The latest manifestation of the globalization and restructuring of education in the neo-liberal spirit in Finland has been the boosting of entrepreneurship education by the Ministry of Education. Measures to strengthen the knowledge base in entrepreneurship concern the education system as a whole.  Education is increasingly seen as the passport for welfare recipients to make the transition from the status of a dependent citizen of the welfare state to an active entrepreneurial self

This paper explores the educational practices that create the enterprising self (Rose 1992).  With this concept we refer to the ethos in which an entrepreneur-like line of action and self-relationship are offered as models for citizens (Bröckling 2005). The concept ties in with various moral models of the good life (Rose 1992), and includes the conceptions of abilities, individual characteristics and attitudes, such as independence, risk-taking ability, creativity, and self-responsibility.

We approach the enterprising self not as a collection of individual traits but as a process created through governance in education. Governance is a productive power that is embodied in the rules through which individuality is understood, acted on, and differentiated in social practices (Foucault 1991) Rose (1992) differentiates three interlinked dimensions of governance. Political dimension refers to ‘rationality of governance’, to complex of notions, calculations and strategies through which diverse authorities try to act upon the lives of each and all in order to avert evils and achieve such desirable states that as wealth, happiness and health. The institutional dimension refers to practices that put in play certain assumptions and objectives concerning the selves that inhabit them. Ethical dimension refers to means by which individuals come to construe, decipher and act upon themselves in relation to the desirable and undesirable. The neo-liberalism materialized in education links up a seductive ethics of the enterprising self, powerful critique of educational reality, and apparently coherent design for the transformation of contemporary educational arrangements (see Olssen et. al. 2004).

In order to investigate the ethical dimension of the governance embedded in entrepreneurship education, we explore what the technologies of self within the school’s entrepreneurship education are that aim to turn pupils into enterprising subjects, and with which they turn themselves into those subjects. We focus particularly on the school’s enterprise projects as a technology of self and as a transformative pedagogical practice through which pupils are invited to act upon themselves in relation to enterprising self. Our aim is to explore what kinds of subjectivities are discursively constructed in enterprise projects. We presume that the school’s enterprise projects attempt to instill norms of individualism, self-reliance and self-management, which resonate with new configurations of power and authority in education, and construct young people as enterprising selves (cf. Hay & Kapitzke 2009).

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