Papers presented by Jeremy Goodwin since 2019

2024 Providence, Rhode Island

"Developing Entrepreneurs: Achievement Motivation Training, Race, and the Origins of Modern Entrepreneurship Education"

Abstract:

In the late 1950s, the Harvard psychologist David C. McClelland began publishing research that purported to show an empirical link between economic development and a psychological trait that he dubbed the “need for achievement.” Specifically, McClelland argued that the “need for achievement” was a marker of entrepreneurial potential; as such, underdeveloped countries and communities could spur growth by cultivating this psychological drive for success among their inhabitants. McClelland was certainly not the first to suggest that an entrepreneurial mindset was necessary for economic development. By arguing that entrepreneurship could be taught, however, he laid the groundwork for a new wave of programs that sought to use entrepreneurship education to solve entrenched social ills like urban poverty. In this paper, I begin by tracing the contours of McClelland’s thought and its implications for entrepreneurship education. I then examine the influence of McClelland’s theory in various efforts to revitalize economically devastated communities in the postwar US. I specifically highlight the role of consulting firms associated with McClelland—such as the Behavioral Sciences Center (BSC) and the Massachusetts Achievement Trainers (MAT)—in promoting his vision of entrepreneurial development to African American communities. In doing so, I demonstrate that social scientific discussions about the nature of entrepreneurship are an important, yet understudied, aspect of the “Black Capitalism” movement that emerged in the late 1960s. Furthermore, I argue that the postwar advent of “achievement motivation” provides a crucial historical grounding for understanding the subsequent turn toward entrepreneurship in business education in the 1970s and 1980s.

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2023 Detroit, MI, United States

"From Economic Literacy to Entrepreneurial Literacy: The National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship and Business Conservatism in the United States, 1987-1999"

Abstract:

In the early 1990s, the MCI Communications Corporation began searching for a way to improve its community relations programs and find its own niche in the world of corporate giving. The company’s solution was to take on a novel problem: entrepreneurial illiteracy. To tackle this issue, MCI announced a partnership with the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), promising to provide the fledgling nonprofit with both funding and access to a communications network dubbed the MCI Entrepreneurial Internet. In this paper, I examine the history of NFTE and its quixotic quest to solve urban poverty by inculcating entrepreneurship among young Americans from disadvantaged backgrounds. I argue that NFTE, which was founded in 1987 by Steve Mariotti, represented a new development in a much longer history of efforts to improve the image of business by appealing to young people. As historian Elizabeth Fones-Wolf has noted, businesses in the 1950s began using economic literacy programs to “sell free-enterprise” in American schools. Funded by corporations like MCI and Koch Industries, NFTE certainly continued this business tradition of targeting the capitalist gospel at America’s youth. However, by centering the theoretical and practical promise of “entrepreneurial literacy,” NFTE updated the idea of free enterprise for the neoliberal moment in which it emerged. For Mariotti and NFTE, entrepreneurship not only promised to get kids excited about capitalism, but also held the potential to be a conservative solution to the perennial problems of poverty and urban economic underdevelopment.

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