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This paper aims to explore the “Fellowship-Tale” as an alternative tale type for narrating entrepreneur stories. The authors illustrate this by telling the Pilgrim business story. It is common for the deeds of men who founded businesses to be narrated as heroic entrepreneur stories. Such fairy tales are dominant narratives in Western culture but do not resonate with everyone, particularly women. Consequentially, many businesswomen do not engage in the rhetoric of enterprise.

The qualitative, analytic approaches adopted in this study include narratology, semiotics and aesthetics. This complementary triage helps us appreciate the complexity of entrepreneur stories while unravelling the nuances of the tale. It also permits triangulation of the data gathered from an in-depth interview of the respondent with newspaper and Internet research.

The research indicates that “fellowship-tales” provide a viable and credible alternative to the fairy-tale rendition common in entrepreneur and business stories.

An obvious limitation is that one merely swaps one narrative framework for another, albeit it offers dissenting voices a real choice.

This study has the potential to be far reaching because at a practical level, it allows disengaged entrepreneurs and significant others the freedom to exercise their individual and collective voices within a framework of nested stories.

A key contribution is to challenge the hegemony of a dominant and embedded social construct allowing new understandings to emerge via a novel combination of research methodologies.

Despite the healthy growth in studies and publications in recent years in relation to the expanding paradigm of gender and entrepreneurship, and notwithstanding the success of this very journal, from the perspective of the author, the field remains overly dominated by a focus on female and women's entrepreneurship. Conversely, there are few studies on masculinity and entrepreneurship and the role of men in shaping gendered entrepreneurship. In addition, few male entrepreneurship scholars choose to write in this niche and specialised field. Indeed, there is a discernible imbalance in the literature in relation to what can be termed as “silent” and “silenced” masculinities. In this reflection, the study aims to look back at his career as an entrepreneurship and gender scholar, considering why this situation exists.

This is an invited, reflective essay written in an auto-ethnographic style containing personal viewpoints.

In the feminist-inspired gender and entrepreneurship literature, “Patriarchy” and the entrepreneurial “strawman” are blamed for the problems associated with the “silent” and silenced female entrepreneur. Much of the gendered literature concentrates on gendered female stereotypes and in particular on negative elements of these. The main finding is that the common assumption of the female as proxy for gender has, to date, prevented the consideration of the full spectrum of gendered identities. These issues are explored, and a call is made for more in-depth research into masculinity and entrepreneurship.

This reflection presents some novel thoughts on how to advance the debate on gender scholarship and in particular masculinity.

As one of the eight key competencies of life-long learning strategies identified by the European Union and the difficulties in enhancing the “sense of initiative and entrepreneurship”, the purpose of this paper is to propose a co-production approach to overcome several concerns.

An exploratory approach is used to analyse a single case study based on the EntreComp progression model and on a pedagogical approach consistent with the philosophy of learning through creating value for others.

The study introduces best novel practices that help enhance entrepreneurial education in primary school by engaging multiple local stakeholders in co-producing education. The case mainly shows that a co-production approach is appropriate to overcome challenges and assists policymakers to identify specific actions and make investments in entrepreneurship education (EE) at the primary level.

Theoretically, the study contributes to literature on entrepreneurial education and co-production studies. The main drawback of the study is its explorative analysis of a single case.

For practitioners, the research proposes stakeholder involvement as key to co-producing EE in primary schools, implying that policymakers should identify resources for projects and other similar initiatives.

The study elucidates the relevance of co-production approach to ensure early EE in school.