Katri Komulainen

Risk-Taking Abilities for Everyone? Finnish Entrepreneurship Education and the Enterprising Selves Imagined by Pupils.

This article examines the spread of the neo‐liberal educational policy in Finnish schools by considering entrepreneurship education. We examined the kinds of gendered and classed enterprising selves that were narrated in the Finnish writing competition Good Enterprise! written by pupils in the 9th grade of comprehensive school. In their narratives of enterprising selves, the pupils constructed the middle‐class version of the self, where the person was not contingent upon external effects but an autonomous self‐governing individual. Moreover, the possible selves of boys matched the culturally valued representations of the autonomous, risk‐taking entrepreneurial individual more closely than the self‐representations of girls did. However, it was especially the boys’ narratives of modest entrepreneurship with the traditional virtues of the respectable citizen that were successful in the competition. This finding is in conflict with the educational policies of the European Union, which call for risk‐taking abilities and competition as pre‐conditions for achieving progress.

Bringing up global or local citizens? Pupils’ narratives of spatial selves in Finnish entrepreneurship education

The article explores the conditions of entrepreneurship education in Finnish schools from the perspective of the school’s tradition of national and territorial socialization and the new aim of educating European and global citizens. Entrepreneurship education presents a new challenge for the school system with regard to territorial socialization and the construction of the spatial self. The theme is discussed by using data consisting of Finnish pupils’ narratives of entrepreneurship which were produced in the essay writing competition Good Enterprise! in 1986–2006. The analysis focuses on the prize-winning narratives which reflect both the pupils’ possible selves and the ideals of entrepreneurship education. The article explores what kinds of representations of space, place and possible self young people produce in their narratives and what kinds of representations are favoured by school. Narratives representing entrepreneurship as familiar, domestic, rural and local activity constantly succeeded in the competition whereas the ideal of the global self was not so much appreciated. Moreover, the images of entrepreneurial spaces and places reproduced conventional representations of femininity and masculinity. The competition seemed to construct local and national versions of self and citizenship which were gendered, too.

Salvation or a Broken Promise? Two Adult Graduates' Social Positioning in Education and Working Life.

Finland has been celebrated as a country where everyone has the possibility to educate themselves and to get ahead in life through education. However, social differences of educability continue to persist and social differences of employability are further construed in the neo-liberal market economy. In this article we will examine 2 adult graduates’ educational and working life histories based on an 8-year qualitative follow-up study. Lisa with a working-class background and Henri from a middle-class family have both graduated from general upper-secondary school for adults and also accomplished higher education degrees in adulthood. Lisa and Henris cases show how class and gender, as well as age, intertwine in the construction of educability and employability in different narrative environments. Based on our analysis, academic education may turn out as a broken promise instead of a great salvation with good occupational prospects for individuals like Lisa with a working-class background.

On entrepreneurship, in a different voice? Finnish entrepreneurship education and pupils’ critical narratives of the entrepreneur

This study set out to explore the narratives of entrepreneurship that 15–16-year-old pupils in their last grade of comprehensive school produced in the Finnish annual writing competition Good Enterprise! We focused on narratives that can be categorized as tragedies, satires, comedies, and crime stories (N = 219). In these stories, the pupils challenge the political ideal of the risk-taking entrepreneur by arguing for sustainable development and social justice as bases for entrepreneurship. On the one hand, the critical representations of entrepreneurs arise from the Protestant work ethic, and thus the values constructed in these stories are close to stories that can be characterized as romances of the modest entrepreneur where the motive for entrepreneurship was not the accumulation of material wealth. On the other hand, these critical stories represent “entrepreneur and consumer pathologies,” and hence make a mockery of the core neoliberal values of autonomy, competition, and choice.

University students’ perceptions of their ‘ability selves’ and employability: a pilot study

ABSTRACT This study sets out to investigate the university students’ perceptions of their current and expected ‘ability selves’ and the contribution of such perceptions to students’ views of their own employability. The participants consisted of a group of male and female students (N = 104) who were asked to describe their present and anticipated abilities and to respond to a set of statements describing self-perceived employability. The students highlighted social aptness, extroversion and enterprise skills in particular as features related to ability selves in current discussions of working life. These interpretations were subsequently related to the optimism they had about their own employability. ‘Ability selves’ seem to play a role in the multifaceted process of subjective confidence formation regarding one’s employment prospects after graduation.

Do ‘good students’ make better entrepreneurs than ‘bad learners’? Ninth-grade pupils’ perceptions of entrepreneurial abilities within the school’s discursive practices

Research on entrepreneurship education (EE) has not discussed the comprehensive school’s traditional discourse of abilities and the related aim of categorising pupils according to their ‘natural’ talents. It has also neglected pupils’ perceptions of entrepreneurial abilities; however, these perceptions are important for understanding the implementation of EE at school and its impact on how pupils position themselves at school and in working life. This study examined the ways entrepreneurial abilities were constructed by pupils in comprehensive school. The data were gathered through qualitative group interviews with 29 pupils (15–16 years old) from a school in eastern Finland. The following six interpretative repertoires were identified in the interviews: ‘academic talent’, ‘predetermined career’, ‘diligent student’, ‘common sense’, ‘personal characteristics’ and ‘loyal friendship’. The former three reproduced the school’s meritocratic notion of abilities and the related class- and gender-specific distinctions between head-on and hands-on abilities. The latter three challenged the value of academic talent for entrepreneurship. The findings demonstrated that while the school’s traditional discourse of abilities guides the pupils’ perceptions, in the pupils’ views entrepreneurial abilities are not evaluated according to the school’s intelligence criteria alone. In their accounts, a discourse of an enterprising self, which characterises the European and Finnish policy for education and training, is emerging. This new discourse will create new dimensions for the categorisation of individual differences at school. The results are discussed in relation to the trait approach to entrepreneurship, the ability ideals of EE and the related proposal for inclusive pedagogy, and the teachers’ perceptions that were explored in a previous study.

Portraying intelligence: children’s drawings of intelligent men and women in Finnish and Russian Karelia

This study sets out to examine Finnish and Russian children’s representations of intellectual competence as contextualised in the hierarchies of abilities, age and gender. Finnish and Russian pupils, aged 11–12 years, were asked to draw pictures of an intelligent person and an ordinary person. It was found that gender appearance of intelligent men and women was less heterosexual than that of ordinary men and women. In Russian pictures, the intelligent characters, especially women, were widely separated from the ordinary ones in terms of cognitive-mental features. In Finnish depictions, the differentiation between the intelligent and ordinary characters, especially women, was not so categorical and was primarily based on status. It appears that Russian children are apt to relate their representations of intellectual ability to the institutionalised systems of cognitive competence, education and science, whereas Finnish children associate intelligence to social success as well. Further, cultural and gender-related hierarchies of age seemed to reflect in the children’s images.