According to literature, entrepreneurship education (EE) teachers face difficulties in their everyday work when they attempt to combine the content of entrepreneurship and the educational methods required to teach it 1, 2, 3, 4. To understand this phenomenon more thoroughly, Fayolle 5 raises a question relating to the basic elements of EE: “What are we talking about when we talk about entrepreneurship education?” To overcome the conceptual confusion, researchers in the field call for theoretical and conceptual studies focusing on ontological and epistemological issues.
In entrepreneurship, there are two ontologically different theories describing its core: opportunity discovery and opportunity creation. These two theories share some key aspects; however, their ontological bases are very different. While discovery theorists see opportunities as existing independently of entrepreneurs, for creation theorists opportunities are created by entrepreneurs 6. Moreover, discovery theorists see entrepreneurship as systematic cognitive calculation where the level of risk can be calculated and future predicted once enough information has been collected. According to this view, the reality is the same for everybody and, consequently, any intelligent entrepreneur will get the same calculation result and will be able to evaluate the feasibility of any existing opportunity. In other words, the ontological view of discovery theory is based on realism; that is, opportunities exist independently of perceptions of them 7. However, for the creation theorists, the context is uncertain or ambiguous (i.e., entrepreneurs are unable to predict the future) 8. The future needs to be created by human actions. Therefore, the ontological view of creation theory is based on idealism, meaning that opportunities are creations of human beings 9.
In education, behavioristic learning conception bases itself on ontological assumptions originating from realism in the same manner as discovery theory in entrepreneurship. The knowledge to be taught is viewed to exist already and the knowledge is considered as a fact that is similar for everybody 10. Moreover, the teacher is capable of systematically transferring this knowledge unchanged according to objectives set beforehand. Conversely, social constructionist learning conception bases itself, in line with creation theory, on idealism; knowledge is not ready to be picked up; rather, learners construct new knowledge in cooperation with peer students, using the knowledge and know-how of these colleagues as well as the support of their teachers 11, 12.
The ontological bases of behaviorism and social constructionism learning theories are fundamentally different. Behaviorists, because of their roots in realism 13, 14, believe that reality exists independently of perceptions of it. Social constructionists believe that no independent reality exists, or that reality may exist but cannot be known ex ante. Thus, they base their theoretical thinking on idealism (i.e., only our constructions of reality exist) 15, 16. Therefore, we believe that both behaviorists and opportunity discoverers focus on external observations of observable issues (stimuli) and the reactions that follow. Thus, they reject the idea that knowledge depends on an individual’s mental state. That is, “there is no subjective element to learning-either in determining what to study or how information is interpreted, used, or understood” 17. Social constructivists and opportunity creators believe that human beings are able to construct their own knowledge by interpreting multiple perspectives of the world, rather than by replicating only one true perspective, as viewed by realists. Thus, realism and idealism represent two polarized perspectives on reality; objective reality at one end and subjective reality consisting of multiple realities on the other. If EE teachers adopt a realist position, then, at the same time, they reject the possibility that their students will construct their own interpretations of the findings. That is, they just assume that what is reported as opportunity actually is a true opportunity. If EE teachers follow idealism, it leads them to conclude that it is students who create opportunities through exploration, collaboration, or co-creation. The opportunities they create can never be known as “true” opportunities ex ante. That is because there is no single reality, but multiple realities, none of which has precedence over the other in terms of claims to represent the truth about social phenomena 18.
The aim of this chapter is to study, from an ontological point of view, the recent theoretical developments in both entrepreneurship and education, and to discuss the impact of possible ontological discrepancies in teachers’ conceptions of entrepreneurship education. That is, we base our approach on the insight that, first, the modern entrepreneurship literature favors opportunity creation over opportunity discovery and that, simultaneously, the modern literature on education prefers the views of social constructionism to behaviorism. Second, we see that while teachers of entrepreneurship education at any level of our education system are able to match these recent theoretical standpoints, they still seem to base the entrepreneurial part of entrepreneurship education on traditional theories, rather than on the modern view of entrepreneurship. Finally, we see that teachers at the university level seem to cling to ontological conceptions of traditional theories of both entrepreneurship and education. Thus, there seems to be a mismatch in entrepreneurship teachers’ ontological conception between entrepreneurship and the educational methods teachers are using to organize their activities for entrepreneurship education.
In order to ease EE teachers’ ontological headaches in understanding entrepreneurship and education, we will first focus on literature to find out whether or not there is a mismatch between EE teachers’ conceptions of entrepreneurship and education. Second, we will focus on opportunity creation from the middle-ground perspective of critical realism to ease some of the ontological controversy in EE teachers’ conceptions of entrepreneurship and education.
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