Making Entrepreneurs and Worlds that Entrepreneurs Make: Self as Narrative Process

In this dissertation, I use a unique research site, The National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship ("NFTE"), to empirically investigate the key elements of a transforming entrepreneurship education. This qualitative study uses a grounded theoretical approach (Locke, 2001) to discover how NFTE program participants experience entrepreneurship education and how key program elements may lead participants to "re - author" their life narratives (White and Epston, 1990) in some meaningful and measurable way. The cross - case analysis that demonstrates the study's principal findings can be found in Chapter 6. Here, I provide a brief summary of the rest of the dissertation. After a Prologue and an Introduction in Chapter I that describe the background and research approach of this project, respectively, in Chapter 2, I present the intellectual antecedents of this project, namely writings on entrepreneurship and economic development from Schumpeter, Baumol and Gerschenkron. I also include a selective literature review covering the general topic of fostering entrepreneurship with a separate section on entrepreneurship education specifically. In Chapter 3, I outline the qualitative research methods employed in this proj ect. Ir1 Chapter 4, I present DeWey's theory of Education and Experience (1938) that provides theoretical support both for the four - part case study on NFTE presented in Chapter 5 and for the cross - case analysis in Chapter 6. I end with a discussion of this project's contribution in Chapter 7.

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