Preface¶
This book was created to be a somewhat ambitious hack simultaneously addressing three specific needs and one very general need, with the general need at significant variance from the specific ones. It needs to:
serve as a primary textbook for the college course BUS 116: Entrepreneurship.
meet the requirements of the Entrepreneurship - Arlington Student Enterprise Program.
Prepare students for the U.S. Entreprenuership Certification Exam.
(and here comes the significant variance part) accomplish the previous three goals in the context of the solidarity economy instead the extractive economy.
This last goal is the raison d’être for the book, and I imagine it won’t be easy to accomplish.
Our current economy in the United States is deeply rooted in extractive logic, where profit maximization is often posed, implicitely or explicitly, as the single objective of economic activity. I completed 21 graduate credits in an MBA program in order to become credentialed to teach this course, and throughout it I found having to operate within this assumed logic, which I consider morally repugnant, to be a form of mild torture. It struck me that this was the case. We have developed an economic system in which there is no place in either business or economics for people who care about other people. These two domains should be the very places for whose who truly care, since they are where we largely reproduce both our material and social being.
As the current system shows ever increasing signs of impending failure, and as young people today look anxiously at a very uncertain future, we need a new system, rooted in human beings as its core value and in their thriving as its core goal. It is for this reason I am writing this book.
So off into this new world I go, learning along the way. I take inspiration for doing this from computer science professor and textbook author Dr. Reema Thareja, who learned from her grandfather that “if you want to learn a subject, you must write a book on it.”
This book will evolve and develop a lot as the my experience, and the experience of my students from whom I will learn as they learn with me, grows. I release now in the hope that it will be helpful to us in our process, and that it may inspire others who draw inspiration from from our effort to step in and help us with it!