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This paper investigates how academic teachers engage in identity work and make sense of entrepreneurship and academia in an entrepreneurship training programme.

By employing a sensemaking approach, the paper inductively analyses materials from a business idea development camp organised for academic teachers.

In collective sensemaking during the camp, non-academic facilitators strongly influenced the reflection-in-experience via normative ideas of entrepreneurship and their othering of entrepreneurship from academic work. In their post-camp individual essays, the academic teachers reflect-on-experience and draw parallels between entrepreneurship and academic work constructing sameness.

Longitudinal research is needed in identity work and sensemaking among academic teachers in relation to entrepreneurship.

Universities need to offer arenas for teachers and other faculty to support identity work and sensemaking.

This study generates new understanding of how academic teachers engage in identity work and make sense of entrepreneurship in training when interacting with others. It underscores the importance of time needed for reflection-on-action.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the construction of master narratives related to age, gender and entrepreneurship in the context of entrepreneurship education (EE) in Finnish higher education (HE). This is important as master narratives create and limit our understanding of entrepreneurship.

The data comprises 30 student interviews generated in one multidisciplinary Finnish university. The data were analyzed using narrative positioning analysis to examine what kinds of master narratives are (re)constructed in relation to age and entrepreneurship by Finnish university students and how gender intertwines with age in the construction of entrepreneurship.

Three aged and gendered master narratives were identified: (1) youthful, masculine, startup/growth entrepreneurship; (2) middle-aged feminine, expert entrepreneurship and (3) modest, feminine, senior entrepreneurship. The paper makes visible aged and gendered master narratives and cultural norms related to entrepreneurship in the context of EE and HE. Authors argue that the youthful, masculine startup/growth entrepreneurship is the hegemonic master narrative in the context of EE in Finnish HE. Femininity is mostly excluded from this master narrative.

The paper contributes to critical literature on entrepreneurship as an aged as well as gendered phenomenon in the context of EE and HE. So far research on entrepreneurship as an aged and gendered phenomenon in EE and in the context of HE has been virtually non-existent. Moreover, the theoretical and methodological focus on master narratives in entrepreneurship and EE literature is novel. The master narratives identified in the study show that HE students are not addressed equally in relation to entrepreneurship, but aged and gendered hierarchies are sustained.