Beyond “Do as I Say”: The Invisible Pedagogy and Implicit Modeling of Entrepreneurial Agency

Abstract

This study examined the linguistic signature of entrepreneurship education and how it differs from instruction in other disciplines. Applying Bernstein’s (1975) concepts of visible pedagogy (the explicit transmission of knowledge) and invisible pedagogy (the implicit modeling of a disposition through discourse), the current work presents a systematic linguistic analysis comparing entrepreneurship lectures to a cross-disciplinary baseline. Results revealed a distinctive dual signature. Visible pedagogy was evident in the high-frequency transmission of capital and finance-related content ( d = 0.40), while invisible pedagogy was evident in discourse patterns that model an agentic stance: a strong inclination toward the first-person perspective ( d = 0.63) and frequent use of agentic verbs ( d = 0.19). Smaller but consistent effects ( d ≅ 0.10–0.16) showed entrepreneurship lectures were positively associated with concrete positive social outcomes and negatively associated with abstract moral principles, alongside a greater emphasis on future-oriented language. These findings characterize entrepreneurship education as a discourse environment in which invisible pedagogy models agentic action while visible pedagogy explicitly addresses the capital knowledge entrepreneurial practice requires.