The Orderly Entrepreneur is a study of the creation, implementation and real life implications of a six-year mandatory course in entrepreneurship taught in Rwanda's secondary schools. Honeyman identifies this course as a reflection of the post-developmental state that Rwanda has increasingly become, that is, a state which safeguards the government's role as a regulator and arbiter in society, while reducing its role as a guarantor of citizen welfare and livelihoods. Theoretically, Honeyman interprets Rwanda's entrepreneurship education policy as a Foucaultian technology of power meant to reshape citizens’ political subjectivity away from alleged attitudes of dependence and towards an idealised disposition of regulated self-reliance. Honeyman also uses Bourdieu's theorising of social practice to explain how the entrepreneurship education policy, created and enforced without any needs assessment or baseline study, corresponds to Rwandan policymakers’ shared habitus where neoliberalism is a doxa whose virtues speak for themselves. Yet, Honeyman also highlights how presumably well-anchored policies may change in unforeseen ways as they are subjected to policy-makers, implementers and target groups of different communities of practice, something she calls ‘negotiated social learning’. This connects to perhaps the book's greatest strength: Honeyman's rich and detailed ethnographic account of how a particular policy – from formulation to its practical effects – is continually recreated in and through human action, interaction and imagination. Her fieldwork, which commenced in 2008, shortly after the policy was publically announced, includes two years of participant observation of the curriculum development process and interviews with policymakers and curriculum developers, one year of interviews and observations in 11 different entrepreneurship classes in five schools in the Kigali area, focus group discussions and questionnaires with about 400 students, and a longitudinal tracer study that followed some 100 students up to three years after they graduated from lower and upper secondary school.

Honeyman draws to attention the ‘underlying paradox’ of the entrepreneurship course: how ‘calls for greater entrepreneurial self-reliance and creativity jostle elbow-to-elbow with expectations of increased governmental regulation and controls’ (p. 5). In the classrooms, this paradox manifests itself in the way creativity and independent thinking is taught using traditional ‘chalk and talk’ pedagogy that rather promotes order and discipline. Out of the classroom, students trying to put their entrepreneurial skills in practice encounter high taxation and tightening regulation that make small-scale entrepreneurship increasingly hard. The latter contradiction becomes apparent among Honeyman's most disadvantaged informants – the only ones actually practicing entrepreneurship – who struggled to raise money to pay for school fees and costs, but who couldn't afford to start any formalised business. Interestingly, Honeyman finds that these youth ‘were not going to school in order to become entrepreneurial; they were entrepreneurs in order to go to school’ (p. 240). Though she does not discuss the point explicitly, Honeyman's study says something important about business regulation as a regulator of access to education in times where costs of ‘free education’ remain (too) high for many Rwandans. While the least advantaged youth in Honeyman's study have attended at least three years of secondary school, the majority of young Rwandans never make it to secondary school at all. What would their educational prospects look like if entrepreneurial opportunities were greater? Though the book does not tell us about the larger landscape of government teaching of entrepreneurship in Rwanda, it is likely that entrepreneurship education reaches many out-of-school youths too, for example through local sensitisation activities, public radio and civic education initiatives. Honeyman's book feeds my curiosity to know more about how the majority of Rwanda's youth – of larger number but lesser fortune – face the post-developmental state's efforts to create orderly entrepreneurs.