Title:
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The gendering of entrepreneurship in higher education : a Bourdieuian approach
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This thesis explores the gendering of entrepreneurship education in Higher Education in
light of increasing government emphasis on the embedding of entrepreneurship
education across the higher education curriculum in the UK. It argues that issues around
the historical masculinisation of entrepreneurship are not acknowledged in current policy
and education approaches and that this is problematic given an increasingly female HE
cohort and that female graduates are still less likely than their male counterparts to
consider entrepreneurship as an option on graduation. I take a three-phase, qualitative,
multiple-method case-study approach - informed by Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice -
to explore gendered discourses of entrepreneurship and enterprise education in the UK
and how these play out in one post-1992 UK HE institution. The study highlights the
choices, positions and struggles of the social space of HE and how staff and students
respond to institutionally-framed policy and historically masculinised discourses and their
teaching and learning practices in light of this. It suggests that, contrary to current
education and entrepreneurship policy discourses, HE institutions and staff are not
disinterested purveyors of neutral and uncontested 'facts' but are highly invested in their
arbitration of the entrepreneurship education curriculum within disciplines, such as Health,
Sport and Hospitality, that have not traditionally had an enterprise or entrepreneurship
focus. It also suggests that female undergraduate students - although positioned in policy
and practice as 'not-knowing' - bring a range of entrepreneurial experiences and
expectations to HE which they can struggle to draw on and make sense of within an HE
sector that positions them as deficient and unable or unwilling to take advantage of
entrepreneurial opportunities.
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