Abstract
Entrepreneurship has become a grand term in government policy as a method to curb unemployment and joblessness amongst youth. Developing countries battling slow economic growth, graduate unemployment and lack of jobs have since devised entrepreneurship policies with hopes to address these challenges. However, these efforts have fallen short in recognising the issues of structure and agency in deciding such policy. This paper asks the question: What are the policy inferences on youth entrepreneurship based on its policy contents and statements? And the objective of this study is to analyse the key policy views on entrepreneurship. The literature review on structure and agency is explored in this paper where the political and individual agency are engaged. The methodological approach is a qualitative documentary analysis of two policies namely the National Youth Policy and National Development Plan. A mini-case study of a South African University is also presented in the paper. The findings show that students remain with little agency to none when it comes to the promotion of entrepreneurship on campuses. This is because the structure of policy enactment takes a top-down approach that suppresses other views that are not directly promoting entrepreneurship to deal with unemployment and joblessness amongst youth, in particular students and graduates. The key discussions of the paper show that the South African university is used by the state to drive policy promotions of entrepreneurship. The discussion exposes both structural and agency issues condoning the use of entrepreneurship to responsibilise youths through policy that they should create jobs via entrepreneurship. Whilst this view is common and popular, this paper challenges researchers and scholarship on entrepreneurship to further investigate the potential role of policy in enabling entrepreneurship amongst students other than to simply coerce them to the practice. The original contribution of this study is that it provides a different approach to entrepreneurship research showing the downside of entrepreneurship policy as opposed to research that generally promotes it.