Enterprise Culture and Education

PROFESSOR ALLAN A. GIBB IS chairman of the Small Business Centre, Durham University Business School, England. The overall objective of this paper is to produce a clearer understanding of the meaning and process of enterprise education, in particular as it has been developed as a distinctive model within the education system in the United Kingdom. It seeks to remove the confusions relating to the links of enterprise education with small business and entrepreneurship education and training, with personal transferable skills and with the political ideology surrounding certain notions of the enterprise culture. It defines enterprise education as concerned with encouraging certain enterprising behaviours; skills and attributes associated with self-reliance and through this process also providing students with greater insight into subjects studied. The links with small business are explored through the development of a model which demnonstrates how the basic organisational essences of the small firm task structures and learning modles within the business stimulate enterprising behaviour. It then demonstrates how these components are embodied in a model of enterprise education which can be applied to any subject context in education. The relationship of enterprise education to broader educational goals is explored. The links with the so-called enterprise culture are examined and thereafter a nuumber of challenges — to industry and education management, and to small business and entrepreneurship education and training — are discussed. The paper concludes by reference to a number of steps that need to be taken to place, more accurately, the enterprise concept within the education system.