, explore, explain and exploit such learning spaces and their potential to change society. In the same vein, we shall continue to critically investigate and advance extant practices and theories of entrepreneurship education in that we leave the classical Silicon Valley models and privilege more marginal, more subversive, more deviant approaches to entrepreneurial agency. We believe that there is a key in the construct of subversion. Schumpeter’s creative destruction must be the most cited term in entrepreneurship literature and yet we tiptoe around all elements of de(con)struction, failure, rule-bending and snares. We are interested in the heuristic potential of subversion, in general and for entrepreneurship and shall advance that interest. This is work in progress: for now we are offering an argumented reflection and some conceptual propositions, and no more than a glimpse into emerging ideas for practical implementation. We are eager to share and discuss these experiments in radical pedagogy in Stockholm, for the pleasure of inquiry and debate, for personal advancement and that of entrepreneurship education. 165 references, available from the authors.
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