Mapping the aliran of the academic discipline of entrepreneurship: A ...

epistemological approaches. While these theorists are commonly regarded as being from
different schools of academic thought, I have found little dissonance in utilising bo th of
their theories and my rationale for mixing these theoretical schools is given in section 3.2.
1.2.1.03 Foucault devoted a great deal of his College de France lecture series in
1981-1982 to a series of discussion on these two knowledges – connaissance knowledges
and savoir knowledges. The high significance accorded these knowledges by Foucault is
apparent in the final paragraph of ‘The hermeneutics of the subject’ (the book that presents
that lecture series), where he describes understanding the relationship be tween the two
knowledges as the “root of the challenge of Western thought to philosophy as discourse
and tradition” [Foucault, 2005, p487].
1.2.1.04 A further written, but uns poke n final question in the lecture was the phrase
“And if the task left by the Aufklarung (from Hegel’s [2003] ‘Phenomenology of Mind’) is
to ask on what our system of obj ective knowledge rests, it is also to ask on what the
modality of the experience of the self rests” [Foucault, 2005, footnote, p487]. It is this
issue that is an underlying crux to this dissertation – the basis of the ‘system of objective
knowledge’ (as in connaissance knowledges) and ‘the experience of the self’ (as in savoir
knowledges) in the de velop ment of the pa rticular discipline of entrepreneurship.
1.2.1.05 Sheridan Smith, the editor of Foucault’s ‘The archaeology of knowledge’,
relates connaissance knowledges to disciplines. “Connaissances refers here to a particular
corpus of knowledge, a particular discipline – biology or economics, for example. Savoir,
which is usually de fined as knowledge in general, the totality of connaissances, is used by
Foucault in an underlying, rather than an overall way” [Foucault, 2004, footnote pp16-17].
1.2.1.06 Foucault offers a further elaboration: “By connaissances I mean the relation
of the subject to the obj ect and the for mal rules that govern it. Savoir refers to he
conditions that are necessary in a particular period for this or that object to be given
connaissance and for that enunciation to be formulated” [Foucault, 2004, p16].
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