UC Berkeley

This study focused on educational efforts in Tanzania to use "partnership" to build the entrepreneurial capacity of those considered "left out" by globalization. In response to the perceived failures of previous efforts, many now argue that marginalized communities are uniquely well positioned to develop sustainable and socially relevant businesses if they can learn new entrepreneurial mindsets and partner with international actors to access missing capital, technology, and resources. Others warn that such partnerships will be inherently unequal and that rather than empowering citizens, entrepreneurial education actually imposes capitalist ideologies and produces entrepreneurial subjects who will serve, rather than contest, new forms of global neo-liberal governance (Rankin, 2001; Weber, 2006b).

My project demonstrates that the reality is more complex. Instead of asking whether entrepreneurial practices are either tyrannical or empowering, this research examined what actually happens when they are put into practice: for one year, I studied the efforts by an American development organization to work in partnership with a Tanzanian community to spread the ideas and practices of environmental entrepreneurship and build a green economy. Using methods of institutional ethnography and critical discourse analysis, I examined how American and Tanzanian "partners" each made sense of, negotiated, reshaped, or contested these discourses of partnership, entrepreneurship and participatory practices by observing how they constructed their partnership meetings and learning spaces.

To track the complexity of this process, I used a close linguistic analysis to reveal the many creative ways Tanzanians used global discourses of participation, partnership, and entrepreneurship: even as Tanzanians used entrepreneurial discourses to make claims on their American "partners" and to contest relations of inequality, the discourse of "equal partnership" prevented the Americans from listening to and engaging with the questions of inequality and relationship their Tanzanian "partners" sought to raise, thereby resulting in a renewal rather than a challenge to inequality. Moreover, the social positions of the least educated and poorest Tanzanian "partners" prevented them from accessing and making use of the resources, knowledge, and new language and literacy practices which were "made available" through global partnerships and de-centered learning activities, thus reproducing and legitimizing, rather than overcoming inequalities, even as the discourse of "partnership" obscured this fact.

By illuminating the micro-linguistic practices in which entrepreneurial discourses and participatory practices were used to discipline educational subjects, this research brings the problem of global governance down to the level of the micro-practices by which actors at multiple scales articulate themselves in "partnership." Through a close linguistic analysis of how actors actually made sense of, contested, and manipulated entrepreneurial discourses and practices, this study brings governmentality down to the ground level. Finally, by illuminating the subtle ways in which participatory and entrepreneurial practices potentially discipline the very subjects they were meant to empower, this study raises new questions and concerns for critical educators and contributes to our understanding of de-centered learning spaces especially in contexts of inequality.