In 2009, The Swedish National Agency for Education was given the task by the government to bring competencies fostering entrepreneurship into the primary school curriculum. The stated purpose was to stimulate economic growth. Subscribing to another set of values, educators were reluctant to accept economic growth as a main goal of education. The agency recruited educational researchers in order to make entrepreneurship meaningful within the pedagogical framework. They thus managed to establish the importance of entrepreneurship in school, while at the same time remoulding the concept to fit with what was already accepted in the pedagogical domain. I argue that research in this case functioned as a mediator between politics and pedagogy, facilitating acceptance in the educational sphere of the political goals of the Swedish government. Furthermore, I argue that the path between these spheres was constructed in a way that did not constitute a ”safe passage” for the economic-­political project. In the process of translating entrepreneurship into a meaningful pedagogical concept (denoting the characteristically pedagogical competencies of “creativity” and “reflexivity”) without losing the word “entrepreneurship”, fine lines between politics and pedagogics were blurred. This “blurring-­act” helped neutralize differences between the political and pedagogical spheres and left an opening for researcher to emphasize entrepreneurship as matter of personal growth, which in return made entrepreneurship a matter of concern to educators. Thus, the use of research to bridge these differences points to an often overseen ability of research to bridge the gap between while at the same time constituting the sphere of pedagogy. The Swedish example constitutes a point of departure for investigating these translations as they occur in the process of implementing entrepreneurship in the Swedish school.

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