Prof. Dr. Daniel Hjorth is Professor at Lund School of Economics and Management, Lund University, Sweden, and Professor at the Department of Business Humanities and Law, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. He is also affiliated with the Graduate School of Management, Kyoto University, Japan, and the former Editor-in-Chief of the journal Organization Studies. His research is in the multi- and inter-disciplinary areas of philosophy and management, aesthetics and business creativity, and entrepreneurship and learning. He is presently setting up a Centre for Aesthetics and Business Creativity (ABC) at Lund University.
I write this by focusing on affect as central to provocation, on how affect can uproot our thinking and open us to learning, on how imagination is part of this process, and on what the implications are for entrepreneurship education.
I will argue that it is of more general relevance to explore entre-preneurial opportunities in learning processes. The argument is that they will have an impact on how students approach education given the meta-learning that it involves in becoming moved while learning.
I write entre-preneurial with a hyphen to stress the two central ideas compressed into the concept of entrepreneur: the idea of the in-between (entre as French preposition) and the possibility of entering that space (entré as French verb), and the idea of grasping (French prendre, to take, or prehendre, to grab) as an affirmative mode of action, ‘as if’ there is something to get.
The concept of entrepreneur, or better, entrepreneuring, would then support our thinking of making space for free movement – what we can understand as play – and in such free movement or playing, reach for what could become grasped. To me, this describes not only an entrepreneurial process but also learning. Both would then be framed as creative processes. They would both describe movement – into the in-between – and include a result possible to describe as ‘being moved.’ I do intend for this – ‘being moved’ – to suggest both meanings: having taken action and having become affected.
Let us stay with French. Do I know how to speak French before I have spoken it? Does my understanding of how to use “qu’est-ce que c’est?” change when I have to use it in a sentence, in a context, in a situation? Do I know how to pronounce it and use it before I speak it in order to use it? Learning language often includes ‘acting as if’ I can and not only know. We have to move into the in-between of not-knowing-how-to and knowing-because-I-tried-to in order to create an experience from which we can learn. Doing so often includes the approach to such a move that says: you do it ‘as if’ you could make it. Most of us discover that it is the ‘as if’-move that creates the grasped learning experience.
Making the move, however, is not always easy. Learning, especially in contexts of so-called Higher Education, can be quite intimidating. It is a social process and involves identity and roles: relational and collective phenomena. Making the move into the in-between ‘as if’ we think we can succeed in grasping something there, pulling off the creative move, shaping the muscles for the first time to perform the sound of “qu’est-ce que c’est?,” is an act that takes some courage. If this was not about learning how to pronounce, speak and use French, but about proposing how to create an organization that solves the challenge of creating a value-offer that potential customers cannot refuse – i.e., an example of entrepreneurship – it would perhaps not be less intimidating.
Learning how to pronounce, speak, and use French changed me to someone that has become a French speaker. That move is inevitably understood retrospectively from the position of the French-speaking I. The French philosopher Henri Bergson pointed out that this tendency to frame and think from the position of the end state prevents us from understanding time, movement, and process. The arrow-to-be-shot is different from the arrow-in-mid-air, and both are different from the arrow-having-reached-its-target. Even more so, I suggest, is the student-to-learn, the learning-student, and the student-having-learnt three very different ways of being in the world. Indeed, one of them is the source of understanding how we are becoming – rather than being – in the world.
Why does this matter? Because entering the in-between, taking the plunge, and experiencing becoming as – metaphorically speaking – an arrow in mid-air, is an intensely rewarding experience. I have met no one that does not enjoy learning, when learning is experienced as moving to a new understanding of myself in the world and how I can engage with that world and my fellow citizens of it. Seeing this as a collective process suggests that learning can become enriched and rewarding when it is accomplished with and by the support of others. However, especially in the context of learning entrepreneurship, it also means that entering the in-between can be prevented by my self-understanding as someone that is not creative. Sadly, a not too misleading definition of an adult is someone that has un-learnt their capacity to be a child. Sadly, again, school is often part of that un-learning.
Bringing the body into it, and with its affect, is a way to find a means to engage students; a way to lure them into the in-between, to enter into ‘becoming’ without knowing on beforehand that something will have become grasped. Provocation, as a pedagogical tool, is here closely related to education. My point is that affect can uproot people from passivity or self-relationships that prevent them from becoming-engaged, to act ‘as if’ and to thereby create opportunities to learn. Provocation can affect people, and move them, such that uprooting happens and the seemingly fixed become ripe for free movement (what we previously described as play), which in turn calls upon the imagination to make use of such ‘spaces for play.’
Provocation in an educational context can be achieved by the teacher introducing multiple answers to the same question without giving clues to how to decide, choose, and assess. Or, indeed, simply by presenting a problem without a solution, a question without a right answer. These are examples of in-betweens and the provocative stems from the ‘having-become-adult’ reflex to seek an answer, a solution, a way to order. Wanting to be able to see the problem from the end-state, from the ‘arrow-having-reached-its-target’ takes out the process, the move, the learning. Figuring out whether there is an end-state requires entering into the process, making the move, and taking the plunge, ‘as if’ there is something to become grasped. It calls upon the potential learner to uproot from the self-identity of the answer-seeking ‘I’ to instead become a ‘problematizing’ ‘free mover’ that can enjoy the mid-air flight. This is learning that does not seek to correctly represent life, but that engages in imaginatively inventing life. New concepts bring our thinking to the fringe of thought, from where we can imaginatively anticipate what a world, in which we used this thinking to act, would look like.
In business school higher education contexts, a particular kind of self-relationship (or subjectivity) is historically dominant – that of the economically rational actor or agent. Effect has not been part of that rationality, nor has the presence of the body in learning been acknowledged. Provocation seeks to uproot that self-relationship, make homo ludens (the playful human) challenge homo oeconomicus to attract students to move freely outside the fringe of the correct- answer-seeking thinking that prevents imaginative anticipation of how the world could become different. A good story is often the source of a generative provocation. Being fundamentally relational, a good story is often what increases the listener’s power to be affected and – having become engaged and entered the in-between – their corresponding power to affect: this is the state of passion. Passion, where receptivity and spontaneity are joined, is a great in-between time where experimentation and play (free movement) is potentialized, and learning experiences therefore intensified.
I hope my text has provoked you to think about learning somewhat differently. Provocation – Affect – Uprooting – Experimentation/Play – New Experience. This can be a model for learning where the role of the ‘educator’ is to provide the story, support experimentation, and engage in reflective discussion of the newly acquired experience.