Entrepreneurial intentions of Tshwane University of Technology, Arts and Design students

Despite a high unemployment rate and the unique capabilities that the Arts and Creative industry can be of value to South Africa by stimulating job creation, Arts graduates are still reluctant to consider entrepreneurship as a viable career option, even in an environment of high job scarcity. Thus, the need to develop and transform university Arts graduates into self-sustaining entrepreneurs is more urgent than ever. It is therefore important to know what drives students’ decision towards self-employment, especially in a University of Technology perspective. This descriptive survey design will utilise an adapted measure based on the Theory of Planned Behaviour. A sample of 150 graduates from the Arts and Design graduates took part in the study and data collected were analysed using structural equation modelling (sem). The results indicated that subjective norm is an insignificant predictor of entrepreneurial intention compared to attitudes towards entrepreneurial behaviour and perceived entrepreneurial abilities. Attitude towards entrepreneurship as a career option and perceived entrepreneurial abilities of students’ both positively influence entrepreneurial intentions. Thus, to positively influence Arts students’ intention to become entrepreneurs, it is necessary to change their attitude towards entrepreneurship whilst increasing their entrepreneurial abilities. Future research is recommended to fully evaluate the effectiveness of entrepreneurship education subject components’ impact on students’ attitudes towards entrepreneurship, perceived entrepreneurial abilities and entrepreneurial intentions.


INTRODUCTION
The trend of high unemployment levels globally is a growing concern.Fostering entrepreneurship among students has become an important topic for policy makers and educators as well as researchers (Movahedi and Fathi, 2011).Entrepreneurship is widely considered to be an importantmechanism to drive sustainable economic growth through job creation, innovation and welfare effect (Herrington et al., 2015: 19).For this reason, policy makers are encouraging entrepreneurial activities.For instance, the National Development Programme in South Africa considers entrepreneurial development as the country's priority for socio-economic development.
Latest statistics in South Africa, however, indicate that about 34% of the country's working population (between 15 and 64 years) is unemployed.Of these, a vast *Corresponding author.E-mail: EbewoP1@tut.ac.za.Tel: +27 73 597 6033.
Authors agree that this article remain permanently open access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International License majority (71%) are youths (Statistics South Africa, 2015).Upon closer inspection, these statistics also reveal that among the unemployment youths, university students constitute a significant proportion.This phenomenon, a huge bubble of unemployed university graduates, presented four theoretical challenges, which necessitated further investigation.First, global entrepreneurship monitor (gem) reports as well as observations from other countries such as China, India, Brazil, Russia, USA, and UK seem to suggest that youths tend to have the highest total entrepreneurial activity (tea) within any economy (CISAC, 2014;Herrington et al., 2015).Second, entrepreneurship intention and tea are expected to directly proportional to educational level (Herrington and Turton, 2012;Kolvereid, 1996;Souitaris et al., 2007;Liñán and Chen, 2009;Ndedi, 2013;Sondari, 2014).Third, South Africa has a very supportive entrepreneurial development structure.Fourth, while it might seem sensible to assume that high levels of joblessness will encourage entrepreneurship as the next best career option (Sowetan, 2012), this is not the case.In the face of increasing unemployment and underemployment, only few students graduate get experimental training or internships that do not sustain their career path, only few graduates are engaged in entrepreneurship (Gregory, 2011).However, despite these three, South African university graduates seem not to be exempted from this phenomenon.The current economic situation suggests that 56% (Statistics South Africa, 2015) of university students especially Arts will face unemployment upon completion of their studies.Clearly, South Africa is faced with a problem of enormous proportions.
Consequently, enterprise development and entrepreneurship must be seen as one of the key areas that can unlock growth potential in South Africa graduates in order to address the real concerns of poverty and inequality (Herrington et al., 2015:19).Nevertheless, it is increasingly observed that university graduates lack the interest and expertise to engage in entrepreneurial activity (Makgosa and Ongori, 2012).Accordingly, the GEM reported that 48.2% of the unemployed in South Africa are youth and the lack of skilled people and also the lack of youth interests in entrepreneurial activities is seen as the cause of the rising unemployment among the youth (Herrington et al., 2011).The gem noted that entrepreneurial activity in South Africa, although very low for a developing nation, increased marginally over the last 10 years, but in 2014 dropped by a staggering 34% (from 10.6 to 7%) (Herrington et al., 2015:4).Since business start-ups are often seen as driving force of economic growth and significant job creation, therefore it is necessary to assess and investigate university students' intentions toward entrepreneurship and perceived support that would influence their intention in starting their own business in the future.Lessons from the study will not only enrich the body of knowledge, but will most likely initiate discourse in interdisciplinary are as including education, employment, and entrepreneurship.More importantly, findings from this research are likely to provide useful insights into entrepreneurship education and environment for universities to stimulate Arts and Creative Industries start-ups, policy makers, researchers and the public in general.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
This research utilised a descriptive cross-section design that seeks to provide insights into Arts' students' entrepreneurship intentions and perceptions.The use of a cross-section design was deemed the most suitable as this technique has been used in previous studies.Since the variables involved are well known and have already been tested using reliable and validated scales in the literature, a quantitative approach was considered appropriate (Blumberg et al., 2011;Babbie and Mouton, 2009).
Simple random sampling is utilised (Malhotra, 2010).The choice for simple random sampling is influenced by the fact that a representative group is easily obtainable; the possibility of classification error is eliminated, least expensive and least timeconsuming.The students that participated in the study were Bachelor Degree (B-Tech) students registered for the 2015 academic year at the Faculty of Arts, Tshwane University of Technology.The choice of the sample of final year B-Tech students is mostly influenced by the fact that final year students are considered to have gone through the entire university syllabus and so can be assessed for the influence of entrepreneurship education on their entrepreneurial intentions, and for the fact that, as graduates, they are expected to either seek gainful employment or start businesses and so are likely to have considered and developed entrepreneurship intentions.Using university students to test entrepreneurial intention is appropriate as the findings can contribute to entrepreneurship education policies and holds implications for public decision-makers who develop support programmes for entrepreneurship (Nieuwenhuizen and Swanepoel, 2015).
The primary data collected from research participants measured the conceptual model of research variables of three immediate antecedents of entrepreneurial intention.The research model and hypotheses were tested using structural equation modelling.In order to perform the selected statistical multivariate tests, the data needed to be reduced or summarised into smaller sets of manageable dimensions or latent variables using factor analysis (Pallant, 2010).To satisfactorily conduct factor analysis, the following factorability tests were performed (Field, 2009): (1) adequate sample size, (2) KMO criterion, and (3) correlations tests (Table 1).

Arts, cultural and the creative industries
There is a global shift to economic opportunities from non-traditional sources instigated by developments emerging from the 2008 global financial crisis (Scherdin and Zander, 2011;Bonnafous-Boucher et al., 2011;Meisiek and Haefliger, 2011) and the cultural and creative industries are widely recognized as a highly dynamic part of many economies which seems to be more resilient to economic recessions relevant to other sectors (UNCTAD, 2010).This has resulted in the offshoot of "cultural and creative economy/creative industries" as a new paradigm of entrepreneurship, which has now received recognition as engines of economic growth and development (Venturelli, 2000;Howkins, 2001;UNESCO, 2005;UNCTAD, 2010;South Africa, 2012;African Union, 2015).As such, Arts Entrepreneurship is a relatively new topic of research in arts  (Klamer, 2011) and has become a topic of high interest in debates around innovation and growth in the context of the cultural and creative industries (Florida, 2012) and is an emerging field (Fillis and Rentschler, 2010;Lounsbury and Glynn, 2001) in the wider entrepreneurship scholarly business agenda (Dess and Lumpkin, 2005).Since Arts are considered to be the foundation of the cultural and creative industries (Throsby, 2007;Hesmondhalgh, 2002), this study combines Arts and Entrepreneurship ("Artrepreneurship") to represent the Arts and Culture sector and it is the process of taking calculated risk to exploit one's (individuals, communities, networks) artist (creative, cultural and arts) resources to create value.Thus, Cultural and Creative entrepreneurs are involved in a process of integrating the artistic freedom as an immaterial, content-oriented value, and entrepreneurial freedom as a material value, supportive to immaterial (cultural) values (Hagoort, 2007) in organising and managing creative activity in a commercial manner (HKU, 2010).Chang and Wyszomirski (2015: 25) agree that Arts entrepreneurship is a management process through which cultural workers seek to support their creativity and autonomy, advance their capacity for adaptability, and create artistic as well as economic and social value.

Entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial intentions
For the purpose of this study, entrepreneurship is defined as the "process of starting and continuing to expand new businesses" (Hart, 2003: 5).To better understand the entrepreneurial process, several researchers (Liñán et al., 2010;Liñán and Chen, 2009;Forbes, 2005) have studied individuals' entrepreneurial intentions.Entrepreneurial intentions refer to tendencies to engage in entrepreneurial behaviour (Ajzen, 1991(Ajzen, , 2012)).Forming an intention to develop an entrepreneurial career is the first step in the often long process of venture creation (Gartner et al., 1994).Theories that predict entrepreneurial intentions include the Theory of Planned Behaviour (Azjen, 1991); Shapero and Sokol's (1982) Theory of the Entrepreneurial Event, the model of implementing entrepreneurial ideas (Bird, 1988), and the Maximisation of Expected Utility model (Douglas and Shepherd, 2002).Across all these cognition-based theories, an individual's perceptions, or cognitions, serve as the primary explanatory mechanism for the formation of behavioural intentions.However, the Theory of Planned Behaviour (Ajzen, 1991) has proved to be a robust model of behavioural intention that accounts well for factors in decision making.In contrast to the other models, there is strong evidence that the Theory of Planned Behaviour predicts a wide range of behaviours in addition to entrepreneurship (Iakovleva et al., 2011: 356) and is utilised in this study.
According to the theory, intentions are the immediate antecedent of behaviour.These intentions to act are determined by three variables: attitude toward the specific behaviour (only specific attitudes toward the behaviour can be expected to predict that behaviour); subjective norms (beliefs about how people, the decision-maker cares about, will view the behaviour in question); and perceived behavioural control (which refers to people's perceptions of their ability to perform a given behaviour) (Ajzen, 2011: 71;Ajzen, 2012: 439;Kolvereid, 1996: 49).In combination, attitude towards the behaviour, subjective norm, and perception of behavioural control lead to the formation of a behavioural intention (Ajzen, 2002).For this thesis, entrepreneurial intention refers to an individual plan to start a new business (Engle et al., 2010;Liñán and Chen, 2009;Krueger et al., 2000).

Research framework and hypotheses
To answer the research question, "To what extent does the antecedents of entrepreneurial intention (attitude towards entrepreneurship, subjective norm and perceived behavioural control) predict entrepreneurial intention amongst Arts and Design students?the conceptual frame presented in Figure 1 presents the constructs upon which the study was based on, and indicates the relationships between these constructs.Based on the reviewed literature, entrepreneurship intention in this study was the dependent variable, attitude towards entrepreneurship, subjective norms and perceived entrepreneurial abilities was considered as independent variables.
Based on the literature review and conceptual model, the following hypotheses were formulated: H1: Students' attitude towards entrepreneurship as a career option is directly related to entrepreneurial intentions.H2: Students' perceived entrepreneurial abilities are directly related to entrepreneurial intentions.H3: Students' subjective norm is directly related to entrepreneurial intentions.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Data for this study was collected from final year B-Tech students from Tshwane University of Technology, Faculty of Arts.The total sample size is 150 respondents, proportionately represented as originating from Department of Performing Arts 30 (20%), Drama and Film 37 (24.7%),Entertainment Technology 10 (6.7%), Fashion Design 18 (12%), Applied Fine Arts 23 (15.3%), and Visual Communication 32 (21.3%).Some, 52% (78) of the respondents are male and 48% (72) are female.
The majority of respondents (88%) are below 25 years, 10% are 26 to 35 years and 2% are older than 36 years.Most respondents agreed to statements regarding attitude towards entrepreneurship as a career option.Only 38.7% of the respondents disagreed that among the various career options, they would be anything but an entrepreneur, however, to whether being an entrepreneur would give them great satisfaction, 70.7% agreed.With regards to subjective norm, 78.7% respondents indicated that their friends would approve of their decision to start a business, and 69.3% agreed that their friends value entrepreneurship as a career option, with only 4.6 and 6% disagreeing, respectively.Only 66% of respondents agreed that their immediate family values entrepreneurship as a career option.In spite of this, 76% respondents indicated that their immediate family would approve of their decision to start a business.
With a minimum mean of 3.77, most respondents agreed to the statements regarding their perceived entrepreneurial abilities.In relation to marketing and networking, 64.3% agreed that they believe they can conduct market analyses related to starting a new business and 75.4% believed they can develop business relationships with key people.Respondents also positively evaluated statements relating to new product development, as 78% agreed that they believe they can create ways to improve existing products for a new business, and 76.6% believed they can create products or services that fulfil customers' unmet needs.They also responded favourably to their entrepreneurial competencies; 74% agreed that they believe they can successfully develop new businesses, which are similar to responses when asked whether they believe they can identify new business opportunities (72.7%).Lastly, 64.7% of respondents indicated that they can identify potential new venture funding.Only 49.3% of respondents have seriously considered becoming an entrepreneur.However, 65.4% of respondents note that they will make every effort to establish their own business.Despite this, only 58% of respondents (Figure 2) indicated that they are determined to create a business venture within the next 12 months.This percentage increases to 75% for a 5 year period and falls to 57% for 10 years.
The model fit was assessed by Chi-square and Normed ²/df value, coupled with other model fit indices like Comparative Fit Index (cfi), Tucker-Lewis Index (tli), and Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (rmsea).The recommended cut off value for the goodness of fit indices was based on Hu and Bentler (1999) and later Hair et al. (2010) recommendations.Following common practice, acceptable model fit is indicated by value greater than 0.90 for CFI and TLI, and a value of less than 0.08 for rmsea.However, a cut-off value close to 0.95 for tli, cfi; and a cut-off value close to 0.06 for rmsea are needed to support that there is a relatively good fit between the hypothesised model and the observed data (Hu and Bentler, 1999;Hair et al., 2010).In addition, the srmr (standardized root mean square residual) <=0.05 means good fit.The smaller the srmr, the better the model fit.SRMR = 0 indicates perfect fit.A value less than 0.08 is considered good fit.

Perceived Entrepreneurial Abilities
Subjective Norms to determine a model that better fit the data.It is worth noting that the model fit was improved using a conservative strategy, that is, none of the error terms was allowed to covary.
According to all fit indices, the revised model (Table 3) reported better values than the conceptual model.Although both models accounted for sizeable covariation, the revised model is significantly different in terms of its ability to account for covariation when compared with the conceptual model.The chi-square test of difference as well as the reported fit indices demonstrates convincingly that the revised model is superior.The revised model resulted in Chi-Square: 0.19, with tli of 1.054, rmsea = 0.000, srmr = 0.007 and cd (r 2 ): 0.274.The cfi was 1.000, which indicates that 100% of the covariation in the data could be reproduced by the hypothesised model.
The structural model output in Tables 2 and 3 as well as the results indicate that Hypotheses 1 and 2 are generally supported.Attitude towards entrepreneurship as a career option and perceived entrepreneurial abilities of students' both positively influence entrepreneurial intentions.
Thus, both Hypotheses 1 and 2 can be accepted at a 0.000≤p<0.045significance level.These findings correspond with past research (Ajzen, 2012;Movahedi and Fathi, 2011;Liñán and Chen, 2009;Souitaris et al., 2007).This confirms that attitudes can be viewed as the stepping stone to entrepreneurial intentions.Thus, to increase the level of entrepreneurial initiative among students, it is necessary to increase positive attitudes towards entrepreneurship.Research has shown that an individual's behaviour is highly influenced by confidence in their ability to perform.The behaviour necessary to be successful (Swann et al., 2007).The study results correspond to past empirical studies (Chen et al., 1998;Zhao et al., 2005;Forbes, 2005;Krueger et al., 2000) that individuals with high entrepreneurial self-efficacy are more likely to be entrepreneurs than those with low entrepreneurial self-efficacy.Therefore, the perceptions of students as to whether or not they intend to start a business are heavily influenced by whether they think they have the necessary capability to do so (Herrington et al., 2015).
Subjective norms yielded non-significant results (p = 0.667) when regressed on entrepreneurial intention.Therefore, there is no direct relationship between subjective norms and entrepreneurial intention, which corresponds to findings in past research (Autio et al., 2001;Krueger et al., 2000;Liñán and Chen, 2009).However, other studies found a significant impact of subjective norms on intentions (Engle et al., 2010;Kolvereid, 1996;Kolvereid and Isaksen, 2006;Takachev and Kolvereid, 1999;Alsos et al., 2006).Liñán and Chen (2009) proposed that one explanation may be different in the measurement of subjective norms across studies.Notwithstanding, the revised model suggests that attitude towards entrepreneurship and perceived

Table 1 .
PCA loadings of variable constructs and Cronbach's alpha for the sub-scales.

Table 3 .
Structural Equation Model: Revised Conceptual Model.