A CRITICAL REALIST ACCOUNT OF THE POOR ENGAGEMENT IN BUSINESS OF JUNIOR ACHIEVEMENT (JA) HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES

Abstract

An entrepreneurship programme offered to high school students by an organisation called Junior
Achievement (JA) was introduced in Eswatini in 2006 with the aim of producing young entrepreneurs.
Between 2015 and 2017 twenty-six (26) schools enrolled in the programme with a total of 6616 learners
participating. Upon completion, less than 65 (1%) of those enrolled started their own businesses after
school. Drawing on critical realism, the study sought to establish what constrain the JA graduates from
engaging in business. To do this, the Snowball sampling technique was used to select 20 participants from
the 2015 to 2018 class. In-depth semi-structured interviews and observations were used to gather data.
The Archer’s concepts of culture, structure, agency and a retroductive process of identifying what is cultural,
structural, and agential on the data were used as the tool for analysis. The results show that the JA
graduates’ involvement in business was mainly constrained by culture in that cultural mechanisms were
mostly constraining rather than enabling on the JA graduates. It was therefore recommended that, in the
curriculum design of the JA secondary school programme, views, beliefs, ideas and principles of
participants are identified early enough so as to counteract certain constraining powers as well as
reinforcing their enabling powers in learning and teaching processes.
KEYWORDS: Abduction; critical realism; entrepreneurship; retroduction; social realism