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Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide an empirical contribution by exploring how secondary school students are governed and shaped when entrepreneurship is emphasised in school curricula, and if female and male students are governed in different ways through different techniques connected with entrepreneurship in school.

Design/methodology/approach: This study takes its departure in Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality. In total, 90 students in gendered focus groups from three upper secondary schools were interviewed about how entrepreneurship in school was implemented and experienced. The schools were geographically dispersed.

Findings: The analysis indicates, the three schools included in the study provide different prerequisites for students to become an active subject. This partly depends on where the individual school is geographically located, but also on the students gender. When entrepreneurship in school is implemented throughout the entire curriculum, female students tend to adopt male-coded entrepreneurial abilities. The neoliberal agenda, with an aim of fostering entrepreneurial self, appears to have permeated the awareness of students, especially female students.

Originality/value: First, the paper contributes with an empirical research regarding students’ experiences of entrepreneurship in school. Second, the paper contributes to a gender perspective on entrepreneurship in school. Third, the paper contributes to the understanding of how entrepreneurship in school is realised in a different school context.

The general aim of this thesis is to examine and explain how education fosters future citizens when Swedish upper secondary schools work actively with entrepreneurship in school. Toward this aim, two research questions are asked: How are students governed and how do students govern when focus is on entrepreneurship in school? How do teachers relate to entrepreneurship in school? The study took place in a school development program with a focus on teachers developing their abilities and working with entrepreneurship in schools. Four studies presented in four articles form the cornerstones of the thesis. The empirical data was collected during 2013– 2014 in three of the participating schools. Different methods were used. The first step was reading and analysing policy documents, followed by observations in the classrooms, interviews with the teachers with the help of performance maps, and interviews with the students in gendered focus groups. In total, 14 teachers and 90 students were involved in the study. The schools were geographically spread and represented both public and independent schools. For this study an abductive approach was used, which means that the empirical data were collected and first studied unbiased. Various theoretical models were chosen to find answers to the specific research questions; thus, a connection between the theory and the empirical data was made.

The first article examines whether a citizen with entrepreneurial abilities is fostered in school when the concept of entrepreneurship has a place in the curriculum. This article also analyses the curriculum (Gy11) and more specifically what can be read under the heading The Task of the School. The main result from this study shows that students are emphasising entrepreneurial abilities over other abilities. The second article draws a comparison between John Dewey’s ideas of progressive education from the early 1900s and the teaching methods that have come to be advocated for developing student ́s entrepreneurial abilities. The main purpose of progressive education is to foster a democratic citizen; here I could observe that techniques for teaching entrepreneurship are comparable to progressive education, but the purpose is not the same. The purpose of entrepreneurship in school is primarily to foster individuals who are active and responsible for their own future.

Michael Foucault's concept of governmentality is the focus of article three, which explores how students are governed and shaped when entrepreneurship in school is emphasised, and it explores whether boys and girls are governed in different ways. The analysis of the result indicated that the students were governed in three different ways in the three school contexts, and girls and boys were governed in different ways both among the schools and within the schools.

The fourth article addresses how the teachers relate to entrepreneurship in schools in light of new reforms, marketization, more regulation and the demands of being an entrepreneurial teacher. The result shows three narratives: the cool teacher, the stressed teacher, and the frustrated teacher, each handling entrepreneurship in school in different ways.

This thesis shows that the entrepreneur has come to be presented as a hero and entrepreneurship as a solution to cope with challenges—to the global economy, but also for coping with ourselves and our own lives. It also shows that fostering a democratic citizen is subordinate to fostering citizens with entrepreneurial abilities, as the regime of truth is to become the entrepreneur. The students are both governed and governing toward that direction. And even if teachers have different ways of approaching entrepreneurship in schools, the will to be the entrepreneurial teacher and to foster entrepreneurial citizens is clear. 

Progressive education, with its purpose of educating young people to become democratic citizens, has influenced the Swedish educational system for many years. Critical voices have been raised, claiming that progressive education has diminished Swedish pupils’ results. Since 2011, when entrepreneurship as a concept and as a pedagogical approach was instituted in Swedish curricula, the debate has emerged again. In this case, however, the problem was with the pedagogical ideas of the entrepreneurship in school. Critical voices claim that entrepreneurship is a part of the neoliberal agenda and that the language of progressive education has been appropriated and misused in order to create productive citizens who will maintain the capitalist state. This article is written from the perspective of pupils in an upper secondary school, illuminating and problematizing the sense in which the entrepreneurship in school can be said to be progressive in the spirit of John Dewey. The result shows that the entrepreneurship in school contains many similarities with the ideas of progressive education, especially in the way that pupils work and take part in activities. However, the lack of pupils who talk about learning to improve future society or to develop democracy is obvious. Thus, even if working methods seem to be equal, the overall educational goals are different. The goal of entrepreneurship in school is to educate young people to become independent, innovative individuals but in that education mission, there is a risk that democratic values are neglected.

For many years, educational curricula have been a tool for countries to foster the ‘right’ kind of future citizens. Since the 1980s, there has been an increasing global desire to create entrepreneurial citizens who possess certain abilities. This article will analyse what kind of citizen appears to be fostered when entrepreneurship is emphasised in school. The study is based on empirical research carried out in three geographically separated upper-secondary schools participating in an entrepreneurial program in Sweden. Interviews were performed with pupils in single-gender focus groups. Interviews with teachers were also completed with the help of cognitive maps. Furthermore, a framework was formulated for understanding the general abilities all pupils should develop according to secondary education curricula. These abilities formed four categories: factual knowledge/abilities, learning abilities, civic understanding/abilities and entrepreneurial abilities. When pupils’ voices are heard, and when their stories and conceptions about their future abilities are defined, it is clear that stories about entrepreneurial abilities are predominant. However, no stories about civic understanding abilities or learning abilities are given, and this is the most interesting result of this study. Is this lack of pupils’ understanding regarding the importance of civic abilities worrying and something to be concerned about when fostering future citizens through education?