I finally got the acceptance letter for this year’s McGill-Cornell Conference on Institutions and Entrepreneurship, held at McGill University in Montréal. This will be a summer treat! (and fortunately it is after the Swedish party de rigueur - midsummer). I wonder what running/hiking opportunities there are in Quebec – too bad they did not think to match up with the ski season…
I regrettfully missed last year’s conference which included highlights such as Shon Hiatt and Wesley Sine’s paper on entrepreneurship in dangeous places (Colombia) and Martin Ruef’s investigation of why the post-Civil War American South suppressed entrepreneurship.
I am set to present my preliminary work on entrepreneurship in the emerging sector of Swedish Voucher Schools – an organizational population that has grown from a politically endangered trickle in the mid-1980s to a vibrant body of schools ranging from parent-organized rural schools with a collective action flavor to a number of increasingly profitable (and contestable) multi-unit organizations noted on the Stock Exchange. The cause for this explosion of independent (voucher) schools is a radical and interesting educational experiment that is internationally unique - except for attempts in Chile, Colombia and some U.S. States like Ohio to introduce vouchers, traditionally welfare-oriented Sweden was the first country to introduce a national voucher scheme in 1992. And except for the research by economist and educational scienctists on educational outcomes of the vocher – very little research has actually been done on this phenomenon. More news will follow…
