An evaluation of an arts-based pedagogy: the benefits of cultural animation for SME owners in an economically deprived region

ABSTRACT

This paper explores insights from a recent entrepreneurship education programme in Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire, an economically deprived region of the UK. An arts-based pedagogical innovation, Cultural Animation (CA), is evaluated for its learning outcomes. The case study explores the specific benefits of this pedagogy for improving the skills of SME owner-managers. Taking an ethnographic approach, a series of CA sessions are analysed to understand their benefits for SME owner-managers. The findings are that CA generates three significant learning outcomes: the development of social ties; the encouragement of peer learning and the creation of a sense of equality amongst participants. This paper contributes to the research on arts-based pedagogies in entrepreneurship education. The findings have applicability to policymakers and entrepreneurship education providers, particularly in economically depressed regions where a lack of social connection is considered to be an obstacle to growth.

KEYWORDS:

• Arts-based pedagogy
• SME owners
• entrepreneurship education
• ethnography
• regional development

Introduction

Unequal regional development has persisted in post-war Britain. Wide variations in employment, education, housing and health outcomes between ‘our country’s great cities (especially London) and those towns and counties that are being left behind economically' (Social Mobility Commission, 2017, p. iv). Economically deprived regions are seen to be hampered by the poor management skills of SME owner-managers (Farvaque & Voss, 2009; Oke et al., 2013) which contribute to low growth (Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy, 2017; OECD, 2015b).

Universities are among those stakeholders invested with responsibility for regional development through the training and education of SME owner-managers (Audretsch, 2014; Harrison & Leitch, 2010; Smith & Bagchi-Sen, 2012). Successive government reports (Department for Business Innovation & Skills, 2016; Dowling, 2015; Wilson, 2012; Witty, 2013) have argued that universities can lead change through entrepreneurship education, and particularly in deploying academic theory to improve management skills (I. Gordon et al., 2012; Lockett et al., 2015). Typically, pedagogies deployed in entrepreneurship education involve traditional academic teaching, mentoring and coaching (Tsai & Barr, 2021).

Despite the strategic importance of education for stimulating entrepreneurship, there is little research on the efficacy of arts-based pedagogies in entrepreneurship education (Karakas et al., 2020). This article contributes new insights to business education by drawing on short-term ethnographic field techniques (Pink & Morgan, 2013) to evaluate the efficacy of a novel arts-based pedagogy: Cultural Animation (CA). We highlight the ways in which CA differs from theoretical, individualistic techniques deployed in traditional entrepreneurship education.

The article is organized as follows: first, the existing literature on entrepreneurship education is examined before setting out the techniques and approaches used in CA. The paper then describe the ethnographic methods used to analyse this set of learning techniques. Our empirical findings are presented by exploring CA in practice. Finally, the discussion and conclusion sections provide reflections on the implications and contributions of the case.

Literature review

1. The particular problems of ‘left behind' regions

‘Left-behind' regions are those typified by lower than average productivity (OECD, 2017; Office for National Statistics, 2017), lower than average skilled jobs (Department for Business Innovation and Skills, 2014; OECD Secretariat, 2002) and lower rates of product and process innovation (OECD, 2015a; Roper et al., 2015). Such regions require business networks that not only deliver product and process innovation (Zhang & Hamilton, 2010), but also generate supplier and customer relationships inside and outside the firm (Capello, 1999). Such networks assist with problem-solving and information sharing (Gemmell et al., 2012). Indeed, a lack of supportive networks has been identified as a feature of economically deprived regions (Capello & Faggian, 2005) along with entrepreneurs fearing competition or the theft of intellectual property (Gemmell et al., 2012). ‘Left behind' regions are also less likely to host large firms and are instead characterized by small and medium-sized enterprises which rarely introduce innovations (Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy, 2018).

Owner decisions, such as the reluctance to invest in training, are of great importance for SMEs. SMEs are particularly vulnerable to the strategy and decision-making of their owner-managers, given their limited size and likelihood to be owned by a single individual. We here define ‘SME owners' as individuals who own and manage their own SME. SME owners do not necessarily share the characteristics of ‘entrepreneurs'. SME owners are found to be risk averse be content with ‘lifestyle' firms which meet their personal and family needs, and avoid innovation. In contrast, entrepreneurs are generally found to display distinctive behaviours, including for risk-taking, achievement-orientation and innovation. Developing entrepreneurial behaviours would lead entrepreneurially minded SME owners to grow their businesses, create additional jobs and increase profits.

It is well documented that SMEs possess unique characteristics that differentiate them from large organization. Small and medium-sized enterprises¹ (SMEs) are not merely smaller versions of large firms, but have distinctive characteristics (Freel, 2005; Storey, 1994) relating to capital and financial resource constraints. Given their limited size and reach, SMEs are particularly vulnerable to larger incumbents in left-behind regions (Lee et al., 2015; Owen et al., 2016). Yet, SMEs operating in a hostile industry environment and in competition with larger, better-resourced incumbents, would benefit from greater collaboration (Westerlund et al., 2008) which can lead to innovation and business growth. Absorptive capacity, here defined as their ability to acquire information and also their ability to exploit it (Gray, 2013; Zahra & George, 2002), is considered particularly important for innovation in SMEs (Liao et al., 2003). Yet SME owners are less likely to invest in training for themselves, or for their staff (Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy, 2018), which limits the absorptive capacity of their firms.

2. The role of entrepreneurship education for SME owners

Moving on to discuss the role of entrepreneurship education in developing entrepreneurial traits, ‘entrepreneurship education' is defined as a mode of learning for business owners and entrepreneurs designed to increase entrepreneurial behaviours (Cope, 2005). This paper’s use of the term ‘entrepreneurship education' excludes entrepreneurship education for students who may seek broad-based learning to foster awareness of entrepreneurship as a post-secondary or tertiary education self-employment choice (Zhang & Hamilton, 2010). A significant tranche of entrepreneurship education for business owners and entrepreneurs is delivered through business schools. While some accelerator or incubation training is trialling new methods, such as the ‘flipped classroom' (Bliemel, 2015), elsewhere, critiques of traditional, university-delivered entrepreneurship education for business owners and entrepreneurs are long-standing (Datar et al., 2011; Ghoshal, 2005; Khurana, 2007; Pfeffer & Fong, 2002). Traditional programmes can be preoccupied with theory (Donaldson, 2002; Perea & Brady, 2017; Weatherbee et al., 2008), downplay uncertainty (Antonacopoulou & Gabriel, 2001; Fendt et al., 2008; Sutherland & Jelinek, 2015) and minimize the importance of a creative and unconventional approach to problem-solving (Leach, 2014). Traditional entrepreneurship education pedagogies minimize ‘social interactions that shape the context for learning' (Toutain et al., 2017, p. 870). Entrepreneurship centres and indigenous entrepreneurship studies (Bajada & Trayler, 2014) are increasingly taking communal and supportive approaches, particularly those that espouse collective agency and the desire for social transformation (M. E. G. Gordon et al., 2017). However, mainstream Western entrepreneurship education has focused on the competitive and individualistic nature of the entrepreneur (Zahra et al., 2004), rather than focusing on the mechanisms that help develop sociability and networks of practice (Toutain et al., 2017).

This paper argues that, given that the role of entrepreneurship education for SME owners is to improve their entrepreneurship skills, pedagogies which encourage SME leaders to step away from traditional concepts of individualism are crucial in developing collaborative working in an atmosphere of equality and shared knowledge (Bougrain & Haudeville, 2002; De Massis et al., 2018). This type of pedagogy encourages peer learning and allows entrepreneurs to benchmark their products and services with their peers (Zozimo et al., 2017) and to share valuable local knowledge (Bosma et al., 2012). Evidence shows that business owners who solve challenging problems in the classroom leads to collaboration outside the firm (Capello, 1999) and ultimately to firmer social ties (Zhang & Hamilton, 2010) whether inside the firm or outside it (Bougrain & Haudeville, 2002; De Massis et al., 2018). Arguably, this type of collaborative working could lead to building wider networks, which is of particular benefit, as we have outlined above, in left-behind regions.

This paper argues that the most beneficial forms of entrepreneurship education for SMEs are those which stimulate social ties and peer-to-peer learning in order to learn how to creatively manage their limited human and financial resources (Cope, 2005) in order to respond to larger competitors (Rae, 2000). The question that emerges, then, is how learning providers can respond to such challenges through pedagogic techniques. This question will be answered by highlighting the advantages of a novel arts-based pedagogic technique, CA. In the following section, we describe CA and formulate the research question.

Context for the case study

Arts-based pedagogies used in entrepreneurship education do not simply provide social spaces for network-building. They also provide practical techniques for entrepreneurship educators to shift focus from individuals to networks by creating the conditions for discussion and experimentation, decision-making (Liotas, 2014) and reflection upon uncertainty (Braund, 2015; Cunliffe, 2009). The ‘human-centred' nature of arts-based pedagogies have been argued to support personal and collective growth, through the mode of ‘sensuous learning' (Taylor & Antonacopoulou, 2019), techniques which are able to develop the ethical awareness of professionals and managers (Antonacopoulou, 2019). The non-hierarchical nature of arts-based pedagogies (Latusek & Vlaar, 2015; Valtonen et al., 2017) provides an alternative to the disembodied, asocial and theoretical nature of traditional management pedagogies (Rigg, 2018; Roberts & Woods, 2018).

In this case study, Cultural Animation, an arts-based methodology of learning that draws on the everyday experiences of people and their creative abilities to achieve individual and collective goals (Kelemen et al., 2018). CA rejects disembodied, theoretical analysis to focus on the co-productive capacities of groups of differently skilled and experienced participants. CA was developed and pioneered in the UK by the Director of the New Vic Theatre based in Newcastle-Under-Lyme in Staffordshire in collaboration with academics from Keele University. The New Vic Theatre was Europe’s first purpose-built theatre in the round and its productions brought a radical, egalitarian perspective to British theatre in the 1960s. The company discovered that working in the round brought about new political and creative possibilities. The company included not only actors but also front of house, back-stage and on-stage staff. The company’s actors were from the local area and employed authentic regional accents, thus countering a tradition where working class people would seldom be able to identify with the middle or upper-class background of characters or canonical plays. Later, the New Vic Theatre company and academics from Keele University developed the novel pedagogy of Cultural Animation which shared the same aspiration to create a democratic space where hierarchies between participants are dissolved. The organizing principle of CA is the creation of a neutral space, where weighty responsibilities can be suspended for a while, and participants are free to shed their habitual identities. CA pays tribute to its theatrical traditions by creating playful experiential exercises which draw on Stanislavski, Brecht and Boal to create social connections, reduce social connections and ask participants to think differently.

CA is situated within the broad field of creative pedagogies (Gauntlett, 2007) and shares elements with theatre-based pedagogies in including an array of performative and improvizational techniques. CA is aligned to pedagogies such as Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (Boal, 2008) and which itself draws on Paulo Freire’s activist pedagogies. CA, in line with Boal’s work, deploys theatrical techniques for transformative potential. CA is part of activist theatrical pedagogies in being ‘a form of participatory and interactive education that uses theatre as a method to develop critical consciousness and as an instrument for social change' (Van Bewer et al., 2021, p. 2).

CA is based on the following pedagogical principles (Table 1):

Table 1. Principles of cultural animation.

Draws on the life experiences of people and their creative abilities to make sense of the world. Builds up trusting relationships between participants by inviting them to work together in activities which may be new to them, but which rely on their life-experiences. When people move about and complete tasks together, it facilitates new ways of seeing and thinking. Boundary objects (everyday objects) are central to the collaboration and communication between academics, participants and members of the public. Common sense, academic expertise and practical skills are valued in equal measure. Knowledge and experiences are articulated in actions, images, installations as well as via the written word. The cultural animator acts as a facilitator. Pioneered in the UK by New Vic Borderlines and the Community Animation and Social Innovation Centre at Keele University.

(Kelemen et al., 2018)

Since then, CA has been used as a pedagogical tool in postgraduate taught management programmes in the UK (Mangan et al., 2016) and Japan. The aim of CA is to build trusting relationships between participants by inviting them to work together in a series of activities which draw on their skills and life experiences. Rather than relying solely on the written word, ideas are also explored through actions and images. A typical CA workshop includes a mixture of creative tasks, embodied activities and small group discussions to explore key themes and begins with a series of name games, designed to put people at ease with each other. Further games become more specialized and encourage a playful approach to problem solving. The facilitator works closely with the academics to design games that are based on existing theory. The games are devised by the Cultural Animators beforehand, which results in a pedagogy that is participatory but not co-created.

In the ‘follow the leader game', for example, the workshop starts with the facilitator stating that she has invited one of the participants to act as a leader without the knowledge of the larger group. She then asks people to figure out who the leader is by following that particular person. At the end of the exercise, it transpires that no one was asked to be the leader, yet many people follow others and post-rationalize their decisions to follow or be followed. Such games ‘animate' or ‘give life to' to the dynamics of everyday life, accentuating the relational and emergent nature of learning and encouraging the participants to reflect on the potential for change within themselves and their own organizations.

Hence, a research question is proposed that explores the ways in which CA pedagogies provide specific benefits to SME owner-managers: What are the specific benefits of CA as an entrepreneurship education pedagogic technique for SME owner-managers in the economically deprived region of Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire? We now outline the background to the case study, which is how CA came to be deployed with SME owner-managers in Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire.

To test CA as a novel pedagogy for SME owners, Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire meets the conditions for an economically deprived region with lower than average productivity and innovation rates, and job increases occurring mainly in unskilled and low-paid employment (Regeneris, 2014; UK Commission for Employment and Skills, 2015). Hatch Regeneris, the consultants appointed to write the Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire regional growth strategy, state that ‘Business Schools have a very important role to play in increasing the contact between SMEs and Universities, and in sharing their skills and expertise' (Hatch Regeneris, 2014, p. 15). These region-specific ambitions resulted in the involvement of a local university in developing a two-year training programme for SME owner-managers. The programme provided a free 6-month skills development course for 76 SME owner-managers based in the Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire area between January 2017 and December 2018. Their businesses had been selected based on their growth potential as defined by Hatch Regeneris. They all employed between 1 and 250 people, with the majority of businesses employing fewer than 10 people. 75% of programme participants were male, 25% were female, and 97% of participants described themselves as white British. Manufacturing made up the largest proportion of businesses (29%), followed by information and communications (19%), professional, scientific and technical (17%) with a smaller number of participants from the construction, service support, and retailing.

There were three cohorts of SME owner-managers with 21, 27 and 28 participants in each cohort respectively. The course content was repeated for each cohort. Each cohort took 6 weeks to complete the full course, with the first cohort starting the course in April 2017 and the final cohort completing the course in December 2018. The course consisted of classroom-based management theory delivered by academics, external speakers, individual mentoring by ‘entrepreneurs in residence' and group-based problem solving, such as the CA techniques. Specifically, the curriculum for each course consisted of six classroom-based sessions which covered strategy, leadership, finance, sales, marketing, and human resource management. This research examines the three leadership sessions which used CA techinques, and which took place in June 2017, December 2017 and June 2018.

The Cultural Animation training sessions took place in a former country house, a distinctively decorated venue which had been chosen to contrast with typical business teaching classrooms, in order to disrupt existing expectations of learning (Millward et al., 2019). The teaching schedule for CA took place over one day with learners arriving in the morning for coffee and breakfast. Breakfast was followed by a 45-minute traditional lecture. Participants then moved to another room for a CA session. A short break would take place at 11am where the participants were free to take phone-calls while the academics and theatre practitioner reviewed the previous session and discussed strategies for the rest of the day. The format would then repeat (lecture, CA or break) for a further three sessions. By the end of the day, the participants had experienced four traditional lectures and four CA sessions. During the sessions, participants were referred to as ‘members of the company’ or ‘participants', rather than ‘students' or ‘business owners' so as to disrupt traditional teaching hierarchies.

Each CA session was facilitated by 6 people: a theatre practitioner, an academic expert in CA, the author, and four ‘entrepreneurs in residence' (EIRs). The EIRs were SME business experts who were recruited at the start of the training programme to facilitate teaching (including the CA sessions) and provide business-specific advice to participants. While the theatre practitioner and academic were CA experts, the EIRs and author were new to the CA techniques. A separate training session for the EIRs were held the week before the first CA training session. At the end of each CA exercise, the facilitators connected each exercise to a specific aspect of entrepreneurship and asked the participants to share their reactions to the game. The facilitators encouraged participants to reflect on how their practices and skills could be seen in a new light following each exercise.

Methods and methodology

To study the effects of these learning experiences, the author used an ethnographic approach during the training sessions. Organizational ethnography has been argued to provide a novel way of analysing the organization, particularly in using in-depth modes of qualitative enquiry to ‘challenge the “received wisdom” of current “knowledge claims” within the field' (Brannan et al., 2012, p. 8). Ethnographic methods in relation to the arts have been used to explore the messy situations that are often deliberately provoked by arts pedagogies, in particular the tensions experienced by people by participating in arts projects and their negotiations in moving towards a more collaborative mode of working (Jaramillo-Vazquez, 2019). Ethnographic enquiry has been employed in understanding the lived experience of management training (Thedvall, 2017), particularly in relation to unexpected learning outcomes. In this case study, ethnographic enquiry during the training sessions was selected as a methodology which would do justice to the range of responses experienced by participant and their learning trajectory during the session.

Field notes and photographs were also taken by the author and the academic expert. The ethical issues relating to photographic methods in ethnography relating to anonymity (Wiles et al., 2012) and consent (Pope et al., 2010) were considered during the ethical approval process. Following ethical approval, participants had become familiar with being photographed during non-CA training exercises for marketing and evaluation purposes. Indeed, some participants asked the author to take photographs of them using their own phones, which suggested their enjoyment of the CA sessions. Such photographs later appeared in the participants’ social media, suggesting that the CA techniques, and indeed the photographs, were of benefit to them. Participants knew they were being observed and that observations were being recorded through field notes and photographs.

During the CA sessions, the author sat at the back of the room during lectures and walked around groups during CA sessions, observing individual behaviours, such as the use of mobile phones, gestures, and facial expressions. The author also observed the atmosphere of the room (such as the amount of movement and noise levels). Photographs were also taken to provide another layer of data and reminded the researchers about key moments or experiences that appeared particularly engaging to participants. Photographs provided descriptive and contextual richness (Dyer & Wilkins, 1991). Interview probes were used to identify more detailed information about participants’ experiences (Gemmell et al., 2012) by asking them to relive the exercises through different perceptual lenses, such as their thoughts, feelings, interactions with others and actions during and after the exercises. Interview questions and probes are provided in Appendix 1. The author was known to participants from previous research on the same project, which provided a higher level of trust than would otherwise be the case. Any issues of bias due to familiarity with the author were addressed through the author sharing notes and observations with the lead academic and theatre practitioner ahead of analysis.

A relatively low response rate of 33% suggests that participants did not feel obliged to take part in the research interviews relating to the CA sessions. The notetaking and photography was explained to participants beforehand, and participants were given the opportunity to deselect photos and interview transcripts before they were uploaded to the research database. No participants chose to do so.

23 interviews relating specifically to the Cultural Animation sessions were conducted with the 76 participants (30% response rate) and five interviews were conducted with the entrepreneurs-in-residence who provided expert facilitation at all three CA sessions. As only 23 participants were interviewed, there is the possibility of sampling bias in that only those participants with the time or willingness to discuss the CA sessions were interviewed. Field notes were recorded during the event, resulting in over 60 pages of analytical material. All interviews were transcribed, approved by participants and uploaded into NVivo for analysis. In addition, the poems produced by the participants and the photographs taken by the author and academic expert were also approved for use by participants and uploaded for analysis. All names of participants, academics and facilitators have been anonymized and substitute names used in this article.

The data were analysed using the constant comparative method, which provided an accountability mechanism for narrative analysis. Firstly, each transcript was marked up line by line to identify the preliminary concepts in an initial ‘open’ system. The audio recordings were then listened to, alongside the highlighted transcripts and interview notes to create codes in NVivo which captured the dialogue as well as the underlying meanings of pauses, laughter, gestures and other non-verbal communication. Secondly, open codes were organized under broader and less individually based codes to form axial coding. Following axial coding, the author then organized the data into three core categories, which are now analysed in the findings.

Findings

1. Playful challenges leads to developing social ties

Prior to the start of training, the academics and facilitators discussed how they would develop the social connections required to create learning. Facilitators viewed their role as encouraging participation in the CA activities and connecting these activities to the academic content which had been delivered in the preceding lecture. There were clear boundaries for managing the initial reluctance from business owners, used to the individualism and formality of traditional entrepreneurship education, as Mary explained.

When I’m running those kind of sessions myself, I usually like to do a little explanatory sentence that says … That asks people to suspend their disbelief and participate fully. I think is quite important is to explain to people that it’s a group activity. You need everybody to participate otherwise their non-activity will compromise other people. (Mary, facilitator)

In other words, there was a cultural expectation of participation and a degree of pressure applied so that participants knew that for the workshop to be useful, they were to work in social and collaborative ways. The facilitators felt that creative techniques constituted powerful methods of seeing a business differently, but in order to do so, participants needed to interact with others. The second facilitator, Matthew, explained it thus:

The creative techniques, it opens … you’re opening people’s brains to looking at things in different ways. [Participants] have done their own thing for years … We come in … and they use our tools within a few weeks of being exposed to them. Matthew (facilitator)

In ‘opening people’s brains’, the facilitators understood that SME leaders found it hard to change long-standing behaviours but considered that the development of new thinking was more possible as an outcome of the workshops. Play and fun were viewed as a way for participants to unlearn ‘bad' habits or to at least question their approach to everyday decision-making. The exercises also had to engage with the personal and work lives of participants, to make the content seem ‘fun' or interesting in ways that were relevant to the participants who were discussing them.

These kind of exercises are about … how people work in teams and how people can work effectively together … How leaders might emerge, or how leaders can act to kind of direct a game. I mean in some of those games, people moved in and out of leadership roles; in others we saw leaders actually emerge. I mean I’ve got a game myself that I played in the first cohort, which was where we were carrying water around outside … So there’s elements of co-operation, but what you gradually realise is that a leader has to emerge to do it. Because if everybody tries to do their own thing, it doesn’t work. … You get creative behaviour emerging, because it’s very difficult to tip the water out at the end, unless somebody actually says, oh, we can do it like this. (Mary, facilitator)

Mary’s exercise was designed to use a practical and physical challenge to elicit leadership behaviour. The unfamiliarity of the exercise forced participants to collectively work out the extent to which cooperation or individualism would solve the exercise. The nature of the exercise required participants to talk to each other. Facilitators used play and fun to create the conditions where mutual interest and conversation could flourish. The emphasis here was on crafting playful experiences to reflect on serious problems or issues:

I think, well, you’re dead a long time, so life has to be fun. … the value of fun is that we … can take our jobs seriously, we just don’t take ourselves very seriously. I think that’s the point of it. (Willa, facilitator)

Willa saw her pedagogical role as reminding SME owner-managers of the importance of the leadership role, their ‘job', but to reduce their limiting sense of self-importance. She saw her role as reconnecting SME leaders to their own humanity, thereby increasing their openness to collaboration.

As participants became more familiar with CA techniques, participants reported less discomfort with the type of games and exercises run by the facilitator.

And the second [drama] session I thought was a lot easier than the first because we already knew each other, we trusted each other, there was the knowledge of each other, our personality, where we come from and it made it a lot easier. (Julia, participant)

The CA sessions established, in a non-threatening atmosphere, a way to share participants’ life goals and their personal characteristics. The result was an acceleration of the bonding between participants which many programmes take considerable time to develop:

The [CA techniques] were really good fun and I think as a group it really helped us bonding further, because I have to say that the group, in the short time that we’ve been together, has really clicked. And a few others are in touch outside of it now. So for that it’s been fantastic. (Tamara, participant)

CA is a pedagogical technique which is perceived as ‘fun’ by participants, and which can speed up the essential bonding process between participants. As such, the accelerated learning benefits of CA are particularly valuable in the limited time available for this entrepreneurship education course. The course took place in addition to the SME owner manager’s existing work commitments. Bonding during CA sessions led to the quicker formation of friendships inside the classroom, which, in some cases, translated to lasting effects on their business.

I think the networking aspect [of the CA sessions] is brilliant. I mean, we've certainly networked with a number of local businesses either to partner with or they've approached us or so on. So I think that's been brilliant … I think we shouldn't underestimate the power of that. (Cassie, participant)

Cassie is clear that she perceived the CA techniques as contributing to the sense of openness and trust which has helped her to build business networks.

One exercise asked participants to describe what they have learned through the CA techniques using poetic language. One participant, Mike, wrote a poem that underlined the power of social connection and phrased this as a form of ‘empowerment’:

Empowerment is the aim

A mirror shows confidence, an arrow is my direction

I feel the cords of connection pull at my heart.

We encourage each other, pass the baton, victory is ours!

What have we learned? Trust”

(Mike, participant)

Mike describes the objects he selected as representing his management style: a mirror, an arrow, a rope. The poem then explains how these items collectively build a winning team that support each other, where each individual plays a distinctive but connected role (‘pass the baton'), which results in business success. Mike’s final line summarizes his learning from the programme: that trust is required in order for his team to compete successfully in the competitive SME market.

At other times, participants were asked to take on a different persona by using dressing up clothes. The image below shows one of the participants who chose to wear his theatrical costume throughout the day. The trust he developed with his learning group allowed him to partially transform his identity for the duration of the day’s training without fear of ridicule. The photograph below shows how the rich, velvet robes contrast movingly with his formal striped shirt and workplace ID badge. The magician’s cloak lends him a mythic glamour. The CA technique of using artefacts temporarily liberate participants from a serious, managerial identity, allowing participants to present a different aspect of their persona to others. This prompted us to consider further how the disruptive and social nature of these techniques reprieves participants from the repetition and isolation typical of SME management, allowing them to learn from each other. While this photograph was taken on the author’s phone, the participant then asked for the same photograph to be taken on his phone. The photograph later appeared on his social media profile, suggesting that he took pride and gained benefit from his temporary transformation (Figure 1).

Figure 1. The Magician's Cloak.

2. Peer learning leads to problem-sharing

The social nature of learning enabled participants to share problems and develop solutions with each other. SME leaders tend to operate in isolation, often leading to reluctance to ask for help. Shelley describes below how isolation from those who could assist her had affected her business. She had become paralyzed in her decision-making, unable to move forward unless she came up with the correct decision:

I’ve not asked for help for 4 years now … I just asked my peers in my group what they were doing, how they were making sense of it all. Because I heard their responses and how they’d reacted to it, I then realised that no answer was the right answer and just kind of got on with it. (Shelley, participant)

The social nature of the CA learning experiences, however, appeared to support participants like Shelley to share problems and develop solutions with each other. This was integral in ‘asking for help'. Furthermore, in understanding that there was no definitive solution to her business problem, Shelley was able to proceed with management decision-making with improved confidence. Participants learned how to listen to their peers describing workplace problems and became intensely focussed on empathizing with their situation. Active listening generated informal learning networks between participants. One participant explained how these networks were then able to bring practical benefit to their businesses:

A few of the girls have got an email group just basically saying we can help each other out if you need to … I was just saying “oh I need something like that for my business” and she said “I’ve got mine I will send you mine.” And she sent me the template. (Rosa, participant)

One benefit of the peer network was to introduce management practices from different industries. One CA session asked participants to build a representation of their firm using buttons, and then share the meaning of their representation with the group. This deliberately child-like game asked participants to be playful, while also inviting them to think differently about their firm. The photograph shows participants listening to each other describe how the button image represents their firm’s organizational structure, customers, and staff (Figure 2).

CA pedagogy disrupts learning expectations through creating physical spaces for play, and encouraging learning behaviours beyond passive listening and note-taking (Millward et al., 2019). For one participant, both the pedagogical technique and the learning from peers were initially discomfiting, although ultimately rewarding. As David, one of the participants, explained:

I think it got me outside of my normal comfort zone and comfy slippers at what we do in the IT industry which, these days, is quite staid. It’s a mature industry in certain places. It taught me to just look at things differently. (David, participant)

In addition to the sociability and peer learning outcomes, the democratic pedagogical approach of CA techniques reshaped participants’ expectations of how to share power within their firms.

Figure 2. Learning from others.

3. Removing hierarchies creates a sense of equality

The final outcome of the CA techniques was the (temporary) removal of hierarchies inherent in formal training environments which led to creating a sense of equality between participants. The physical spaces of CA techniques (rooms set out as a theatre in the round, the formal garden outside, rooms filled with props and costumes) were crucial in breaking the learning boundaries that accompany familiar teaching spaces.

Initially, participants were nervous of interaction, behaving as they would in a traditional classroom as fieldnotes taken by the author suggest:

Everyone has finally taken a seat at the shared tables, avoiding eye-contact, typing away on their tablets. There are nods and smiles to each other, but when the lecturer starts talking, their attention is entirely on her. (Observational notes, author)

Participants initially replicated classroom hierarchies, with the first morning lecture room remaining hushed and silent. As the CA sessions started, they removed jackets and ties, left their bags and laptops on the chairs in favour of moving around spaces, talking and laughing. As the CA sessions started, the noise level gradually rose, often ending up in noise levels so loud that the author could only hear the participant closest to her. During one session, a lecturer from a neighbouring room comes in to ask for the noise levels to be kept down.

Participants witnessed a non-hierarchal working environment which they could then model back in their workplaces. Physical movement, embodied contribution and the emphasis put on developing human relationships contributed to a feeling of equality between participants.

[The creative exercises] make everybody on the same playing field because I don’t think you expect, in a business conference setting, to go in and be creative. The general kind of consensus was like that kind of a day as you all sit around, listen a lot, network … So, it kind of put everyone on the same playing field which was really nice. (Naomi, participant)

It is possible that those with less experience could have been inhibited by the extensive business experience which would have been displayed in a traditional business teaching module. Here, however, new entrepreneurs were confident to contribute through a pedagogic approach where all participants are equally unfamiliar with each exercise. The strangeness of the exercise created a degree of anxiety, but this brought participants together in their attempt to work out what was expected of them. The uncertainty around what was going to happen was part of the transformative effect of CA techniques. Facilitators shifted authority horizontally to participants, while offering assurance with the necessarily uncertain flow of exercises.

[We were] explaining the purpose and signalling the expected behaviour, involving everybody, ensuring everybody is participating. Not being too directive about how it goes, because I think you want to allow for the unexpected, want to encourage the unexpected. If you’ve got a group who are well-disposed towards you, most people will join in and, you know, be open to it, I think. (Matthew, facilitator)

The facilitators sought to empower participants to come to their own conclusions. Participants were then able to reflect on how removing hierarchies of knowledge and authority could be transferred into everyday business life, something that one participant phrased as ‘giving people freedom'.

I want [my staff] to be growing and doing stuff for themselves anyway … if I am keeping secrets to myself and only giving them half the story, I need to know that and also if I’m not giving people the freedom to do stuff on their own, then that’s going to be an issue. (Arthur, participant.)

One of the final creative exercises involved writing and performing a silent vignette or dramatic scene about how each participant would like to improve their management style. Participants were then asked to perform a silent vignette which demonstrated their new approach with their group. A photograph from this session shows the extent to which a participant had modelled the democratic approach of CA pedagogy within his own team. The group are facing each other as equals and celebrating the team’s success in a shared ‘high five'. The participant had moved from a hierarchical, individualist approach to one where each team member is given equal recognition and decision-making authority (Figure 3).

To summarize, the findings show how fostering social connections, peer learning and democratic approaches were core to CA’s pedagogical techniques of costume, creative writing, and drama. Participants started by socializing with members of their group, then drew upon their newly formed relationships to learn from each other; by the end of the session, the increasingly confident participants remodelled their management styles from hierarchical to ones with greater equality with their staff. We now turn to the limitations of the research design.

Figure 3. Everyone's contribution counts.

Limitations of the research design

The research design carried a number of limitations.

Participants found it difficult to leave their work persona behind and continued to check their mobile phones and leave the room to take calls. The lack of engagement from some participants caused initial tension with the author, who felt it was disrespectful to her colleagues. However, the facilitators themselves remained relaxed, noting that a lack of participation was not unusual with CA techniques. The reluctance from some participants to engage in playful activities is a limitation of the CA technique that requires further reflection. Without expert and patient facilitation to maintain interaction and connect the activities back to aspects of learning, participants remained in their habitual personas, succumbing to the more immediate demands of managing an SME.

A further limitation of the research design was that the author was unable to follow the participants back into their firms to see how knowledge-sharing was extended to their firms and between firms. A follow-up study is now required to assess the long-term impacts of CA techniques on their management style within their firms, the extent to which firms continue to collaborate outside the classroom, and the overall impact on their region.

Discussion

The research question asked: What are the specific benefits of CA as an entrepreneurship education pedagogic technique for SME owner-managers in the economically deprived region of Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire? The findings have illuminated three major benefits: firstly, the generation of social ties, secondly, the encouragement of peer learning and thirdly, the creation of a sense of equality amongst SME participants, as illustrated in Figure 4:

Figure 4. The benefits of CA for SME owners and potentially the region.

Firstly, social ties were generated participants formed relationships inside the classroom, which, if carried on beyond the end of the training course, had the potential to develop trust-based, co-operative networks: an asset considered particularly important in left-behind regions. A deficiency identified in the literature review was that traditional entrepreneurship education techniques prioritize the ‘chalk and talk', whereby an expert delivers content to students who are expected to listen. In contrast, CA techniques, through their ability to stimulate new ways of thinking, encouraged SME owners working in mature industries, such as IT and manufacturing, to re-evaluate traditional ways of working. Such process innovations would be particularly valuable for SMEs in left-behind regions and would be a valuable long-term outcome of entrepreneurship education.

Secondly, peer learning was developed through the spontaneous, occasionally unsettling nature of CA, which required participants to rely on their instincts and those of others when responding to the exercises. Participants were reliant on their own and others’ experience to problem-solve effectively. In contrast to the individualistic, procedural decision-making processes taught in typical business education, CA expects participants to share their knowledge, often in an unplanned and therefore open technique. Described as ‘learning by surprise' (Huffaker & West, 2005), creative pedagogies encourage sharing by dissolving boundaries between students. Consistent with other examples of other power-reversal pedagogies in entrepreneurship education, such as the flipped classroom, the CA exercises encouraged participants to discuss and strategize across barriers of different industries, different size firms, and previous educational experience (Greenberg, 1995).

Thirdly, the creation of equality between participants was created by the costumes and dressing up, which allowed participants to be temporarily released from their habitus: the routine dress, speech and mannerisms which control and define the social meaning associated with our identity (Bourdieu, 1984). The CA techniques allowed SME owners understand that their management identity was mutable and that leadership behaviours were not confined to the business owner but could be distributed across their team. Such willingness to share knowledge and decision-making with others bodes well for the absorptive capacity of SMEs. The motivational energy resulting from CA techniques enthused participants to retell the sessions to their teams, involving them in taking their ideas forward. The findings contribute to pedagogical literature on how entrepreneurship education techniques encourage participants to experiment with distributed leadership (Huffaker & West, 2005; Jones et al., 2014).

These exercises were particularly powerful in helping participants to share their knowledge with others, and to introduce ways of doing things differently: in the CA exercises, there was nowhere to hide. The findings add to literature that finds theatre techniques in the management classroom (Huffaker & West, 2005) are more successful at embedding academic theories, in this case, entrepreneurship skills of risk-taking and innovation, in participants than traditional methods.

However, CA contains some limitations which were evident in the findings. Participants struggled to reconcile the arts-based approach with their more prosaic daily experiences, occasionally giggling together in corners or even rolling their eyes at what was being asked of them. Furthermore, the physical, embodied nature of the activities was uncomfortable for some participants:

I felt that the drama was a bit too touchy-feely for me, but like I said there was quite a few of us feeling like that. Erm, but actually, whether the learning from that will stay with me I am not sure. (Michael, participant)

While CA is a participatory pedagogy, it is not co-created with participants. The exercises were devised beforehand by the Cultural Animators and, while practitioners were encouraged to be creative within the rules of the games, there was an element in which the techniques were ‘done to' them. Future CA sessions may benefit by drawing from less didactic theatre pedagogies in which participants co-create the learning exercise (Dutton & Rushton, 2022) or where the teaching space becomes ‘unruly' and participants are actively encouraged to critique the logic and premises of the pedagogy (Gallagher & Wessels, 2013).

While the study did not follow up the long-term regional effects of CA, the technique implicitly contributed to the success of the overall 6-month skills development training programme. The programme evaluation concluded that the skills development training, of which CA was a part resulted in the creation of £1.8 million of GVA in the region and 31 net additional new jobs (Hatch Regeneris, 2018). SME owners are less likely than entrepreneurs to innovate in general, and in left-behind regions in particular (Department for Business Innovation & Skills, 2015). The evaluation concluded that the distinctive pedagogical approach contributed to regional development:

The pedagogical approach paid dividends and provided participants with an experience that has enhanced their base level of knowledge, whilst adding value beyond the core curriculum … The implementation of learning and commitment to collaboration across the three cohorts shows that [the skills development project] is having the desired effect and provides a foundation from which to improve individual business outcomes and also the prospects of the Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire [regional] economy. (Hatch Regeneris, 2018, p. 55)

Moving from discussing the economic impact of the programme, to the methodological implications, ethnographic techniques were found to be particularly well suited to studying the workshops and the perspectives of those who participated. The naturalistic approach to research; being there to observe, move in between them or shadow them functioned well alongside opportunistic moments of conversation and unstructured interview. This was appropriate to the fast-moving and creative nature of the workshops. Recording their experiences allowed the author to move from close-up observation of the setting to speculation about the meaning of the interactions, situations, and exchanges. The form of interview used during the events was conversational, while in follow-up interviews, it necessarily became more focused as themes began to form in the fieldnotes. Maintaining the conversational style for as long as possible gave naturalistic access to the ways that participants played with, suspended, or adopted new ways of communicating. The scenes observed were complicated by the playfulness with which participants created an identity, inhabited and interacted with each other and worked to forge ‘outcomes' of various types. These were not simply moments of fun. Participants often seemed to become attached to their temporary identity. The flexibility with which participants inhabited their roles, slipping between performances as part of the task, meant that it was difficult to forge a stable view of their analytic position within a temporary ‘social structure' of the classroom but reflected their willingness to experiment and ‘play'.

The policy implications of the research are that, should regeneration policy continue to task universities with delivering entrepreneurship education through their business schools, it may be beneficial for business schools to employ arts-based pedagogical methods. Universities are, arguably, well placed deliver CA techniques given their co-location of arts and business teaching. This assumes that business schools are willing, as in this case, to embrace unconventional pedagogic methods which are grounded in academic research.

Conclusion

The foregoing case study has answered our research question as to the specific benefits of CA as a pedagogic technique for improving the skills of SME owner-managers. CA, through playful activities, has three significant learning outcomes: the development of social ties; the encouragement of peer learning and the creation of a sense of equality amongst participants. For SME leaders, such exercises and experiences represent a chance to cultivate the creativity, non-hierarchical management style and build the trusting networks which are essential for entrepreneurial activity.

CA, as with other arts-based and unconventional pedagogies, is therefore able to connect entrepreneurship theory to practice. CA generates individual learning outcomes which move towards addressing the policy aim of strengthening SME’s ability to respond to larger, better-resourced incumbents. CA, arguably, may be able to contribute to creating regional networks of practice characterized by knowledge-sharing behaviours. In conclusion, the arts-based nature of CA pedagogy can be used to practical effect with SME owner-managers in economically deprived regions.

I am grateful to Professor Mihaela Kelemen and Dr Lindsay Hamilton for their valuable feedback on earlier versions of this paper. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers whose comments greatly improved the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by European Regional Development Fund.

Notes

1 This article uses the EU definition of SMEs (Commission Recommendation of 6 May, 2003 Concerning the Definition of Micro, Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises, 2008) as an individual firm with a staff headcount of between 1 and 250 employees and a turnover of either up to 50 million Euros or a balance sheet total of less than 43 million Euros.

Appendix 1:

Semi-structured Interview Questions

1. What does innovation mean to you? What are the key behaviours and approaches required to innovate successfully?

2. What does growth mean to you? What are the key behaviours and approaches required to increase growth in an organization?

3. Did the Cultural Animation sessions change your perspective on management? If so, how? Elicit responses relating to how they thought and felt about their management style. To what extent did they perceive their style as being individualistic or collective? Use photographs (the dressing up game) to engage and remind participants.

4. Did the Cultural Animation sessions make you see your organization differently? If so, how? Elicit responses relating to how they perceived their staff, their interactions within and outside the organization. Use photographs (the button game) to engage and remind participants.

5. Did the Cultural Animation session make you feel closer to the group? If so, how? Elicit responses relating to trust-building i.e. what did they think and feel about each other? How did they interact with the group? Use photographs (the silent vignette) to engage and remind participants.

6. How did the objects used (e.g. the stage props such as the hat, the heart-shaped box, the catapult) make you think about leadership? Elicit responses relating to boundary objects? Use photographs (the stage props) to engage and remind participants.

Appendix 2: the cultural animation sessions

1. The Button Game: participants are split randomly into 4 groups. Each group has a facilitator. The theatre practitioner explains the game: each group is to choose one person and then to recreate their organization using a collection of coloured buttons. No further directions are given (e.g. use one colour to depict your sales team; one colour to depict your marketing team). Each group is given a large sheet of paper on which to place the buttons, coloured sticky tape, and pens. The academic expert moves round the groups, providing assistance if required by facilitator. The group is given 20 minutes to create a depiction of their organization.

2. Find an Object: the theatre practitioner prepares the room beforehand with a collection of artefacts (magician’s cloak, bell, rope etc.) designed to encourage participants to think differently about their identity. The artefacts are place on tables around the edge of the room. The theatre practitioner invites participants to enter the room and select an object which best represents themselves. The theatre practitioner then asks participants to explain to the group why they chose the object, and what it represents about themselves.

3. Silent Vignette: the theatre practitioner splits the participants randomly into small groups. Each group is allocated a facilitator. Each group is then asked to develop a silent vignette about leadership. The group is given 20 minutes to develop a vignette. The group then performs the vignette in front of all the other groups. The other groups are asked for their interpretation of the vignette. The performing group finally explains the intended meaning of their vignette.

4. Poetry: on the final day, the theatre practitioner asks participants to write a short poem in a pre-structured form, to describe what they learned from the CA session. Those who wish to then read out the poems to the wider group. Those participants who wish to share their poems with the author. Not all poems were shared, indicating that some may not have completed the exercise, that they felt the meaning of the poems was deeply personal, or that their opinion of the CA sessions was negative. None of the poems shared were deeply critical of the CA sessions.