This article concerns the rise of young entrepreneurship education programs in 1980s Sweden, which entered schools surprisingly early and quickly, backed by organized Swedish business. The increased popularity of entrepreneurship education toward the end of the twentieth century in many European welfare states is usually associated with a shift toward neoliberal, market-oriented, policies. It is argued here that an important reason for young entrepreneurship’s success was its ability to connect with the Swedish tradition of cooperation and democratic decision making, in combination with values such as individualism and competition. A case in point is the surprising compatibility between progressive pedagogical ideas and “neoliberal” entrepreneurialism. The article is based on a study of Ung Företagsamhet (Young Entrepreneurship, henceforth UF), the Swedish version of the American organization Junior Achievement, and the ambition of the consumer cooperative movement’s think tank, Koopi, to offer a different kind of entrepreneurship education. In the analysis, the concept of “the entrepreneurial self” is applied to these two different programs, and the results show how they clashed, but also overlapped, in ways that help explain the success of UF. The article is a contribution to our understanding of how entrepreneurship discourse emerged and manifested itself in everyday environments in the late twentieth century, and as such also contributes to the history of Nordic neoliberalism.

Cooperative departments and organizations were a ubiquitous but rarely studied aspect of British colonial governance in the twentieth century. The Co-operative College in Britain provided specialized training in colonial cooperation to students from across the British Empire. The cooperative movement was a key part of the emergence of regimes of development in the decades between the 1920s and 1960s, reflecting their emphasis on modular solutions deployed by experts in an increasingly homogenizing ‘developing world’. However, the colonial and post-colonial students at the Co-operative College were also critical of colonialism and capitalism, participating in the anti-colonial internationalist effort to create a more just post-imperial world. As post-colonial governments retained cooperative structures, the former students of the Co-operative College used the movement as a counter-balance to the larger forces of nationalism and neo-colonialism.