Tools with no warranty : the state promotion of entrepreneurship training in Saskatchewan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Neo-liberal theories of political economy support the state promotion of entrepreneurship training and development as key to community economic development, given its perceived potential to alleviate unemployment, and rural (and provincial) out-migration. Critical theories of political economy view such state promotion as representative of the expansion of neo-liberal policies and the contradictory processes of legitimation and marginalization, and depoliticization and containment, rather than the protection of the collective well being of citizens. In order to understand more clearly the role of entrepreneurship training programs (ETPs) in promoting the enterprise culture, and contributing to the changing face of entrepreneurship, findings are presented from a study of nine state-sponsored entrepreneurship training programs (ETPs) for marginalized individuals located throughout Saskatchewan. A multi-method approach was used, with both survey and interview data collected to explore the training agencies and their programs, and participants' experiences before, during, and after their training. The findings show that ETPs play a central role in promoting the enterprise culture. Despite the fact that the majority of participants were seeking alternatives to unemployment (rather than adopting wholeheartedly the tenets of the enterprise culture), their ETP infused them with feelings of optimism about entrepreneurship. Participants looked forward to the benefits of control, independence, and (for females) flexibility and personal fulfillment that they believed small business ownership offered. The ETPs contributed to the changing face of entrepreneurship by providing an opportunity for individuals not traditionally involved in entrepreneurship (women, Aboriginal peoples, and economically marginalized individuals) to do so. However, numerous barriers blocked participants' chances for entrepreneurial success. For those who had gone on to start their own business, their optimism waned in the face of the harsh realities of small business operation and failure. The agencies offering the ETPs attributed small business failure to participants' individual flaws and/or presented it as part of a valuable process of lifelong learning and personal development. As a case study, the research supports the conclusion that the expectations of entrepreneurship may be over-inflated and, consequently, the new self-employed are at risk to become part of a new underclass. Opportunities that do exist for the development of new policies which more adequately address the issues of unemployment, rural out-migration, and community economic development are identified.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".