Discourses of entrepreneurship in contemporary commerce textbooks in secondary schools in selected Southern African Development Community (SADC) Countries.
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Date
2020
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Abstract
Strong emphasis has been placed on entrepreneurship in recent times as scholars and
policy makers, including those in the field of education, regard it as a remedy for the
social and economic challenges facing societies. Various programmes and courses
promoting entrepreneurship can thus be found in the official school curriculum in
many countries and numerous textbooks, specifically commerce textbooks are
dedicated to the study of this phenomenon.
In many classrooms, textbooks are a popular resource for the dissemination of
‘factual’ knowledge, such as entrepreneurship education to students. However, a
number of studies have reported that the seemingly objective knowledge in textbooks
that has been thoroughly screened by educational officials and approved for
classroom use is not neutral but loaded with various ideologies and other one-sided
incomplete knowledge.
Against this background, this study adopted a qualitative critical research approach
and applied the tenets of Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) to critically analyse
entrepreneurship discourses in contemporary commerce textbooks in selected
Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries. MDA encompasses
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Visual Semiotics Analysis (VSA). The CDA
and VSA methods drew on the frameworks of Fairclough (1989; 2001), Huckin
(1997), Machin and Mayr (2012) and Nene (2014) to uncover the construction of
entrepreneurship in the selected commerce textbooks.
The findings of the study indicate that, despite regular revision, the analysed
textbooks present an ideological rather than a factual perspective of entrepreneurship.
The main ideological formations identified were the ease of business formation;
personal enrichment; foregrounding of males as exemplary entrepreneurs, leaders and
managers; stereotyping of gender roles; women on the lowest rung of the
entrepreneurship hierarchy; economic growth; job creation; solution to poverty;
improved standard of living and effortless globalisation. This resulted in selective
entrepreneurship knowledge being presented to students in textbooks, with little
attention paid to the realities of this phenomenon. Moreover, the ideologies that
emerged promoted neoliberal and capitalistic values and were gender biased and
gender insensitive. Students are thus presented with a one-sided version of
entrepreneurship. This can be attributed to the assumptions in entrepreneurship
scholarship and the neoliberal capitalistic ideology that is entrenched in societies and
educational institutions around the globe, as well as the fact that entrepreneurship is
not gender neutral. Finally, textbooks are biased political and ideological tools.
The implications of these findings are that the different stakeholders involved in the
production of textbooks should scrutinise them on a regular basis and improve them
by including the reality of entrepreneurship, such as business failure, hardship and the
many taken-for-granted assumptions and ideologies underlying entrepreneurship
scholarship. The quality of textbooks and whether they are suitable resources to
impart entrepreneurship knowledge should also be taken into consideration. This
would help to enhance learning and also convey only factual and up-to-date
knowledge to students in classrooms.
Description
Doctoral Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.