To Örebro University

Entrepreneurship scholarship faces challenges related to diverse populations, striving to balance inclusivity with the recognition of unique entrepreneurial identities. Applying optimal distinctiveness theory, we explore the relationship between belongingness and uniqueness in entrepreneurship research. Catalyzed by Bakker and McMullen's 2023 article on inclusivity in entrepreneurship, we utilized natural language processing to examine responses about inclusive entrepreneurship from 29 scholars dedicated to marginalized populations. Findings suggest that employing varied research methods and integrating structural and epistemological considerations can enhance our understanding of entrepreneurial heterogeneity. We advocate for entrepreneurship research that values individual experiences while promoting inclusive practices, highlighting the need for evolving scholarly paradigms to reflect entrepreneurial differences.

Entrepreneurship is often understood as acting boldly on the market, broadcasting one’s endeavours in persuasive success stories. We, in contrast, seek to understand less flamboyant entrepreneurial practices by examining the creativity and innovations pursued by a gendered and marginalized professional group in the public sector. Through an ethnographic study of hospital pharmacists during the COVID-19 pandemic, we seek to understand how pharmacists ‘do’ entrepreneuring at work, what practices they engage in, and how they act creatively, sometimes breaking with role expectations, and seldom receiving recognition for what they are doing. In the article, we refer to this as silent entrepreneuring – a form of entrepreneuring that simultaneously complies with and refuses entrepreneurial ideals. By adopting two contrasting but complementary analytical positions, we examine the often unspoken activities of pharmacists and how they form practices that both support and contradict each other. We conclude by suggesting that the concept of silent entrepreneuring enables a broadened understandi of organizational entrepreneurship that calls for greater sensitivity towards the different forms that entrepreneuring may take.

In this article, we explore the multiple facets of academic projectified selves, i.e. how academics relate to the culture of projectification in neoliberal society, crafting themselves and their careers. We focus our inquiry on the highly gendered character of projectified selves and uncover differences in how the subject position of the projectified self is invoked in academic work, as well as the tensions inherent in such identity work. Through a qualitative interview study involving senior lecturers, both women and men, in a social science discipline across five Swedish universities, we identify three variations of the academic projectified self. We find that they navigate tensions between individual liberties and organisational limitations; that they experience recognition as transitory and unreliable; and that attachment to work is often located in ‘micro-spaces’ rather than in work as a whole. The analysis emphasises the vulnerability of the academic projectified self – in constant need of achievements, projects, and reputation-building initiatives – and how projectification perpetuates gendered inequalities. The article concludes with a discussion on how the notion of the projectified self can be employed in future emancipatory project studies.

While research has pointed to the lack of gender mainstreaming in rural and agricultural policy, how rural policy determines what is seen as problems of gender inequality in the first place and how it constructs men and women in relation to rural development remains unexplored. In this article we perform an in-depth analysis of how rural policy constructs gender inequality problems and gendered subjects. We employ the 'What's the problem represented to be' approach to analyse the implementation of the European Union's Rural Development Policy in one Swedish region, Jonkoping County. We conclude that gender inequality is largely left unproblematic in relation to rural development, placing women in the subject position of being uninterested in rural development policy and lacking the ability to take it on. The focus on farmers and ICT broadband positions adult, Swedish-born men as the norm, reflecting a neoliberal emphasis on economic growth through competitive businesses. We also conclude that the policy twists 'gender mainstreaming' by claiming that it promotes gender equality, while it in fact takes no action. Paying lip service to gender equality rural policy thereby co-opts feminism, in line with a neoliberal 'postfeminist' discourse, which is harmful to the feminist project. Alternative approaches to gender inequalities suggest that there may be broader, and different, ways of discussing them in relation to rural development, making for a broader spectrum of problematisations and subject positions, which may, in turn, allow a transformation towards gender equality.

Purpose - Policy for women's entrepreneurship is designed to promote economic growth, not least in depleted rural areas, but very little is known about the contributions of rural women entrepreneurs, their needs or how the existing policy is received by them. Using a theoretical framework developed by Korsgaard et al. (2015), the authors analyse how rural women entrepreneurs contribute to rural development and discuss the implications for entrepreneurship policy. This paper aims to focus on the aforementioned objectives.

Design/methodology/approach - The authors interviewed 32 women entrepreneurs in rural Sweden representing the variety of businesses in which rural Swedish women are engaged. The authors analysed their contributions to rural development by analysing their motives, strategies and outcomes using Korsgaard et al.’s framework of “entrepreneurship in the rural” and “rural entrepreneurship” as a heuristic, interpretative device.

Findings - Irrespective of industry, the respondents were deeply embedded in family and local social structures. Their contributions were substantial, multidimensional and indispensable for rural viability, but the policy tended to bypass most women-owned businesses. Support in terms of business training, counselling and financing are important, but programmes especially for women tend to miss the mark, and so does rural development policy. More important for rural women entrepreneurs in Sweden is the provision of good public services, including for example, schools and social care, that make rural life possible.

Research limitations/implications - Theoretically, the findings question the individualist and a-contextual focus of much entrepreneurship research, as well as the taken-for-granted work–family divide. How gender and how the public and the private are configured varies greatly between contexts and needs contextual assessment. Moreover, the results call for theorising place as an entrepreneurial actor.

Practical implications - Based on the findings, the authors advise future policymakers to gender mainstream entrepreneurship policy and to integrate entrepreneurship and rural development policy with family and welfare state policy.

Originality/value - The paper highlights how rural women respond to policy, and the results are contextualised, making it possible to compare them to other contexts. The authors widen the discussion on contributions beyond economic growth, and the authors show that policy for public and commercial services and infrastructure is indeed also policy for entrepreneurship.

Purpose - In this paper, women entrepreneurs are seen as leaders and women leaders as entrepreneurial, making both groups an easy target of postfeminist expectations, governed by calls to embody the entrepreneurial self. Acknowledging that the entrepreneurial self has its roots in the universal, rational and autonomous subject, which was shaped in a male form during the Enlightenment, the purpose of this study is to conceptualise feminist resistance as a process through which the autonomous subject can be de-stabilised.

Design/methodology/approach - Empirically, this study draws on an extensive research project on women’s rural entrepreneurship that includes 32 in-depth interviews with women entrepreneurs in rural Sweden. This study interpreted expressions of resistance from the women by using an analytical framework the authors developed based on Jonna Bornemark’s philosophical treatise.

Findings - Feminist resistance unfolds as an interactive and iterative learning process where the subject recognises their voice, strengthens their voice and beliefs in a relational process and finally sees themselves as a fully fledged actor who finds ways to overcome obstacles that get in their way. Conceptualising resistance as a learning process stands in sharp contrast to the idea of resistance as enacted by the autonomous self.

Research limitations/implications - This study helps researchers to understand that what they may have seen as a sign of weakness among women, is instead a sign of strength: it is a first step in learning resistance that may help women create a life different from that prescribed by the postfeminist discourse. In this way, researchers can avoid reproducing women as “weak and inadequate”.

Originality/value - Through the re-writing of feminist resistance, the masculine entrepreneurship discourse including the notion of the autonomous self is challenged, and a counternarrative to the postfeminist entrepreneurial woman is developed. Theorising resistance as a learning practice enables a more transforming research agenda, making it possible to see women as resisting postfeminist expectations of endless competition with themselves and others.

The last decades have seen major welfare state retrenchment in Europe, not least in Sweden with public sector downsizing, including privatization of schools, care, and health care. The rhetoric connected to privatization stressed the unique opportunities for formerly publicly employed women to start their own businesses in sectors now open for enterprise. Did this materialize? Analyzing twenty years of empirical research on women's entrepreneurship in Sweden we find that privatization resulted in oligopolization and masculinization of the market(s), and that gendered public sector practices were reproduced in the private sector – women turned from low-wage labor to low-profit entrepreneurship. In addition, divisions among women along lines of ethnicity resulted.

Entrepreneurship is by many recognized as a solution to environmental and social challenges of today’s society. However, it has also been criticized since it may maintain the capitalistic demands of growth and efficiency in an unsustainable way. In this paper we like to challenge the current conception of entrepreneurship that aim for societal change by tracing what, how, where and with whom such entrepreneurship is performed. Further, we take inspiration from the idea of diverse economy by Gibson-Graham and introduce the concept of alternative entrepreneurship to explore how it takes shape, change its contours and both challenges and propels contemporary capitalism. In this chapter we present three ethnographic cases unfolding diverse entrepreneurial activities: 1) the case of Oria, who contributes to social justice through fair trade; 2) the case of artisan food producers who contribute to biological diversity and a rural livelihood; and 3) the case of the DiE project//NEEM NGO, that contributes to social inclusion through entrepreneurial empowerment and the development of a micro credit program. We find that the alternative entrepreneurs are not constrained by organizational forms or by a limited number of economic and non-economic activities as to target societal challenges. The alternative entrepreneurs move between different organizational forms such as non-profit and for profit, as well as, undertaking business and voluntary practices to achieve societal change. Finally, we conclude that the ethnographic tracing of alternative entrepreneurship, allowing previously unsighted activities become visible, also creatively destroy the overly-narrow conception of entrepreneurship. 

The social entrepreneurship (SE) discourse habitually casts social entrepreneurs as heroic, creating economic and social value, whereas those whom they strive to assist are portrayed as disadvantaged and in need of interventions. This implies an implicit differentiation between knowing, agentic entrepreneurs and less-knowing, more passive beneficiaries. In this article, we seek to unfold the subtle ordering of relations in SE and problematize power-related aspects and ideological influences that potentially overshadow dimensions of mutuality and relationality inherent to SE. From an examination of two cases, we hypothesize that differentiations between knowing selves and learning others tend to disintegrate when entrepreneurs and beneficiaries enter into closer interaction. Adopting a postcolonial framework, we identify three forms of relations in SE: transactional, ambiguous/interactional and transcending.

Purpose: Contrasting two countries with different gender regimes and welfare states, Sweden and Tanzania, this paper aims to analyse how the institutional context affects the ways in which a neo-liberal reform agenda is translated into institutional changes and propose how such changes impact the preconditions for women's entrepreneurship.

Design/methodology/approach: This study uses document analysis and previous studies to describe and analyse the institutions and the institutional changes. This paper uses Scandinavian institutional theory as the interpretative framework.

Findings: This study proposes that: in well-developed welfare states with a high level of gender equality, consequences of neo-liberal agenda for the preconditions for women entrepreneurs are more likely to be negative than positive. In less developed states with a low level of gender equality, the gendered consequences of neo-liberal reforms may be mixed and the preconditions for women's entrepreneurship more positive than negative. How neo-liberalism impacts preconditions for women entrepreneurs depend on the institutional framework in terms of a trustworthy women-friendly state and level of gender equality.

Research limitations/implications: The study calls for bringing the effects on the gender of the neo-liberal primacy of market solutions out of the black box. Studying how women entrepreneurs perceive these effects necessitates qualitative ethnographic data.

Originality/value: This paper demonstrates why any discussion of the impact of political or economic reforms on women's entrepreneurship must take a country's specific institutional context into account. Further, previous studies on neo-liberalism have rarely taken an interest in Africa.