Entrepreneurship & Regional Development

Entrepreneurship Education in a Time Between Worlds: Transforming Theory, Practice and Scholarship

Global society faces grave and interconnected crises and challenges. These include widening economic inequalities, financial system instability, ideological extremism, democratic decline, mounting social and political unrest, accelerating climate heating, biodiversity loss, large-scale forced migrations, pandemics, violence and genocide and numbness to human suffering. This poly-crisis environment is so severe that research initiatives are coalescing around the subject of existential risk (c.f. Cambridge Existential Risks Initiative; Global Systems Institute; Cascade Institute). As an example, EY, one of the world’s largest accounting firms, published a report from its New Economy Unit. This elaborated how a global Polycrisis Economy characterised by geo-political crisis, short-termism, unsustainable growth and over-consumption, is hardwired for collapse (Roussou et al., 2024).

Previously, it has been argued that various external crises are underpinned and held together by a meta-crisis of imagination and consciousness (De Oliveira, 2021; Andreotti, 2021; Rowson, 2021). This meta-crisis articulates that old structures, conceptual frameworks and mental models no longer make sense. Still, new structures, frameworks and models have not emerged, creating a painful ‘in between’ time (Roy, 2021). The meta-crisis is posited as a historically specific threat and is argued to be manifesting institutionally and culturally to the detriment of life on Earth (Rowson, 2024). To elaborate on the ‘in between’ (Roy, 2021): the old world is recognised as unsustainable, but a new world has yet to be born, making this literally a Time Between Worlds (Stein, 2019).

Education plays a special - a central - role in crisis and renewal in this Time Between Worlds. Indeed, the inter-generational transmission of knowledge, values, ethics and capabilities for sustaining life is breaking down and self-termination has become a possibility. Artificial intelligence (AI), attention extraction, technology addiction, culture wars, decay of social and cultural institutions and nihilism are changing the basis on which educators and students interact (Stein, 2021). How and what we educate, how we develop and design curricula, as well as our methods of assessment can accelerate breakdown, or make transformation possible.

While profound crises in sense making, capability, legitimacy and meaning unfold, there are also ‘best case scenarios’. These may include collectivity, a joint and shared sense making to comprehend truth and beauty, reviving educational initiatives for new economics and new forms of governance, factoring in collective and planetary concerns into choice making and generating space to question ethics, values and the purpose of existence (Stein, 2022, pp 8-9). This Special Issue aims to develop theory, practice and research that addresses the problems and possibilities of entrepreneurship education in a Time Between Worlds and illuminates ways forward.

Entrepreneurship and Regional Development (ERD) has long championed the idea that entrepreneurial endeavours are not simply about starting a venture but extend to addressing, and recognising social, societal, political and environmental concerns and implications of entrepreneurship (Steyaert & Katz, 2004). Context influences the knowledge, skills and resources for entrepreneurial endeavours, and should be part of Entrepreneurship Education (EE) (Leitch, Hazlett & Pittaway, 2012). Now the context is understood as a Time Between Worlds. In EE’s mother field, entrepreneurship, progress narratives have lost credibility in that unsustainable business practices have been identified but not acted upon and now the future generation of entrepreneurs will need to be more focused on existential threats (Hall et al., 2010; van Gelderen et al., 2021). The entrepreneurs of the present and future will either hinder or help shift towards a more eco and socially just society (Qin et al., 2022; Engel et al., 2021).

EE plays a role in this, with some educators sustaining business as usual while others try and transform themselves and their practice (Wyness et al., 2015). A failure to transform in the face of social and ecological breakdown brings into question the very legitimacy of EE, and risks accusations of providing a ‘cretin’s education’ (Loi et al., 2022). The horror and disruptions of a multi-crisis world are now articulated in EE scholarship (Dodd et al., 2022; Klapper and Fayolle, 2023, Hoppe and Namdar, 2023). Yet, more reflexive space is needed to recognise the role and place of the meta-crisis in consciousness and imagination in EE, and to develop theory, practice and research (Brentnall and Higgins, 2024, Brentnall, 2023).

This Special Issue will build on and extend the calls made in ERD and elsewhere that entrepreneurship educators engage in collective reflexivity (Berglund & Verduijn, 2018; Dodd et al., 2023). We aim to provide a space to re-think, re-imagine and transform theory, practice and research in EE. Conceptual, theoretical and empirical papers are welcome and imaginative methodological and philosophical perspectives are encouraged. Potential questions could connect to, but are not limited by, the following suggestions:

• What is preventing us from doing things differently? How do certain structures, frameworks and models in Entrepreneurship Education help to maintain the ‘old world’, a dominant but dying system?
• How can these (paradoxes, contradictions and messy entanglements?) be opened up, grappled with and waded through in Entrepreneurship Education? Which beliefs, practices and assumptions are particularly problematic in Entrepreneurship Education? What must we stop doing and why?
• How can alternative philosophical and theoretical foundations inspire transformed research and practice in Entrepreneurship Education? What conceptual innovation and theorising can be mobilised to transform how we think about and approach Entrepreneurship Education? What are the specific processes, activities and assumptions that can be composed and recomposed to transform Entrepreneurship Education?
• To what extent (and in what way(s)) are Entrepreneurship Education policy and programmes reflecting the need for transformation?
• What are the most promising new/transformed practices (e.g. cooperation, commons thinking and practices, bio-regionalism, healthy information ecologies, spiritual, decolonial and indigenous sensibilities), and their consequences for Entrepreneurship Education?
• What are ‘best case scenarios’ (e.g. relating to sense making, capability, legitimacy and meaning) being pursued in Entrepreneurship Education? How can Entrepreneurship Education support the development of a more just and regenerative economy?
• (How) Does Entrepreneurship Education, for better or worse, interact with existential issues such as peace, democracy, health, well-being, food and energy system transformation and such like?