Entrepreneurship continues to be a popular and growing field in universities spanning numerous faculties ranging from business to the Arts. World-wide, numerous engineering schools have created dedicated graduate programs to teach entrepreneurship as a distinct discipline. To better understand why these programs exist, how they acquire legitimacy, and what type of career their graduates pursue, we studied programs at a prestigious Canadian university. We analyzed the content and structure of the program and conducted more than 35 interviews including faculty and alumni that graduated between two and ten years prior. Employing theories of emergence and holding environments, we analyzed our data and discovered a new unintended profession that we identify as an “entrepreneurship profession.”
We observed programs initially designed to graduate individuals who begin new start-up enterprises resulted in the unintentional outcome of creating the professionalization of entrepreneurship as an instructional and motivational career. We thus examine the emergent process and credentialing of entrepreneurship promotion as a new professional field. Finally, we contributed to the theory of legitimation by identifying elements that impact and were impacted by the newly emerging entrepreneurship education program.
Benson Honig (Ph.D. Stanford University) is the Teresa Cascioli Chair in Entrepreneurial Leadership, DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University. Studying entrepreneurship worldwide, his research interests include business planning, nascent entrepreneurship, transnational entrepreneurship, ethics in scholarship, social entrepreneurship, social capital, and entrepreneurship in environments of transition.
He has published widely in leading academic journals and the media, and serves on six editorial boards, including the Journal of Business Venturing and the Journal of Management Studies. He is currently a blogger for the Academy of Management’s Ethicist site. He is past chair of the Academy of Management Ethics Education Committee and is a past president of the CCSBE (Canadian Counsel of Small Business and Entrepreneurship). He is also an active board member of the Africa Academy of Management. Dr. Honig served for seven years as an editor for Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, and is the 2009 winner (with Per Davidsson) of the Grief price from the University of Southern California for the most cited entrepreneurship article in the previous five years, as well as the winner of the most cited article for the Journal of Business Venturing in 2009.
He has published in the Journal of Management, Journal of Business Venturing, Academy of Management, Learning and Education, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, Journal of Management Studies, European Management Journal, Journal of Small Business Management, Entrepreneurship and Regional Development and the Journal of World Business, among others.
The seminar will be held in English.
Major information: Prof. Daniela Bolzani (daniela.bolzani@unibo.it)