I am writing a chapter for a new book about Media Education. My chapter will be focused on entrepreneurship; approaches to enterprise education and some findings from a research project I did with my students last year. My aim is to offer an overview of where we are at in terms of enterprise education for media and cultural industries students along with some questions for further investigation. It builds upon earlier research I conducted (Carey and Naudin, 2006b), and a recognition that entrepreneurship is increasingly important in media education. Many aspects of entrepreneurship education are familiar to vocational media courses but they have probably not been called ‘entrepreneurship’ before. Having come across a range of enterprise educators working in more generic faculties or departments, I am often surprised that, unknowingly, media and art and design education fits with much of the good practice promoted by organisations such as the NCGE. Unlike business schools, we have always been about the experience of real life practice, working on live projects with industry, getting in guest speakers, team activities and experiential learning. The words ‘enterprise’ and ‘entrepreneurship’ are loaded with meaning and can certainly be off-putting to many media educators. But rather than dismiss these terms, I think they provide us with an opportunity to reflect critically on the nature of the entrepreneurial element within contemporary media practice.

Firstly meet with your supervisor and read your handbook to make sure you have all the information about the upgrade process. Each institution, faculty and school can be slightly different. Go to sessions on the upgrade process if they have any.

Be prepared and manage you time

Make sure you have plenty of time to prepare for this. See your supervisor very early on about this to make sure you have both agreed deadlines for drafts, final papers and the upgrade date. Some supervisors can be surprisingly casual about this but you need to plan ahead.

Paper

I sent a draft to my supervisor and then made sure I had plenty of time to work on the final version (in my case 2 weeks because I’m part-time).

Content

This does differ for each institution but some basic elements remain the same. You will have to be confident about the literature and the distinctiveness of your research question. communicate the level of work you have already done and your plan for the next few years. Make this a realistic plan. Challenge yourself by all means but don’t be unrealistic, particularly if like me, you are also full-time employed. At this stage some methodological issues might not be resolved and you should be able to discuss that as part of the process. However, don’t be in too much of a rush to go through the upgrade if you’ve not done some research and testing of your methodology. I did a pilot and explored methods, approaches and limitations relevant to my area.

The panel

Be really prepared and know your paper inside out. I emmersed myself in papers and material related to my research for a whole day before. I think there is no harm is coming across as passionate about your area of study but be open-minded to different points of view. Dont be defensive. This should be an engaging and critical debate to help you progress in your research. No one sails through even if they have written a great paper . You should welcome the discussion and tough questions. To feel prepared ask yourself what key questions they might ask. These might include; what is your thesis about? Tell us about your methodology? Prepare answers for these questions. It is a good idea to be able to explain your research in 3-4 sentences to non specialist audiences.

Afterwards

Dont forget to celebrate with colleagues, friends and family! This is an important milestone and you should be proud of your achievement. I know I was!

And then the really hard work starts…

The starting point for Campbell Jones and Andre Spicer is to take a critical perspective. They argue that entrepreneurship research can be divided into three major areas; Firstly the functionalist which seeks to explore the causes and outcomes of entrepreneurship, secondly the interpretive which tends to observe entrepreneurship as it is conducted day to day and thirdly, a critical approach which questions the category of the entrepreneur including how the entrepreneur is represented and takes a critical view of the impact on society. They claim that the critical approach, such as the work by Paul du Gay, is relatively small in comparison with the array of literature which appears to accept entrepreneurship and has no compulsion to investigate and critique many of the commonly held assumptions about the subject.

In order to do this, Jones and Spicers refer to the work Lacan’s theory of  ‘the mirror stage’ which explores the notion of our symbolised identity and the gap which exists between that and ourselves. The ‘mirror stage’ is based on the notion that when a child is about 6 months old and looks in the mirror, he or she starts to recognise their image rather than thinking of themselves as part of their mother (which is how they understand themselves until then). So for the first time, they have a sense of their image through the eyes of others. I should add that this has been contested by others and is by no means accepted by all academics. However, Lacan goes on to develop the idea of the ‘dual relationship’, as the gap between a person and his or her image. This is described as the ‘silent real’. That which is unspeakable. That which is absent. To quote Jones and Spicer, ‘the mirror stage’ gives rise to an aggressive tension between the subject and the image’.

‘We are suggesting that entrepreneurship is not a coherent and stable discourse which is help together around a stable centre. Such a unity is almost always assumed by functionalist approaches to entrepreneurship, and this is something a critical perspective brings to light. Rather, it is a paradoxical, incomplete and worm ridden symbolic structure which posits an impossible and indeed incomprehensible object at its centre. To put it into the strictest Lacanian formulation, entrepreneurship discourse does not exist.’(Jones and Spicer, 2009)

The idea that the identity of the entrepreneur is a ‘fictional construct’ (du Gay, 2000), is helpful in ‘unmasking’ the theoretical and popular image of the entrepreneur. The argument here is that the entrepreneur, as with the emperor’s clothes, is an image from the outside and that behind the mask is nothing.

In research investigating the modern man, James Donald, agrees with Lacan’s theory that their is nothing behind the image; it is not the case that beneath these layers, a ‘true’ or ‘real’ person is hiding. However, he suggests that: ‘This nothing is once again the necessary nothing we keep coming up against, the abstraction that is the subject, the empty place that makes appearance, conduct and consciousness possible. Being a citizen, being a man about town, being a person – these are not identities, they are performances.’ (Donald, 2000).

The use of the word performances suggests an opportunity to ‘act out’ an image and the potential for subversion and resistance as discussed by Jacqueline Rose in her analysis of Lacan.

But to come back to the question of entrepreneurship discourse, the point the authors are trying to make, is not simply that entrepreneurship discourse does not exist, but that research which has attempted to identify the entrepreneur has in fact simply explored the ‘absent centre’, the ‘lack’, that the underlining failure of entrepreneurship discourse reveals something more profound. In unmasking, the authors seek to suggest that it is the undefinable nature of the entrepreneur, ‘the entrepreneur as an empty signifier’ which is the entrepreneur.

This is not to say that they reject the existence of entrepreneurship discourse in a different sense. The signifiers and signified are part of a narrative which serve to illustrate the identity of the entrepreneur so many seek. ‘It is not in ‘being’ an entrepreneur that one secures identity, but in the gap between the subject and the object of desire.’

What is the nature of entrepreneurship in cultural and media work and what are the implications for vocational education?

I explore this problem by researching cultural workers and the nature of entrepreneurship as it is experienced by individuals working as freelancers and in small independent businesses within the creative, media and cultural industries. The emphasis is placed on the specific experience of these workers, their potentially entrepreneurial behaviors and skills as they negotiate a career in the UK’s creative industries sector. This informs and raises debates for higher education policies in creative, media, art and design subject areas, with an emphasis on the post graduate level.

Theoretical framework

There is relatively limited academic research on the subject of entrepreneurship and the creative industries in comparison with policy documentation on the subject (DCMS, 2006b). The exception to that is the only book specifically on the subject, Entrepreneurship in the Creative Industries; An International Perspective (Henry, 2007), and a few articles and chapters (Carey, 2006b, Hagoort, 2008, Ellmeier, 2003, Rae, 2007, Eikhof, 2006). Of the examples just cited, the interest in the subject has come predominantly from entrepreneurship theorists rather than cultural, media studies or the arts. The result is a perspective which has a tendency to favor entrepreneurship or at the very least not question it, as well as paying relatively little attention to a more critical debate about cultural work.

In contrast, cultural studies research includes research on cultural work (rather than entrepreneurship specifically) and most recently this has been captured by Hesmondhalgh and Baker, in their book, Creative Labour: Media work in three cultural industries(Hesmondhalgh, 2011). This study aims to bring together the growing interest in cultural work from cultural studies with disciplines which explore work from a business, management or organizational perspective, and with the sociology of work. The authors starting point is cultural studies research which tends towards a critical analysis of the over optimistic discourse which has permeated recent UK cultural policy (Oakley, 2009, Hesmondhalgh, 2005, McGuigan, 2009). The accounts of creative work they explore offer an important and detailed insight into the conditions of work which too often are celebrated simply as positive characteristics of the sector with no real evidence of some of the difficulties encountered.

It is these polarized perspectives, alongside working with post graduate creative and media students and teaching them entrepreneurship which has raised questions about the very nature of entrepreneurship as it is lived and experienced in this sector. Given that entrepreneurship and self-employment are increasingly important in vocational courses, I aim to explore and reflects on the nature of highly contextualized entrepreneurship to inform education policy and curriculum. There is a proliferation of generic learning tools to teach entrepreneurship and business start up which often does not meet the specific needs of media and creative students or reflect current industry standards. Entrepreneurship education in context can allow for an opportunity to contest the dominating discourse of enterprise and explore the nature of entrepreneurship specifically as it relates to the cultural, creative and media workers.

An exploration of these issues requires a level of research and knowledge of the lived experience of cultural work as described by those working in the sector. The next section starts to discuss approaches to capturing these stories and experiences, and attempts to test these to inform the methodology and practical processes.

Having recently presented at the MECCSA 2011 conference, at The Lowry, Salford, I have been able to reflect on the methodology I am testing out for my research.

My presentation was entitled: An exploration of contextualised enterprise curriculum for media and creative industry students. And this is the abstract:

• Given that entrepreneurship and self-employment are increasingly important in vocational media courses, this presentation explores and reflects on the nature of a highly contextualised enterprise curriculum. There is a proliferation of generic learning tools to teach entrepreneurship and business start up which often does not meet the specific needs of media and creative students or reflect current industry standards. Entrepreneurship education in context can allow for an opportunity to contest the dominating discourse of enterprise and explore the nature of entrepreneurship specifically as it relates to the cultural, creative and media workers. Drawing from research conducted with post graduate media and creative students, this paper engages with these issues by exploring the student’s experience of entrepreneurship through a narrative approach.

This research was an opportunity for me to pilot a narrative, storytelling interview technique as a means of capturing the student experience of enterprise education. While the process so far has revealed some interesting emerging themes, I am mindful that I need to review the process and technique in setting up the interview questions and in analysing the data collected.

The process did reveal some unexpected issues such as the extent to which cultural differences and expectations of certain students plays a role in their learning and development. It became apparent that we take for granted certain western social norms in terms of the expected interactions, understanding and approaches to being entrepreneurial. This is something which needs further consideration in relation to international students – an increasingly important student group at PG level.

The focus on the individual and personal development through the use of narrative in interviews did encourage self exploration and debate. It supports the idea of a personalised, non generic perspective of entrepreneurship as it is negotiated at an individual level. The interview process enabled interviewees to construct their identity as entrepreneurial media workers, their story of themselves, their subjectivity through storytelling. It revealed complexities and difference but also interrelated elements of each story such as building their confidence, reinventing what enterprise and entrepreneurship means to them. However, I did not pay appropriate attention to what was not said, to the themes left out of the discussion and to the power relationships between students, lecturer & student, language and style of communication. On reflection, I also overlooked the fact that of those interviewed, there was certainly a level of repeating what had been taught in class, perhaps consciously or sub consciously to ‘please the teacher’.

The interviews are not over and as I collect more data, a useful approach could be to apply discourse analysis as a means of revealing more about the experience as students express it. It could also be used to connect this to the twitter feed linked to the course and analyse the material altogether.

Where to start with discourse analysis? I’ve been trying to work this out for a while and have not been getting very far!

So this is my thinking so far:

Focusing on the material collected, I will attempt to highlight the use of certain words, or expressions to build a picture of the language used and explore how this relates to the discourse introduced in class. I will explore the specific activities described by the students in terms of what they have done and what they have not attempted as part of their entrepreneurial projects and some of the discrepancies between the two. I will reflect on to what extent they seem to be reinventing entrepreneurship for themselves, and within their own context (cultural or industry sector).

How will I do this? These practical issues are often ignored but I think they are crucial to those still relatively new research, such as myself. I have found Ann Gray’s, Research Practice for Cultural Studies extremely useful for these practical concerns. Following Gray’s approach, I have opted for transcribing the material myself thereby making myself familiar with the material and enabling me to start to make connections between themes and issues. Gray then talks about developing a filing system to ensure both that material is kept in an organised system but also to help the researcher  not lose confidence. These processes, though apparently mundane, can in fact be both creative and intellectual aspects of the researching resulting in unusual connections, imaginative ideas developing and ensuring familiarisation with the material. I am going start creating files under the emerging themes including, experimenting and reviewing methodologies.

Identity theory, in cultural studies, has focused on the idea of the constructed identity – the external factors which construct our identity through the power of discourse and ‘différance’ as described by Derrida. Stuart Hall argues this is enacted through codes, language and style that are constructed through difference, how we define ourselves in relation to the ‘other’ as a means of distinguishing ourselves. This identity is not a fixed state of being but as Hall argues it is unstable, in a constant state of flux. But do we play a role in shaping that identity, specifically in the context of cultural work?

Paul Du Gay refers to Foucault, Weber and Mauss who explore the self in relation to religious (Protestant) and spiritual disciplines as a means of involving individuals in systematic practices of self-control, monitoring their own behaviour and introducing them to practical techniques and making them personally responsible for ethical life. The result is an individualisation and a set of techniques to conduct oneself as the ‘subject’ in a reflective way, of one’s conduct. In his research Du Gay explores this idea in relation to bureaucratic work done in public sector organisations and the erosion of the specific behaviours and practices developed by individual workers as a result of the introduction of entrepreneurial modes of working. His example demonstrates how workers adopt a personality and practices appropriate to the work context and separate from their personal life.

To me this suggests the potential for ‘acting’ out a role and a potential for learning and developing a set of attributes relevant to a particular environment in which it is possible to carve out a personal identity.

The question for me to explore is how, as a researcher can I observe and analyse the cultural worker or entrepreneur and the techniques  she employs to develop  her identity? What are the external factors which impact on the context and environment? To what extent Do cultural workers self-consciously construct their identity and to what  end?

I am exploring the work of Elias and Bourdieu as part of my investigation into identity theory. Their work is a critique of the idea of ‘life-history’, advancing instead the idea  of humans as capable of self-reflection and self-conscious behaviour dependent upon certain forms of discourse and activities.

My project aims to capture the entrepreneurial behaviour of several cultural and media workers, in order to develop a resource and case studies to be used in class or for students to access. The funding is limited but I now see this as an opportunity to test some of the methodological issues I have been grappling with for my PhD and to produce the results as both the artefacts, in this case videos and podcasts, as well as a paper.

My concerns are to explore entrepreneurial activities and behaviour in cultural and media workers; attempting to reveal the specific characteristics of entrepreneurship as it is expressed in the cultural and media industries. Much entrepreneurship research is not industry specific and therefore has a tendency to offer generic findings. As feminist entrepreneurship theory has revealed, it can reflect typically male attributes associated with the archetypal entrepreneurial personality, the Alan Sugars of this world. In contrast, I am attempting to investigate the entrepreneurship as it is lived and experienced, bringing together several contextual elements: firstly, the policy environment; secondly, the individual cultural workers background, aspirations and activities; and finally the industry context.

For this project, I will attempt to capture all three contextual elements although I suspect that the focus will be on the individual, as the work will be reported through the form of interviews with cultural workers. The challenge then, will be to see how much an interview format more usually associated with PR and promotion, can be utilised to capture an  ‘authentic’ narrative. The interview should emulate a documentary style revealing off guard moments rather than prepared and well rehearsed naratives.

The theoretical framework will combine my research on Paul du Gay’s work on identity and Fairclough’s interpretations of discourse analysis. I am interested in theories of identity, as a means of exploring the persona associated with cultural work to identify motivations, certain practices such as the importance of networking and as a result, how this determines or influences entrepreneurial behaviours and activities.

I still need to do a lot more research to create a more focused framework but equally, and in a truly entrepreneurial way, I also need to just get on with it and learn through doing.