Entrepreneurship Education: Social Acceleration or Impatience?

This chapter explores the rationale behind entrepreneurship education and demonstrates how it is formed via a discursively constructed image of an unprecedented speed of change in contemporary societies. Centred around this discursively constructed rationale, entrepreneurship education is then in this chapter discussed as, on one hand, an instance of increased speed of social change, a project that reacts or adapts to certain temporal structures. On the other hand, this chapter will also argue that the increasing speed of change that is used to legitimize the initiative of entrepreneurship education is first and foremost a discursive construct rooted in a neoliberal discourse of accelerating speed of change, a belief that speed, change, adaptability are vital factors in an increasingly faster changing landscape of contemporary capitalism. Here, this chapter argues, entrepreneurship education becomes then an initiative that imposes or enforces certain temporal structures of increased speed of social change, something akin to a project of impatience – an impatient desire to increase the chances for success by speeding up the slowness of the generational rhythm into faster reproduction.