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VOL. 9, NO. 2 
FALL 2020 

 

 SPECIAL ISSUE: ARTS ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION 

Blank Canvas 
Explorative Behavior and Personal Agency in Arts Entrepreneurship 
Education 

Ben Toscher 
Norwegian University of Science and Technology 

ABSTRACT: The majority of learning in arts entrepreneurship education is 
experiential (Essig & Guevara, 2016). Experiential and entrepreneurial learning 
theories indicate that to facilitate entrepreneurial knowledge generation which 
“enables [entrepreneurs] to recognize and act on entrepreneurial opportunities and 
to organize and manage new ventures” (Politis, 2005, p. 400), individuals need to 
exercise personal agency and engage in explorative behavior (Kolb & Kolb, 2009; 
Politis, 2005). If arts entrepreneurship education is to help students generate such 
entrepreneurial knowledge, arts entrepreneurship educators should create learning 
environments in which their students can exercise personal agency and behave 
exploratively. Despite this, how students exercise personal agency and explore 
within arts entrepreneurship education has not been empirically studied. This 
empirical paper attempts to answer the following question: How do students explore 
and exercise personal agency in arts entrepreneurship education? Using rigor to 
systematically analyze qualitative data (Gioia et al., 2013) from a five-week course in 
entrepreneurship in higher music education to produce a data structure and model, 
I find that within a teacher-created learning environment, students balance personal 
factors (their values and beliefs, habitual modes of thought, prior experience and 
personal goals) against social factors (social interdependencies and conditions of 
approval) while taking actions to reduce uncertainty. The findings imply that teacher-
created learning environments and engagement in social contexts influences how 
students exercise personal agency and explore. KEYWORDS: arts entrepreneurship 
education, entrepreneurial learning, personal agency, explorative behavior, Gioia 
methodology. DOI: 10.34053/artivate.9.2.115 



ARTIVATE 9.2 

20 

Introduction 
Research argues that entrepreneurial skills and knowledge are critical for musicians. They must 
recognize and act upon opportunities, build and utilize networks, manage multiple concurrent 
roles, and self-manage a series of simultaneous employment engagements to build careers as 
“enforced entrepreneurs” (Bennett & Bridgstock, , p. ; Bennett, ; Breivik et al., 
; Cawsey, ; Coulson, ; Teague & Smith, ). In response, higher education has 
called upon arts entrepreneurship education to teach arts entrepreneurship, defined as “a man-
agement process through which cultural workers seek to support their creativity and autonomy, 
advance their capacity for adaptability, and create artistic as well as economic and social value” 
(Chang & Wyszomirski, , p. ). Arts entrepreneurship education’s growth is considerable, 
with courses now available in Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and the UK (Bran-
denburg et al., ; Pollard & Wilson, ; Thom, ; Toscher & Bjørnø, ; Watne & 
Nymoen, ). In the US, as of  there were  arts entrepreneurship courses offered by 
 institutions, compared with just  institutions offering such courses in  (Beckman, 
; Essig & Guevara, ). This growth in arts entrepreneurship parallels the broader field 
of entrepreneurship education for which “universities are creating courses and programs to de-
liver entrepreneurial knowledge and competencies to students in a variety of majors beyond 
business . . . such as the arts” (Duval-Couteil, , p. –). Research lags behind this 
growth in teaching, as “action and intervention have raced far ahead of theory, pedagogy, and 
research to explain it” (Rideout, , p.). While curricular efforts are documented 
(Beckman, , ; Damásio & Bicacro, ) and theories and definitions offered (Chang 
& Wyszomirski, ; Gangi, ), there is an important gap in the arts entrepreneurship lit-
erature that empirically examines how arts students are learning in the arts entrepreneurship 
classroom. 

The majority of learning in the arts entrepreneurship classroom is experiential (Essig & 
Guevara, ), focused on transforming experience into knowledge; so, naturally, experiential 
(Kolb & Kolb, ) and entrepreneurial learning (Politis, ) theories may be a starting point 
for examining student learning. These theories claim in order facilitate the generation of entre-
preneurial knowledge which “enables [entrepreneurs] to recognize and act on entrepreneurial 
opportunities and to organize and manage new ventures” (Politis, , p. ), individuals 
need to exercise personal agency and engage in explorative behavior (Kolb & Kolb, ; Politis, 
). If arts entrepreneurship education aims to help students generate such entrepreneurial 
knowledge, then arguably educators should create learning environments in which their stu-
dents can exercise personal agency—operationally defined as “the ability to accomplish action” 
(Campbell, , p. )—and behave exploratively to transform experience into knowledge. 
Here, explorative behavior is operationally defined as “choosing new actions that are distinct 
from what they have already taken” (Politis, , p. ). This contrasts with exploitative be-
havior, which refers to exploiting “what is already known, implying individuals learn from ex-
perience by exploiting old certainties . . . it is thus about creating reliability in experience . . . the 
returns are hence generally more certain, closer in time, and closer in space than returns to 



ARTIVATE 9.2 

21 

exploration” (March, ; Politis, , p. ). Seen in the light of Politis’ theory of entrepre-
neurial learning, both concepts of personal agency and explorative behavior involve action—
and action is argued to be the core of entrepreneurship (McMullen & Shephard, ). This 
may explain the growth and popularity of action-based entrepreneurship education (Rasmussen 
& Sørheim, ; Haneberg et al., ). Entrepreneurial action may be the means through 
which students can develop the types of entrepreneurial competencies (Morris et al., ) 
which are often the basis and rationale for creation of entrepreneurship education in the first 
place. But before students can take entrepreneurial action in the classroom, educators should be 
interested in how their teaching practice may influence students’ abilities to exercise personal 
agency and explore. 

The influence educators may have on their students has been addressed by experiential 
learning theorists to show how students interact with their learning environment (Kolb & Kolb, 
). Using the concept of “learning space,” Kolb & Kolb compare and examine a graduate 
management MBA program and an undergraduate arts program in order to empirically demon-
strate how the differences in the learning styles between the two may be a reflection of the insti-
tutional learning environments in which they study. They found that art students tended to be 
more in the feeling-oriented regions of the learning space (a region relating to concrete experi-
ence), whereas management students tended to be more in the thinking-oriented region (related 
to abstract conceptualization). This should be of significant interest to arts entrepreneurship 
educators: entrepreneurship education for arts students may not be the same as it is for man-
agement students. An anecdote from their study is illustrative—when the researchers asked 
what texts they should provide art students for a workshop on learning, the provost of the arts 
school replied “learning is not text driven” for arts students (Kolb & Kolb, , p. ). This 
contrasts to management education, which is largely centered around texts. Further, the find-
ings of these influential experiential learning theorists have direct relevance for arts entrepre-
neurship education, in which the majority of learning is assumed to be experiential (Essig & 
Guevara, ). It demonstrates how educators help determine the coordinates for experiential 
learning along both the acting/reflecting or feeling/thinking axes in their learning spaces. We 
can see how this might influence how students take action, but what about whether those actions 
are explorative or exploitative, or why explorative behavior is particularly interesting? 

Politis’ () model accounts for both exploitative and explorative types of behavior in 
entrepreneurial knowledge generation and offers several interesting propositions and argu-
ments about how each type of behavior relates to entrepreneurs at different career stages. These 
propositions make the study of explorative behavior especially interesting the context of music 
and arts education. First, Politis proposes that those entrepreneurs who rely upon exploration 
as a model of transforming experience into entrepreneurial knowledge will be more effective in 
recognizing opportunities—and this exploration is associated with “substantial success as well 
as failure, implying a larger performance variation” (Politis , p. ). Considering the wide 
variation in economic performance and outcomes of artists in the creative economy, which has 
been noted for its “winner-take-all” dynamics (Stern & Seifert, ), it could be argued that 
working artists in their careers are used to explorative action and that students could benefit 



ARTIVATE 9.2 

22 

from being exposed to this type of behavior. Indeed, if we hypothetically compared artists with 
established careers to those music and arts students in the college classroom, we might find 
those in higher education are still at a “suboptimal stable equilibrium” in their careers (Politis, 
, p. ). Second, Politis notes that individual entrepreneurs with a “spiral” and “transitory” 
career orientation (Larsson et al., ) will to a larger extent focus on an explorative mode of 
behaving and transforming experience into knowledge. These spiral and transitory careers, 
which can be characterized by a “prefer[ence] to explore new activities related to previous ones 
in which creativity and personal development become the key motives . . . project oriented and 
episodic, implying that the competence developed, which consists of skill diversity, networking, 
speediness, and adaptation” (Politis, , p. -) are career characteristics typical of those 
working as musicians and artists (Coulson, ; Teague & Smith, ). Third, Politis pro-
poses that the more an entrepreneur relies on exploitation, the more effective they are at coping 
with the liability of newness (Stinchcombe, ). Early career artists, like music students, are 
susceptible to such liabilities of newness and I would argue that such early career artists would 
first need to focus on exploration in order to achieve a breakthrough in their careers. In our 
modern world, for example, the large majority of the twentieth century’s recorded music is 
available at our fingertips through smartphones and streaming services, and new artists must 
compete with not only contemporary artists but artists and music from the past century in their 
competition for listeners. This type of “substantial success” or breakthrough is necessary before 
they can begin thinking about behaving in an exploitative manner in order to manage their 
liabilities of newness. For example, the type of actions taken by a world-famous rock band like 
U are likely very different than the type of actions taken by a two-month-old garage band com-
prised of nineteen-year-olds from Sandusky, Ohio. The latter must explore more to establish 
themselves and their career, whereas U can exploit their already established name, reputation, 
and fanbase. 

Only recently have theories of experiential and entrepreneurial learning been explored in 
greater depths within the context of art, the arts entrepreneurship literature, and Artivate (To-
scher, ). While experiential and entrepreneurial learning theories have received more at-
tention in the broader entrepreneurship education literature, some evidence observes differ-
ences in experiential learning styles of arts students compared to management students (Kolb 
& Kolb, ), perhaps limiting the transferability of some findings from the broader field of 
entrepreneurship education to the subfield of arts entrepreneurship education. Further, while 
we would hope that the substantial amount of empirical research within the broader field of 
entrepreneurship education (Nabi et al., ) and entrepreneurial learning (Wang & Chugh, 
) would assist the arts entrepreneurship field, the subjects in these studies are largely a dif-
ferent population (business students) who have self-selected into entrepreneurship education. 
In addition to differences in experiential styles found by Kolb and Kolb (), these two stu-
dent groups may also have differing career goals and motivations for studying entrepreneurship 
(Chang & Wyszomirski, ; Toscher, Dahle, & Steinert, ). Thus, practitioners and edu-
cators would benefit from a rich, empirically grounded understanding of the entrepreneurial 
learning processes of students in the arts entrepreneurship classroom. 



ARTIVATE 9.2 

23 

This empirical paper attempts to answer the question, How do students explore and exercise 
personal agency in arts entrepreneurship education? 

The paper proceeds as follows. First, I introduce and discuss the research method, the re-
search design, the empirical setting of the arts entrepreneurship course, the empirical data, and 
the participants of this study. Then, I present and discuss the results from my analysis of the 
data, which includes a structure of the qualitative data and a conceptual model of how arts en-
trepreneurship students explore and exercise personal agency in the classroom. Finally, I con-
clude with implications for education and practice. 

Research Method—The Gioia Methodology 

Research Method 
To answer the aforementioned research question, I use a qualitative approach aimed at building 
theory. This approach is inspired by grounded theory (Corbin & Strauss, ), guided by ana-
lytic rigor (Corley & Gioia, ; Gioia et al., ), and is often referred to as the largely 
inductive Gioia method (Gioia et al., ). I use the Gioia method to analyze empirical 
qualitative data consisting of interviews, student learning diaries, a researcher’s journal, and 
course deliverables from a five-week mandatory course in arts entrepreneurship for a master’s 
degree program in music and technology (see Table  for an overview of the data collected). 
Through analysis, I establish first order codes, second order themes, theoretical subcategories, 
and finally an aggregate theoretical dimension to build and present a model of how students 
explore and exercise personal agency in arts entrepreneurship education. 

Research Design, Empirical Context, and the Arts Entrepreneur-
ship Course 
The empirical context for this study is a five-week entrepreneurship course I designed, planned, 
implemented, and taught at a large university in Norway. A unique aspect of this course was 
that it was taught in a state-of-the-art distributed classroom teaching environment, with stu-
dents physically located in two different cities. In both research design and empirical setting, 
this study is largely a teacher-research approach, through its use of: (a) an insider perspective; 
(b) a pragmatic and goal oriented approach to solve problems faced by practitioners in the class-
room; and (c) a practical approach to answering research questions (Baumann & Duffy, ). 
Inspired by teacher research and practitioner inquiry, I have researched my own classroom for 
the purpose of generating knowledge that may contribute to better teaching and learning, and 
that may help teachers “develop their capacity for making the kinds of sound autonomous pro-
fessional judgments and decisions appropriate to their status as professionals” (Lankshear & 
Knobel, , p. ). 

This mandatory course in entrepreneurship was part of a master’s degree program in music 



ARTIVATE 9.2 

24 

and technology. All students had: (a) a bachelor’s degree, (b) personal and/or professional in-
terest in and experience with music, and (c) interest in and experience with technology. The 
class most closely resembled the “being enterprising” (Bridgstock, ) type of arts entrepre-
neurship education rather than the “new venture creation” or “transitioning” type in arts entre-
preneurship education (Beckman, ), and students were given a blank canvas with which to 
iteratively learn about, recognize, and act on an opportunity of their choosing. Students were 
encouraged to act on an opportunity that created either economic, social, cultural and/or envi-
ronmental value for themselves and society. The course was pedagogically inspired by design 
engineering (Steinert & Leifer, ), experiential, andragogical, and action-based learning 
(Neck & Corbett, ; Rasmussen & Sørheim, ), and effectuation (Sarasvathy, ). 

Entrepreneurship was framed in the broader opportunity (Shane & Venkataraman, ) 
and value-creation framing (Bruyat & Julien, ) senses for a few reasons. First, due to the 
heterogeneity of the students (including their educational and work backgrounds—see Table ) 
and the degree’s emphasis on team-based, interdisciplinary learning, students were not tasked 
with creating a portfolio, an artist website, arranging a concert or other professional develop-
ment activities that sometimes accompany an arts entrepreneurship career transitioning offer-
ing (Beckman, ). Second, there is empirical evidence (Bonin-Rodriguez, ; Moore, 
; J. C. White, ) and theoretical argumentation (Toscher, ) that entrepreneurship 
needs to be reframed appropriately in the context of music education, given the historical con-
flict and tension between aesthetic values, artistic identity, and neoliberal notions of entrepre-
neurship. Situating entrepreneurship as something to deliver economic, social, cultural, and/or 
environmental value moves the discipline away from the notion that it has to do strictly with 
profit (Bridgstock, ). Finally, what I call the blank canvas approach, where students were 
free to define the scope of their work within the course, helps answer the research question: 
How do students explore and exercise personal agency in arts entrepreneurship education? This 
pedagogical structure, which closely resembles the being enterprising type of arts entrepreneur-
ship education, resulted in a research design in which I could observe how students explored 
and exercised personal agency based upon their own determinations of value. 

Course Timeline and Deliverables 
Before week one, I met the students during an orientation session to learn about them, their 
experience, and their goals, and to understand any potential team dynamics that may emerge. 
Most lecturing occurred during week one, in which I went over the theoretical content provided 
in precourse readings. After discussion, we went over the deliverables for the course, which were 
comprised of: (a) a graded team project, in which they were to identify and act upon a value-
creating opportunity, and (b) a nongraded, mandatory individual student learning diary, which 
consisted of a log detailing the actions they took to act upon their opportunity, reflections de-
scribing the action they took, what resulted from that action, how they thought and felt, what 
they learned, what assumption they were testing with their action, and any connections between 
this experience and their prior experiences, knowledge, and/or ideas presented both in this 



ARTIVATE 9.2 

25 

course and in their prior education. This reflective learning diary approach was inspired and 
informed by previous entrepreneurship education research, which has argued for the im-
portance of synthesizing reflection and action in order to help students generate entrepreneurial 
knowledge in experiential entrepreneurship education (Hägg, ; Hägg & Kurczewska ). 
Students were encouraged to draw connections between course reading and what they experi-
enced in their project work. I explained the theoretical support for this reflective and experien-
tial learning approach (Boud et al., ; Dewey, ) to help students understand its value, in 
addition to being something they needed to do to just pass the course. Besides delivering eight 
entries in their learning diary (four action logs and four reflections, delivered once per week), 
the graded group project consisted of a final ten-minute pitch presentation before a jury, with a 
Q&A session. Students chose the appropriate audience for their pitches, whether it was an in-
vestor, a customer, a governmental agency, or other stakeholder. 

Week two featured lectures about value creation and identifying problems. Weeks three, 
four, and five were used to discuss team project progression using a business model canvas 
(Pigneur, ) to guide discussion. 

Single-Case Embedded Design 
This study uses a single-case embedded design (Figure ), where the five-week course in entre-
preneurship is the case studied and the embedded units of analysis are the individual students 
in the case. During the course, each individual student worked within their teams on the course 
project; students were placed into semester-long teams by the researcher and other music degree 
program staff to achieve a balance of background, experience, skills, interests, and gender. Stu-
dents worked in these teams for the entire semester in all of their courses in the degree program. 

The unit of analysis is the individual student, and the data that forms the basis of that anal-
ysis is described in Table . While some collected data articulates specific events and critical 
incidents that occurred within the team setting, the goal of this current study was to understand 
the phenomena of interest at the personal and individual level, not the team level. Thus, teams 
were not explicitly considered as a separate unit or level of analysis. Figure  displays the stu-
dents who were willing to participate in this study and the teams in which they were members. 
Note that only one student from team D was willing to participate in the study. 



ARTIVATE 9.2 

26 

 

Student Participants, Limitation of Potential Biases, and Ethical 
Considerations 
Nine out of sixteen students in the course were purposefully sampled and agreed to participate 
in this study. To avoid biasing both their actions taken within the course and reflections made 
in their student learning diaries, students were not informed beforehand that their activity in 
the course could potentially be used at a later date for research purposes, should they consent 
to participate in such research. This decision was made to limit any potential self-censorship or 
self-presentation biases from the participants. After the course was completed and grades as-
signed, I approached the students to tell them about this study and asked if they were willing to 
participate. Students received grades prior to my request for their permission to participate so 
they would not feel pressured into participating. I told them our relationship would not change 
should they choose not to participate. Notification of this study was sent to the NSD, the Nor-
wegian Data Protection Official for Research, prior to the commencement of the course and 
received approval from NSD. Participants formally consented to participation through an NSD-
approved consent form. 

Figure 1. Single Case Embedded Research Design 



ARTIVATE 9.2 

27 

Data Collection 

The Students 
I used a purposeful sample strategy to choose participants who could best help me answer my 
research question about how students explore and exercise personal agency in arts entrepre-
neurship education (Creswell, ). As seen in Table , the participants had a substantial range 
of educational, work, and arts entrepreneurial backgrounds. While many had arts entrepreneur-
ial experience according to a common definition (Chang & Wyszomirski, ), they all had an 
interest in performing and/or making music, and they were all enrolled in a master’s degree 
program offered by an institute of HME. This may represent a wider band of diversity than one 
may find in a specific arts entrepreneurship setting, compared to, for example a second-year 
bachelor’s course for classical music performance majors. This relative heterogeneity in the par-
ticipants created a high degree of variation in the domains of previous knowledge and experi-
ence amongst the participants. In addition, the selection of this entrepreneurship course as a 

Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4 Week 5

Interviews

Nine semi-structured interviews, varying in 
length from 20 to 75 minutes each. A total of 6.03 
hours of interviews comprising 117 pages and 
34,381 words.

x x

Student Learning Diaries: Reflections
Nine student reflection journals comprised of 36 
total learning reflections, 4 from each student. x x x x

Student Learning Diaries: Action Logs

Nine student action logs comprised of 62 actions 
in which students describe actions they took and 
describe it with the date, time, what it consisted 
of, whom they spoke with, why they did it, what 
critical assumptions or hypothesis they were 
testing, and based on what they learned, their next 
planned action. The action logs total 44 pages 
with 4,716 words and also include numerous 
images.

x x x x

Project Status Update: Business Model Canvas

Eight business model canvasses , as populated by 
the Researcher during weeks 3 and 4 of the 
course, in order to integrate information provided 
by students via reflection journals and action logs. 
This enabled the researcher to keep track of 
student progress on course projects, facilitate 
group discussion, and to contextualize theoretical 
content into actual coursework. 

x x

Researcher´s Journal

A journal kept by the Researcher containing 
notes, observations, thoughts, feelings, and 
analysis related to the course. Comprised of 19 
pages totaling 8,072 words, this journal was kept 
between August and December 2018 – covering 
the period before, during, and after the course. 

x x x x x x X

Final Project Presentation

Four presentations archived as slide decks, 
including additional presentation material such as 
a business plan and a video of a pilot test, which 
represented the students´ final presentation of 
their project. 

x

Timing of Data CollectionDescription of DataData Collected

Before 
Entrepreneurship 

Course
Entrepreneurship Course

After 
Entrepreneurship 

Course

Table 1. The Data Collected 



ARTIVATE 9.2 

28 

case offered an opportunity to create a pedagogical context that in some respects represents an 
extreme case. By creating a relatively open course in which students were completely free to 
explore, recognize, and act upon any opportunity of their choosing, I thought I could potentiate 
their opportunities to explore and use their personal agency. 
 

Data Analyses 
Data was analyzed following guidelines for inductive qualitative research using analytic rigor 
(Corley & Gioia, ; Gioia et al., ). This analytical method resulted in building the data 
structure seen in Figure  in the results section. First, I started to analyze the data using an “open 
coding” approach to identify first-order codes that emerged from the data (Strauss & Corbin, 
; Van Maanen, ). I identified first-order codes by examining data for each student on 
a separate basis. This open coding procedure was performed by printing out all of the data on 
paper and coding chunks of text by highlighting and writing on the paper. These codes were 
then eventually placed into a spreadsheet to be used in later stages of the analytic process. Since 
I considered each student as a separate unit of analysis, the result was a set of independent codes 
for each student. I did not reuse a code generated from one student on another student. It was 

Student Age Educational Background Previous Entrepreneurship 
Education?

Has Pursued A 
Career in Arts (Arts 

Entrepreneurial 
Experience)?

Has experience with non-
commercial musical activities 
(e.g. Playing an instrument 
for leisure, being part of a 

hobby band, etc)

Reason for Taking Masters 
Degree

Additional Notes on Arts 
Entrepreneurial Experience

1 Mid 20s Bachelors in Music Technology

Yes (during bachelors, took 
one course in entrepreneurship 
and innovation from social 
scientific and humanities 
perspective)

No Yes Gain new professional and 
academic skills

2 Late 30s Bachelors in Music Performance 
– Jazz

No

Yes Yes

Gain new music technology 
knowledge and skills; earn a 
masters; build network; expand 
creative toolset

Has worked professional as a 
freelance jazz saxophonist, 
composer, and music teacher.

3 Early 30s Bachelors in Media and Visual 
Studies

No

Yes Yes Learn new skills and tools to 
enable new creative expression

Has worked as a musician, 
composer, lyricist, vocalist, and 
writer. Additionally, founded 
and managed design companies 
and cooperative record label and 
production companies.

4 Mid 20s Bachelors in Theatre and 
Humanities No

Yes Yes Satisfy intellectual curiosity Has worked in journalism and 
film production

5 Early 20s Bachelors in Informatics

Yes (during bachelors, took 
courses in economics and 
entrepreneurship – the latter in 
which they built a prototype 
and tested it with users)

No Yes Improve music technology skills

6 Early 50s Bachelors in Music Performance

No

Yes Yes Improve skills, perhaps open 
pathway to PhD

Has worked in video production 
for 30 years, the majority of 
which has run own company.

7 Mid 20s
Bachelors in Electrical 
Engineering and Music 
Technology

Yes (during bachelors, took 
one course in entreneurship for 
engineers focused on 
developing a business plan)

No Yes Further specializiation in music 
technology

8 Mid 20s Bachelors in Financial 
Mathematics

No
Yes Yes Gain core knowledge in music 

technology

Has worked as a drummer, 
freelance studio engineer and in 
advertising analytics

9 Early 20s
Bachelors in Electrical 
Engineering (Acoustics and 
Signal Processing)

No

No Yes

Further specialization in music 
techology and engineering; 
explore entrepreneurial 
opportunity and new product 
development

Has worked as video production 
technician

Table 2. Participants in this Study 



ARTIVATE 9.2 

29 

not until the next step of analysis, in which these codes were aggregated to second order themes, 
that overlapping codes converged by means of higher-level abstraction. 

Next, I looked for a deeper structure behind my first order codes that could explain my 
observations using a form of axial coding to group codes into second-order themes (Gioia et al., 
; Locke, ). These second order themes were then grouped into theoretical subcatego-
ries, which were sufficiently abstract to encompass the meaning of the underlying data while 
also situating the results within a more abstract theoretical subcategory. Finally, these theoreti-
cal subcategories were aggregated into an aggregate theoretical dimension. The first-order 
codes, second-order themes, theoretical subcategories, and aggregate theoretical dimension 
were then used to create a data structure (Figure ). 

Under this method, Gioia argues there is value in a “semi-ignorance or enforced ignorance 
of the literature” (Gioia et al., , p. ). The inductive aspect of my analytical approach to 
generating first order codes reflects this. However, I did have a pragmatic intention to eventually 
situate my findings within existing literature to facilitate a meaningful conversation while also 
being true to the discoveries, whether novel or redundant. This approach is in line with previous 
research using the Gioia methodology (Gioia et al., ; Patzelt & Shepherd, ). Thus, when 
discussing the results in increasingly higher levels of abstraction in this paper, I often present 
them alongside and in light of existing literature. 

Finally, in order to improve the credibility and dependability of my interpretations of the 
data, as well as the emergent model and constructs from my analysis (Lincoln & Guba, ), I 
relied upon feedback, review, and engagement from peers and outside researchers in the field 
of entrepreneurship education from a diversity of cultural and educational contexts. This fol-
lows several research norms established by other single-author qualitative research studies in 
management and experiential learning (Laasch, ; Matsuo, ; Smith, ; Sonenshein, 
) that use the “Gioia” method. I received this feedback and review throughout this article’s 
development as it was presented in courses, at conferences, and through paper development 
seminars. Despite being familiar with literature from the entrepreneurship education and arts 
entrepreneurship education fields, I restrained any inclination to immediately bind the data to 
any forms preconceived during initial coding. This was, to a large extent, performed to prevent 
potential transferability issues in applying previous findings from literature to my own context 
(Lincoln & Guba, ). Conversely, in order to improve the transferability of my own findings, 
I have attempted to provide “thick descriptive data—narrative developed about the context so 
that judgments about the degree of fit or similarity may be made by others who may wish to 
apply all or part of the findings elsewhere.” (Lincoln & Guba, , p. ). I have attempted to 
provide this thick descriptive data through my description of the empirical context, the partici-
pants in the study, the types and forms of data collected, and the integration of actual participant 
quotes in the presentation and discussion of findings. 

 
 



ARTIVATE 9.2 

30 

Results and Discussion—Explorative Behavior and Personal 
Agency in Arts Entrepreneurship Education 
The results show that within a teacher-created learning environment, students balance personal 
and social factors in order to take balanced actions to reduce uncertainty. Figure  displays the 
data structure resulting from the analysis and Figure  displays a model of how students take 
balanced actions to reduce uncertainty in the process of entrepreneurial knowledge generation. 
This model is comprised of five components. First, the process of generating new entrepreneur-
ial knowledge begins with students who possess existing knowledge before they enter the con-
text of a teacher-created learning environment. In this particular study, this learning environ-
ment was the five-week course in entrepreneurship. The teacher-created learning environment 
and the students are embedded in a broader social context which is not created by the teacher—
in the model in Figure , this social context boundary is denoted by a dotted line. The next 
component consists of the personal factors that influence how students take actions within the 
learning environment, which include their existing values and beliefs, their prior experience and 
personal goals, and their habitual modes of thought (like whether they tended to think intui-
tively or analytically, to use reason or feeling). The next component is the social factors that also 
influence how students act, comprised of conditions of approval and social interdependencies. 
Actions to reduce uncertainty is the next component of the model, which includes concepts 
such as opportunity recognition, uncertainty, and taking action. The final component is bal-
anced actions to reduce uncertainty, which is essentially an aggregate theoretical dimension that 
represents how the students in this study behaved exploratively and exercised personal agency, 
and thus in theory generated new entrepreneurial knowledge. Below I discuss each of these 
components, and at various points use quotations from the students. Words in brackets are my 
own, which I have inserted to improve the clarity of the quotation while preserving the contex-
tual meaning. It should be noted that it is not the aim of this study to test the theoretical validity 
of entrepreneurial learning and subsequent entrepreneurial knowledge generation (Politis, 
), thus the students’ existing knowledge and entrepreneurial knowledge they generate is 
not the analytical focus of this study even though they are present in the model in Figure . 

Teacher-Created Learning Environment 
It may seem obvious, perhaps it is an assumption taken for granted, that teachers are creating 
the environments in which arts entrepreneurship students learn. However, results from this 
study help explicate the different dimensions of this learning environment and how they may 
influence the processes under study. I found four themes that describe the different dimensions 
of this learning environment and set learning boundaries for students: (i) team-based learning, 
(ii) theoretical content, (iii) entrepreneurship education, and (iv) establishing a timeline for de-
liverables. 

With regard to team-based learning, for example, Student  spoke of group decision-mak-
ing in team-based learning, saying, “after the group decided to focus on loneliness, isolation, 



ARTIVATE 9.2 

31 

and rehabilitation of prisoners, I decided to gather some information about this problem as it 
stands in [ . . . ] society today” and Student  noted it “was important to get everybody involved.” 
While statements such as these related to the necessity of establishing consensus to proceed in 
the team project point to the overall team-based structure of the course, other statements allude 
to the types of challenges that emerged from the team setting. Student  spoke of learning in the 
team setting, which included dealing “with other people’s emotional boundaries, how far [they] 
can go with [ . . . ] critique, comment or dislike of something someone proposed.” This learning 
resulted from emotional disturbances within the team setting, and some students viewed the 
communication of such emotions as important. As Student  said: “One [person] was very . . . 
[they] didn’t feel welcome anymore. And I had no idea. Because people are afraid to say [what 
they feel]. But I think human emotions are so important to make a team work.” 

The theoretical content framed how the students went about their coursework and what 
they felt they learned. The team project was theoretically rooted, at a fundamental level, in un-
certainty (Knight, ) in the sense that students had to choose a problem to focus on and 
explore how a solution solves that problem, using information boundaries of their own choos-
ing. As opposed to a teacher-framed or client-framed problem (Levy & Petrulis, ), they 
constructed their own sets of information related to a problem and drove the uncertainty re-
duction process. While this connection between their activities and this process was not repeat-
edly made explicit to the students and was a bit more implicit, it was discussed in terms of the 
intended learning outcomes and implied by the pedagogical emphasis on identifying and chal-
lenging assumptions through trial. Despite this, explicit theoretical content was a notable fea-
ture of the learning environment. 

In terms of entrepreneurship education, Student  indicated one of the most important 
things they learned was “organizing thoughts” and “effectuation. Basically solve [a] problem 
with the means you have.” This “organization of thoughts” was something Student Two, who 
has worked for over fifteen years as a professional musician, expressed they wish they had been 
exposed to during their bachelor studies in music performance. A tool such as the business 
model canvas was a piece of theoretical content that several students recognized as useful in 
“organizing their thoughts.” While there were several instances of students using new terminol-
ogy from the course readings to describe their teamwork and their actions, there were some 
instances in which words could be a hindrance. Student Four said that “this terminology is kind 
of good, but also limits because I instantly think of Silicon Valley.” Silicon Valley, entrepreneur-
ship, its terminology, and the resultant values and beliefs that individual students had about 
these items are resonant with some discussion about entrepreneurship’s connotation in the arts 
(Bonin-Rodriguez, ; Bridgstock, ), but is more focal to the personal factors component 
of the model described further below; however, the relevant observation here is that any teacher 
will, to a large extent, provide the theoretical frame and content used within the course. 



ARTIVATE 9.2 

32 

While terminology was useful in helping students orient themselves in the course, the un-
derlying context of action-based (Rasmussen & Sørheim, ) entrepreneurship education 
elicited a more visceral reaction in their experience. One student borrowed an expression from 
their culture and said the coursework was like “making a boat while rowing” or “fueling while 
in the air”; Student  was surprised by the practicality of a course in which they tried to “do it 
themselves,” noting that “with [just] too much theory [about entrepreneurship] our personal 

 

- Working in a team
- Emotional turbulence in group setting

- Importance of expressing feelings in a team
- Challenged by working remotely

- Freeloading is a problem
- Competing agendas

- Harmony from sharing goals

Team Based Learning

- Using resources and tools provided by teacher
- Theoretical understanding

- Integrating course literature
- New terminology helping and hindering students

- Direct observational versus symbolically intermediated 
understanding of situations

- Coursework as the organization of thoughts

Theoretical Content

- "Making a boat while rowing"
- Students surprised by practicality of course

- "This course gave freedom"
- Entrepreneur identity as opportunist

- Equating entrepreneurship with practice
- "Use what´s in front of us"

- Problem evolving

Entrepreneurship Education

- Teacher affecting work process through milestones, creating 
or limiting tendency to procrastinate

- Deadlines causing stress
- Stress causing actionable steps

- Action bias limits and curtails discussion
- Stage-gating entrepreneurship cycle

Establishing a Timeline for Deliverables

- Finding balance between art and money
- Political awareness and commentary on economic systems

- Philosophical positions and considerations
- The joy of creation

- Keep entrepreneurship away from art
- Silicon Valley has created problems

- "Art has moral responsibility"

Values and Beliefs

- Dominance of feelings
- Feeling, mood, genre as the essential attractor in music

- Coincidences guiding feeling which guides action
- Logic leads to solution; feeling leads to problem

- Resist old habits of only working with familiar people
- Generating questions to explore problem

- Consistently builds logical argument for action

Habitual Modes of Thought

- Balancing outside work and coursework
- Maintaining status as a musician

- Utilizing personal resources
- Money creating sincerity

- Importance of the project and its relation to music
- Professional experience influences strategy 

Prior Experience and Personal Goals

- Pleasing the teacher; following the teacher
- Just meeting requirements to pass course

- Using teacher´s examples and language as reference point
- Affected by content of lecture in framing opportunity

- Justifying approach to teacher
- Seeking teacher approval before trying something

Conditions of Approval

- Building on each others ideas
- Empathizing and considering social consequences of actions

- Individual will diminished in team setting
- Focus on cultural and not monetary value

- "I can´t make people do it"
- Altruism and social connection
- Entrepreneurs must have morals

- Team more important than individual

Social Interdependecies

- Hypothesizing value add
- Logical calculation of value to customer

- Defining problem based on experience and empathy
- Existence of competitor alters course and confirms problem

- Absence of solution means opportunity exists
- Existence of solutions signal demand

- Rationally theorizes customer segments
- Imagining future business opportunities

Opportunity Recognition

- Abstract problems promote inaction
- Using uncertainty as a creative force

- "Art liberates from rules"
- "Floating around several ideas"

- The importance of understanding the problem first
- Vagueness causes confusion; unclarity in team

- More comfortable learning from other people´s experience

Uncertainty

- Limited time forces action
- "There is no barrier when I think about it."
- Acknolwedging the limits of knowledge

- "A huge step"
- Refining pitch to outside world

- Approaching outside world and being surprised from 
response

- Taking action to alleviate anxiety

Taking Action

Teacher Created 
Learning Environment 

Personal  
Factors 

Social 
Factors 

Actions to 
Reduce Uncertainty 

Balanced Actions 
To Reduce Uncertainty 

               First Order Codes                                 Second Order Themes            Theoretical Subcategories                  Aggregate Theoretical Dimension 

Figure 2. The Data Structure 



ARTIVATE 9.2 

33 

relationship to entrepreneurship wouldn’t really change.” Student  thought the course “gave 
freedom” but also noted that this freedom created responsibility and it can “destroy you.” In 
some senses, though, the students found relief and ease in taking inspiration from effectuation 
theory (Sarasvathy, ) by deciding to “just use what is in front of us.” This particular stu-
dent’s team ended up creating a solution for a “superior musical jamming experience” using the 
state-of-the-art telecommunication equipment that formed the setup of the distributed class-
room teaching environment itself. 

Finally, the timeline and timing of the course and required deliverables was a noted feature 
of the learning environment. Researchers have explored how instructor-set deadlines have been 
shown to regulate student pacing (Roberts & Semb, ), yet some students prefer to set their 
own paces. In the learning environment of this study, the only instructor-set deadlines related 
to weekly delivery of learning diaries and the final presentation of their project. This created a 
five-week timeframe with no teacher-imposed interim milestones, thus students were respon-
sible for the pacing and progress of their projects. Statements from several students indicated 
how the timeline established by the teacher affected the working process, which either created 
or limited tendencies to procrastinate based on their group working styles and the students’ own 

Figure 3. A Model of How Students Explore and Exercise Personal Agency in Arts Entrepreneurship 



ARTIVATE 9.2 

34 

preferences and schedules. One student felt it was difficult to know how much time “we should 
spend on these tasks” and that it was at times a challenge to balance individual tasks and group-
work based upon different team members’ tendencies to engage in or avoid procrastination. 
The final deadline did create a sense of stress, which did prompt students to take “actionable 
steps.” This action served to alleviate anxiety, as Student  described: “we concluded there was 
not enough time to do both . . . [another team member] was annoyed that we made the decision 
without them . . . I can’t blame them, but we thought it was necessary to proceed as time is crit-
ical.” Student ’s team spent a substantial amount of the five weeks deciding which problem to 
focus on for their project, ultimately leaving little time as they scrambled to explore their solu-
tion. Student  thought it might have been helpful if I stage-gated the process and “set time 
limits for different parts of the entrepreneurship cycle.” Based on these observations, I note that 
teacher-imposed interim milestones may result in more action, depending on students’ own 
time management tendencies—and that this is an aspect of the learning environment an educa-
tor can adjust for a desired effect. 

Personal Factors 
Personal factors such as values and beliefs, habitual modes of thoughts, and personal experience 
and goals seemed to have played a role in how the students behaved. As I argued before, the 
freedom afforded to the students in defining their project is a part of both the course and re-
search design which enabled these factors to emerge. As will be described shortly, these personal 
factors were balanced with social factors to ultimately take actions that reduced uncertainty. 

The influence of the personal values and beliefs of the students was revealed through class-
room discussion and interviews. My findings are consistent with literature that has explored the 
tension between art and money the literature describes (Bonin-Rodriguez, ; Bridgstock, 
; White, ). Student , when engaging in a discussion about terminology and labels, said 
“I mean this artistic thing is one [thing]. It’s really nice for the soul [and] everything, but I don’t 
know, I want to keep it away from this entrepreneur thing.” Other examples of conversation 
with the students confirm views that art is imbued with an aesthetic or value-laden dimension, 
which may at times conflict with money. Student  spoke of their personal sense of empower-
ment in seeing that “art has a moral responsibility,” that in the face of bombardment from im-
moral images that we as “artists or professors have a moral responsibility.” But it is not just the 
artist with moral responsibility. Through a dialectical dialogue with Student , entrepreneurs 
were characterized as agents with free will, and for this reason entrepreneurs must also be moral. 
The philosophical positions the students articulated are possibly a basis for other commentary 
on politics and economic systems that surfaced during the course and interviews. A few times 
in both individual and group settings, anecdotal examples of entrepreneurs and solutions to 
problems in the market veered towards discussions of conservative values and environmentally 
imposed needs to make money and survive. But values and beliefs extended beyond spheres of 
money and economics; there was a notable commonality over the joy of creation experienced 
by most in the artistic process and that in this creative sense, artistic innovators were viewed by 



ARTIVATE 9.2 

35 

some as entrepreneurial. Student , when describing the process of agreeing upon a problem to 
work on with the group, noted the importance of that problem being related to music as a basis 
to unify common interest and motivation in the team—“ . . . because we’re in the music[ . . . ] 
[our teammate has been] promoting this female artist and all of us had some music knowledge 
and all relate to the problem. Yeah. We felt it was important to get everybody involved.” Student 
 also noted that their team had to “find an idea that everyone could believe in and relate to” 
before they could achieve consensus and move forward. 

Prior experience and personal goals were also a personal factor. Student , who had over 
twenty years of experience working as an entrepreneur in video production, noted that they had 
to overcome their own habit and preference for working with people they have known “for a 
long time” whom they “know very well.” I interpret this reflection to represent a desire to behave 
exploratively and explore “new possibilities and domains,” rather than “further development 
and refinement of [their] knowledge within their specialty” (Politis, , p. ). Several stu-
dents noted the challenge of balancing coursework with outside demands—whether academic, 
professional, or personal. Prior to starting the course, Student , who had an educational back-
ground in electrical engineering and acoustic signal processing, had explored creating an app to 
replace cochlear implants. When reflecting upon the process of deciding what to work on with 
their team, they recalled “want[ing] to maybe look into this app development with cochlear 
implants. I think we briefly considered it . . . I guess we [as a team] weren’t exactly suited [tech-
nically for it] . . . I don’t really remember why we went away from that idea.” Personal goals of 
“channeling creativity” and “being true to myself” also influenced how and to what extent indi-
viduals were motivated by the team project. Interestingly, differing levels of personal flexibility, 
adaptability, and tolerance for ambiguity seemed to be an influential factor. As Student  noted: 
“I think it’s important to [ . . . ] take the project in one direction . . . then [later] you can turn it 
again into something else because [it] was not what it was meant to be. And then the team also 
has to be on the same page when it comes to [ . . . ] mov[ing] it in a [new] direction. But some-
times in teamwork, I feel like someone really wants to have it a certain way because that’s what 
we said originally.” 

Through my observations and interviews, I noted a difference in what I call the habitual 
modes of thoughts of the students. This largely relates to how students processed information 
while making either intuitive or deliberate decisions regarding how to take actions in their pro-
ject work (Hogarth, ). For example, I found that in their learning diaries and explanation 
of their course of action, Students  and  (with engineering backgrounds) consistently ex-
plained their reason and logic for doing certain things. They rationally deduced and induced 
why they thought a market would exist for their chosen solutions. While the basis for this ob-
servation is grounded in the exposition of their thoughts, I can fairly surmise that they tended 
to think more analytically than other students in the course. The more artistically inclined stu-
dents tended to describe their process as more intuitive than analytic. For example, Student , 
who relayed important events in their life story in which they had been guided by coincidence, 
serendipity, and feeling to make big decisions, largely viewed entrepreneurial ideas as kind of 
like an animal that has to “be what it wants to be,” saying, “you can’t really force an idea.” This 



ARTIVATE 9.2 

36 

contrasts to Student  who used empirical responses from a survey to generate user insight and 
argue for how the idea of their team’s product needed to be. When reflecting on their teamwork, 
it appears that feelings tended to be used in identifying a problem whereas logic tended to be 
used in articulating a solution. Interestingly, these modes of thinking and meaning-making have 
been elsewhere discussed within the context of adult learning as a means to address disharmo-
nies or disjunctures, which are often emotive and lead to a learning process (Jarvis, ; 
Koulaouzides, ). This finding also seems to be somewhat consistent with the feeling/think-
ing learning style dichotomy that Kolb and Kolb () explored in their study of arts and man-
agement students. 

Social Factors 
Social factors such as conditions of approval and social interdependencies also played a role in 
how the students behaved. These conditions of approval are conditions students attempted to 
satisfy in order to be approved by the teacher. The conditions of approval are either formal (like 
approval for passing the course) or informal (like a student seeking some sort of approval or 
confirmation that they are on the right path with their project). This included both explicit be-
havior and statements whose intent were to satisfy the requirements of the course and gain ap-
proval by me (the teacher), but also more subtle, tacit behavior to please the teacher by using 
the teacher’s language or examples or to seek verbal approval, the latter of which have been 
studied in relation to reinforcement theory (White, ). I consider examples of student be-
havior that aimed to do minimal work for maximal effect (doing just enough to pass the course) 
as trying to satisfy some of the formal conditions of approval. But more telling are those in-
stances when students would try to justify their plans or seek approval for their team project to 
the teacher before actually trying something or exploring something new. These conditions of 
approval seem to be an embedded factor in any classroom situation or teaching environment, 
and the student’s habit of falling into an approval-seeking pattern has perhaps been developed 
and reinforced over their entire education by the time they enter the arts entrepreneurship class-
room in a university setting. 

The social interdependencies of working both within a team and on a project whose devel-
opment was dependent on finding new information and feedback from other people outside of 
the classroom in the social context was a notable second-order theme. There were clear exam-
ples of students building on their teammates’ ideas about how to proceed with their project but 
also examples of a single person attempting to dominate the direction of the team. As Student 
 explained: “Yeah . . . we have all different backgrounds and different taste in music and eve-
rything. For my sake, I would have done something completely different . . . but it’s [about] go-
ing away from it and finding a compromise with their interest.” An entrepreneurial project that 
depends upon actors outside of the classroom also presents its limitations. When reflecting on 
arts entrepreneurial experience, Student  shared that “everybody’s just busy doing their own 
thing. I really want . . . things [to] start blossoming, but I can’t make people do it.” Interestingly, 
some aspects of these social interdependencies related to goals and outcomes have been 



ARTIVATE 9.2 

37 

discussed within literature on cooperative learning and social interdependence theory (Johnson 
& Johnson, ). 

Irrespective of this goal-oriented social interdependency, students demonstrated that the 
social-moral consequences of actions had an impact on their behavior. Through empathizing, 
considering the social consequences of actions, and nurturing a sense of altruism and social 
connection, several students were guided in how to proceed with developing their entrepre-
neurial idea. Student  reflected upon the pain they felt firsthand when feeling lonely after mov-
ing to a new city, saying “. . . for me personally it is a relevant problem since I have firsthand 
experience . . . but creating a space where one can meet people or stay in touch with friends can 
be a powerful tool in combatting loneliness. . . .” Student  also drew upon their personal expe-
rience when identifying a problem early on in their project, and extended their situation to a 
problem facing many other musicians in a potential market, and argued that “this app/ser-
vice/database is needed and will be worth investing for the common good.” These actions seem 
to relate to a broader sense that entrepreneurs must have morals due to their own agency and 
control over the consequences of their actions. 

Actions to Reduce Uncertainty 
The students took actions to reduce uncertainty based on some sense of recognizing an oppor-
tunity (Shane & Venkataraman, ). This opportunity recognition occurred both in theory 
and practice. Many students hypothesized how much value their solution would add and logi-
cally calculated the value of their solution. Student  wrote about their solution to facilitate 
online music therapy programs for prisoners, which “can be a way to provide daily or weekly 
therapy programs without actually [requiring physical] visits. So the prisoner can effectively 
follow up a program without interruption. . . . Research suggests rehabilitation programs [here] 
are not working so well. Maybe this is because of the difficulty of keeping the programs run-
ning. . . .” Interestingly, both the presence of a competitor and absence of a competitor indicated 
an opportunity for students. Student  continued, at a later point, “After searching the internet, 
I found out many impressive platforms that people are using for many years. Among them, 
[products X, Y, and Z] seem very popular. So I realized there is a demand for these kinds of 
platforms and nowadays musicians seem super excited [to do what our product does].” Yet, 
when exploring another opportunity, the same student found “no platforms that provide music 
therapy through the internet . . . I think this can be an opportunity to bring [our technology to 
the market].” Beyond this, students also engaged in activities such as customer segmentation 
and the imagination of future product offerings. As Student  reflected, “If we have [this] as our 
trademark, we might think of making other content for the clients we work with.” 

This course was rooted in uncertainty (Knight, ) and it was not a surprise that this 
emerged as a theme. Students noted they “floated around several ideas,” and those having a 
background in the arts had some comfort with this since “art liberates from rules.” The abstract-
ness of an ill-defined problem was a notable feature that seems to have caused students to be 
stuck in an inactive state and to learn from other people’s experience instead of generating their 



ARTIVATE 9.2 

38 

own experiences. Student  noted “the less concrete the problem, the harder it is start up with 
action beyond online research.” Student , who had previous entrepreneurship education, ex-
plained to their team that “the problem was important” and they should spend time in under-
standing that before proposing a solution. Interestingly, students caught in the vagueness of a 
poorly defined problem had experienced unclarity within their team’s communications. 

Taking action was one of the effective strategies to deal with the perceived opportunity, the 
uncertainty around that opportunity, and satisfying the conditions of approval. The limited 
timeframe of the course forced action. Student  wrote that this timeframe forced their team to 
“just do it instead of thinking too much.” Student  reflected on taking an action to alleviate 
anxiety and stress to “get things done . . . [the action] was needed for our project to proceed.” 
This action-taking also resulted from an acknowledgement of the limits of one’s knowledge. The 
learning outcomes from taking action were notable. Student  said “. . . this course was more 
practical, we really went into a project . . . it’s a real-life project that you can do. I mean, we really 
contacted some clients . . . It’s a huge step.” Upon further reflection on how this practicality 
contrasted with Student ’s previous professional experience in statistics, actuary tables, and 
financial mathematics, they felt some people were just more comfortable with certainty and 
knowing what would happen but “. . . if you know what is going to happen, then there’s no point 
of doing anything.” This mindset is perhaps one of the more salient outcomes of the course. 
When probed further about a favorable response received by Student  from a real customer 
who had potential commercial interest in the solution they worked on during the course, I asked 
Student  what it would take to pursue a potential opportunity even though the course had 
ended. They responded that “there’s no barrier for right now when I think about it.” 

Conclusion—Balanced Actions to Reduce Uncertainty 
In the beginning of this paper, I set out to answer the question, How do students explore and 
exercise personal agency in arts entrepreneurship education? 

My answer is this: in a teacher-created learning environment, students balance personal 
and social factors to take balanced actions to reduce uncertainty. Further, these actions all took 
place within the context of the teacher-created learning environment that was an action-based 
entrepreneurship course with project work rooted in uncertainty. While this teacher-created 
learning environment is itself embedded in a broader social context, the model derived from 
this study shows that since students balance personal and social factors, teachers may influence 
how students explore and exercise personal agency by tweaking or adjusting the social factors 
they have control over in the creation of the learning environment. For example, by having stu-
dents work individually on their own projects, rather than in teams, certain considerations and 
aspects of social interdependencies would clearly be affected. One could expect that a student’s 
own prior experience and personal goals, values and beliefs, or habitual modes of thought may 
have a greater weight in how they take actions than if they do not have to negotiate a project’s 
aims, scope, or tasks with other team members. Furthermore, the model shows that a student’s 
own personal agency is indeed influenced by these social factors, and that one may expect that 



ARTIVATE 9.2 

39 

a student’s own personal agency in a course without any team-based work may be observably 
different from what was observed in this study. While some may critique the ability of this 
study’s design to answer the question of personal agency based on a sampling of individual stu-
dents who worked in teams, a study design based solely on students who worked individually 
may be a less accurate reflection of professional and academic realities. The need for student 
graduates who have experience with and are skilled in teamwork, largely due to the nature of 
modern work, has been widely noted across the world in many academic disciplines (Crebert et 
al., ; Dunne & Rollins, ; Hodge & Lear, ; Jun, ; Kivunja, ). I would submit 
that in the future, if we are to consider a student’s personal agency—as it is used and defined in 
this study, meaning the “the ability to accomplish action” (Campbell, , p. )—then I think 
students must eventually work with other people in order to accomplish actions, rather than 
operate as socially isolated individuals. But more importantly, experiential learning theorists 
(Kolb & Kolb, ) argue that learning is the result from transactions between the individual 
and the environment, which is inevitably comprised of other people. So why not stimulate such 
transactional learning through teamwork? 

While the answer and results may seem obvious and intuitive, that does not mean they lack 
a contribution. Obviousness is not antithetical to utility. In some ways, what I found reminds 
me of the story of a fish who is swimming along one day when all of a sudden, a second fish 
approaches. The approaching fish asks the first fish “Hey! How’s the water today?” To which 
the first fish replies “Water? What’s that?” (Wallace, ). It is easy for educators to forget and 
overlook the subtleties of the environment we are immersed in. It may also be easy to forget that 
both us and our students are immersed in a learning environment we create. Notably, the em-
pirical context of this study was a course most closely resembling the being enterprising 
(Bridgstock, ) type of arts entrepreneurship education, a specific context reflected in the 
more general theoretical subcategory of teacher-created learning environment in the study’s 
model (Figure ). But future research may address how findings from this study may be applied 
to the context of a career transitioning (Beckman, ) course in arts entrepreneurship. For 
example, actions to reduce uncertainty may play a smaller role in an arts entrepreneurship 
course where students are responsible for creating an artist portfolio, writing a five-year plan, 
or learning how to bookkeep and file taxes as part of their career transitioning. It may also be 
interesting to systematically investigate how the results and the model from this study apply to 
different national and even broader entrepreneurship education contexts—how might personal 
factors such as values and beliefs or personal goals be observed in voluntary entrepreneurship 
education contexts where management/business students opt into courses and are motivated 
primarily to start profitable ventures? How might their balance of personal factors against social 
factors in order to take actions to reduce uncertainty compare to this study’s context? 

Irrespective, learning environments may trigger familiar patterns of teacher-student dy-
namics students are well accustomed to by the time they reach adulthood. By this I mean a 
dynamic in which a student focuses only on what I call the conditions of approval—including 
seeking the teacher’s approval of their ideas for an action before trying something new or testing 
out that idea related to their entrepreneurial solution. This is a pattern that may demonstrate 



ARTIVATE 9.2 

40 

the mechanics of the model in Figure . Asking the teacher for their approval about a potential 
entrepreneurial solution and action is itself a form of taking action to reduce uncertainty—but 
the quality of that uncertainty reduction, and the entrepreneurial learning from it, is arguably 
different if such a student instead approached someone outside the classroom who actually had 
the problem they were trying to solve. In experiential entrepreneurship education, should the 
boundaries of certainty and uncertainty be established between student and teacher interac-
tions, or between student and the outside world interactions? According to the model in this 
study, a teacher could tweak the social factors in this circumstance by doing the following: They 
could make a policy and tell their students that the teacher will not comment on or give approval 
based on whether they think something is a good idea or not, and instead students need to get 
that feedback from acting with real problem owners or stakeholders. This would affect the bal-
ance of action-taking to reduce uncertainty. As an example, before the COVID- pandemic, 
many investors would have thought the market for new solutions for livestreaming of music 
concerts was very small and not very promising. Those same investors probably think a bit dif-
ferently now, given the sudden cancellation of physical concerts and the rapid transition onto 
online streaming by musical artists across the world. The point is that in a changing world only 
time and experience can reveal whether something is a good or bad idea. But these conditions 
of approval also include doing only the work which needs to be done in order to gain approval 
from the teacher to pass the course, as opposed to self-imposed standards that would help stu-
dents achieve their broader life goals. If the arts entrepreneurship educator’s goal is student in-
dependence, we might be aware of this. These created environments will influence how our 
students behave within the temporal context of their education. But if the goal of education is 
to influence how students behave outside and beyond the classroom, what can we do? 

The first thing we can do is to be aware, as the model in this study shows, that each student 
has their own sets of values, beliefs, goals, experiences, and preferred styles of thinking that they 
have developed before they arrive in the classroom. Entrepreneurship educators Blenker et al. 
() have argued that this challenge of idiosyncrasy and the unique nature of individual op-
portunities (Shane & Venkataraman, ) can be met by embracing an idiosyncratic (as op-
posed to universalistic) paradigm of entrepreneurship education, where students utilize their 
everyday practice to understand entrepreneurial opportunities as “individualized and context 
specific, in the sense that their particular opportunities can only be created on the basis of their 
individual and idiosyncratic background” (Blenker et al., , p. ). 

The sense of personal agency and empowerment expressed by students as they explored 
and took their projects outside the walls of the classroom and approached real-life stakeholders 
in their social context is difficult to understate. Despite the benefit of these types of interactions 
seeming to accrue on a personal level for the individual student (since they feel like they can 
actually try to affect change), there seems to be an even greater social benefit when considering 
the social interdependencies I spoke of earlier. In these circumstances, the content of an educa-
tional activity moves from the personal (the theoretical which exists in the mind) into the inter-
personal (the practical that exists in society). If I was a civil engineering student, I could learn 
how to draw theoretical plans and theoretically calculate how much it would cost to build a 



ARTIVATE 9.2 

41 

ladder to the moon—but what would that tell me about why anyone would want a ladder to the 
moon, who would climb such a thing, or the types of social regulatory processes involved with 
building such a lunar ladder? In this way I think educators can understand how they may tweak 
their learning environment in an effort to shift from the theoretical-ideal to the social-real. 

Finally, a consideration of each individual student’s own sensitivity to uncertainty and tol-
erance for ambiguity might be useful for educators. Increasing our efforts to understand and 
engage our students can go a long way in encouraging them to try things they may not have 
considered before. And one potentially effective technique to accomplish this can be a bit So-
cratic in nature—if a student asks the teacher whether something is a good idea to try, the 
teacher may instead ask the student the same question—“I don’t know, do you think it is a good 
idea to try?” Experience has shown me that students already know the answer and have an un-
derstanding of why something does or does not make sense. And if the answer involves how 
somebody else might respond to their action (somebody like a customer, a user, or an audience), 
then it is incredible how the power of their ability to empathize might just illuminate the previ-
ously dark pathways of an uninitiated action. Our students can feel and empathize, and we 
should not overlook the fact that much of the arts is rooted in feeling to begin with. Further, it 
is this process of shifting the center of thinking back to the student (rather than on an expert, a 
source of information, or the teacher) that itself may be at the heart of the promise of any liberal 
education to begin with (Nussbaum, ).  



ARTIVATE 9.2 

42 

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