Critical questioning of entrepreneurial “truths” through poststructural interview analysis

Questions we care about: Human-induced climate change, a global polycrisis, and the persistence of a
neoliberal economic model are not separate threads but woven elements of the dominant business-as-usual
story shaping our era (Lewis & Maslin, 2015; Hickel, 2021; Lawrence et al., 2024). This system prioritises short
term profit, accelerates resource depletion, widens inequality, and drives ecological harm; claims that growth
can be fully decoupled from damage remain contested (Raworth, 2017; Hickel, 2021). Entrepreneurship sits
uncomfortably within this landscape: it often reinforces growth-centric paradigms through its ‘business-as
usual' paradigm, yet it also holds potential to rethink its purpose and cultivate regenerative mindsets (Raworth,
2017; Fullerton, 2025). Whether entrepreneurship education (EE) continues to perpetuate the ‘business-as
usual' or become part of the solution (Walsh et al., 2026) depends on how deeply and critically we are willing
to challenge the prevailing assumptions (Sterling, 2010) embedded in the current dominant paradigms. Our
question is: How can entrepreneurship educators harness critical-thinking pedagogical practices that empower
learners to question dominant business-as-usual paradigms?
Approach: In this paper, we examine critical thinking as a pedagogical area of interest within EE. Although
frameworks such as EntreComp and GreenComp emphasise critical thinking competency, what it looks like in
practice remains contested (Bacigalupo et al., 2016; Bianchi et al., 2022; Calma & Davies, 2020). We situate
our approach in discourse studies (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997) and draw on Fairclough’s reminder that
“changing the world for the better depends upon being able to explain how it has come to be the way it is”
(2013, p.10). To explore how entrepreneurship success is problematised in interview-based media, we use
Carol Bacchi’s Poststructural Interview Analysis (PIA), adapted from her ‘What’s the Problem Represented to
be?’ (WPR) approach. PIA treats interviews as discursive and political sites where meanings and subject
positions become sayable and taken-for-granted rather than transparent accounts. Conceptually, we suggest
this kind of “noticing” aligns with Sterling’s (2010) transformative learning leading to third-order paradigm
change of “seeing things differently”.
Results: We purposively selected one publicly available podcast interview from The Entrepreneur Experiment
(Episode 403), “From 10k Investment to Multimillion-Euro Beauty Empire: Aimee Connolly’s Story.” Using four
extract-led sections drawn from different points across the transcript, we illustrate how PIA surfaces discursive
logics including inherent drive, disciplined bootstrapping, scale/quantification as success, and wellbeing-as
performance. The analysis also highlights how interviewer prompts and endorsements help stabilise what
becomes sayable.
Implications: We argue that a PIA exercise can offer an alternative to the dominant problem–solution
pedagogies in EE by creating structured space for learners to slow down, surface assumptions, and interrogate
business-as-usual meanings in everyday entrepreneurial media. In an educational landscape shaped by GenAI,
an initial, facilitated manual application can support deep engagement with the text before later
experimentation with GenAI-supported approaches.
Value and Originality: We offer a method-based demonstration of PIA for EE and show how interview-based
media texts can be used as critical-thinking resources. By focusing on critical questioning rather than defaulting
to problem-solving, the approach helps learners recognise how entrepreneurial “truths” and subject positions
are produced and circulated, opening space for discussion around alternative purposes and possibilities within
planetary limits.