The analysis of entrepreneurship promotion process through formal education in European Union's official documents

Abstract

This study aims to analyze European Union‘s (EU) entrepreneurship promotion process in order to create economic growth and the assigned roles and responsibilities of education in this process, through utilizing published the EU‘s official documents relative to entrepreneurship. Content analysis was used as a research method to make an interpretive document analysis of the EU‘s policies. The study mainly focuses on three purposefully selected documents of the EU "Green Paper: Entrepreneurship in Europe", "Action Plan: The European Agenda for Entrepreneurship", and "Implementing the Community Lisbon Programme: Fostering entrepreneurial mindsets through education and learning". In the study, the promotion process of entrepreneurship in the EU is conceptualized under two interrelated issues namely the promotion of entrepreneurship through economic discourses and the assigned roles and responsibilities of education in promoting the idea of entrepreneurship. On the basis of the findings, in the EU agenda, entrepreneurship is considered as a significant indicator for the anticipated economic growth of EU. Also, through the focus documents, it can be claimed that feasible effects of entrepreneurship on the decreasing unemployment rate is one of the highlighted baseline of EU to promote entrepreneurship. Through utilizing the EU‘s official document about entrepreneurship, it can be claimed that the EU assigns education a critical and significant role while promoting entrepreneurship. In other words, in the EU context it is expected that education should contribute encouragement of entrepreneurship through fostering the entrepreneur mindset and develop awareness of career opportunities among students. Concurrently, in this promotion process, the EU highlights public-private partnership through the establishment of school-business community links and partnership with the business world. Also, the analysis of the focus documents reveal that the EU expects formal education to constitute personal qualities like creativity, spirit of initiative and independence, to enable early contact with the world of business, and information about the role of entrepreneurs. Thereto, students are to be aware of self-employment, able to conduct mini-enterprises and to know how to start a real business and support for business ideas in different levels of formal education. Concretely, revealing from the focus documents of the study, in formal education, revising national curriculum, adding courses on entrepreneurship that cover entrepreneurship theory and practical guidance on preparing business plans, using virtual enterprises, organizing benchmarking exercises around the use of mini-companies are implemented activities executed by different member states. As a result, through out the analysis of the focus documents, it can be concluded that, the EU‘s promotion of entrepreneurship is an integral part of neo-liberal transformation process of education. This situation demonstrates that societal developmental dimension of education is diminishing and education is reduced to be a tool to train labor force for global capital.