A story within stories: Using analytic frameworks to move from individual to collective storying in narrative analysis of academic entrepreneurship in the USA

Academic entrepreneurship is a process that an academic entrepreneur envisions to find innovative solutions that bring value to the immediate surroundings, broader education system, and society at large. We present a narrative analysis of individual stories enhanced with theoretical insights to show the structuring of a collective narrative of academic entrepreneurship and the meanings it conveys. Participating twelve college leaders in executive positions in the for-profit higher education industry in the USA, invited as information rich cases from personal networks, were powerful storytellers, comfortable with sharing representative anecdotes and shaping the strategic story for their organizations. Their stories were gathered during two rounds of in-depth interviews. Interpretivist positionality and constructivist epistemology underpinned our analysis with assumptions about researcher and participant as co-constructing meaning of the social phenomenon of academic entrepreneurship. In this co-construction, we documented the role of theoretical frameworks in guiding the theming of participant stories to reveal our structuring of a collective narrative of academic entrepreneurship and its subsequent function in meaning making. The collected stories were analyzed by applying two cycles of coding to organize data into categories narrated and to produce data displays. Reflexive analysis proceeded with theming by considering how the narrative categories from individual leader stories interlock with theoretical descriptions from prior literature to compose a storyline. The initial storyline centered on serving students and focusing on strategies that help students become professionals. Application of analytic framework from previous literature added a description of the entrepreneurial institutional culture as: “service-oriented” around student needs, “fast-paced” and “metric-oriented” to stay in business, and engaging stakeholders for expansion and development. Thus, the analytic framework supplied the principles of entrepreneurial higher education institutions and the pathways to becoming more entrepreneurial, facilitating data interpretation and construction of a consolidated story of academic entrepreneurship within individual stories of leader experiences.