Educational and Economic Orders

This article analyses the conditions under which educational French actors appropriate and use a pedagogic innovation (mini-companies in secondary schools) intended to develop the pupils’ entrepreneurial skills. In contrast to research developped in a Foucauldian perspective, seeing this type of pedagogy as an instrument of production of a new ethos fitted to a world valuing interindividual competition, the article, based on an inquiry conducted in schools, shows that these projects, especially designed for pupils from working class or middle-class backgrounds, are primarily mobilized to serve school purposes. They tend less to acclimatize the pupils to entrepreneurial thinking and behaviour, than to familiarize them with the places assigned to them in the school system, and therefore with the places that the production system reserves to them.