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Peer-reviewed
Citation for published item:
Yousafzai, S. and Fayolle, A., and Saeed, S., Henry, C. and Lindgreen, A. (2018) 'The contextual
embeddedness of women's entrepreneurship : towards a more informed research agenda.', Entrepreneurship
and regional development., 31 (3-4). pp. 167-177.
Further information on publisher's website:
https://doi.org/10.1080/08985626.2018.1551786
Publisher's copyright statement:
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor Francis in Entrepreneurship and regional
development on 13th December 2018, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/08985626.2018.1551786
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The contextual embeddedness of women’s entrepreneurship: towards a more informed research agenda
Shumaila Yousafzai
Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK
Alain Fayolle
Strategy & Organization, EMLyon Business School, Lyon-
Ecully, France;
Saadat Saeed
Durham University Business School,
Durham University, UK
Colette Henry
Dundalk Institute of Technology, Ireland;
UiT-The Arctic University of Norway, Norway
Adam Lindgreen
Copenhagen Business School, Denmark;
University of Pretoria’s Gordon Institute
of Business Science, South Africa
To cite this article: Shumaila Yousafzai, Alain Fayolle, Saadat Saeed, Colette Henry & Adam Lindgreen (2018): The
contextual embeddedness of women’s entrepreneurship: towards a more informed research agenda, Entrepreneurship &
Regional Development, DOI: 10.1080/08985626.2018.1551786
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/08985626.2018.1551786
The contextual embeddedness of women’s entrepreneurship: towards a more
informed research agenda
‘For the modern man the patriarchal relation of status is by no means the dominant
feature of life; but for the women on the other hand, and for the upper-middle class
women especially, confined as they
are by prescription and by economic circumstances
to their “domestic sphere”, this relation is the most
real and most formative factor of
life’. (Veblen 1899, 324 as quoted in Van Staveren and Odebode 2007, 903)
Introduction
Entrepreneurship is positioned within contemporary scholarship as a noun that
describes the ‘world as it is’ (Calás, Smircich, and Bourne 2009, 561). Krueger and
Brazeal’s (1994, 91) definition of entrepreneurship as ‘the pursuit of an opportunity
irrespective of existing resources’ is consis- tent with the common assertion that
entrepreneurship offers gender-neutral meritocratic career opportunities. In
practice, however, interaction with the environment determines the future of
women’s entrepreneurship, that is, women are never just women, but also are
located within a specific context (Ahl and Marlow 2012; Calás, Smircich, and
Bourne 2009; Mirchandani 1999; Yousafzai, Saeed, and Muffatto 2015).
Feminist philosophers argue that the constitution, development, critique and
application of knowledge is profoundly gendered (Butler 1993; Harding 1987,
Hardiong 1991; Marlow and McAdam 2013). Even though gendered institutions
have long been recognized as exemplary for how historical and cultural contexts
influence the economic process of provisioning (Veblen 1899; Van Staveren and
Odebode 2007), they have received considerably less attention in the institu- tional
analysis of the ‘gendered terrain’ of the women’s entrepreneurship landscape
(Brush, de Bruin, and Welter 2009; Tedmanson et al. 2012; Welter, Brush, and de
Bruin 2014). Indeed, a critical shortcoming of research on women’s entrepreneurship
is that instead of pursuing a more reflexive, theoretically informed and holistic
understanding of the embedded context, it tends to focus on a direct relationship
between general conditions and arrangements in the overall entrepreneurial
environment (for both male and female entrepreneurs) and women’s entrepreneurial
activity (Ahl 2006; Brush, de Bruin, and Welter 2009; Hughes et al. 2012; Tedmanson
et al. 2012). Such ‘all are alike’ (Aldrich 2009) and ‘extreme decontextualisation’
(Welter, Brush, and de Bruin 2014) approaches ignore research, which suggests that
gender-differences should be conceptualized as fluid processes and rooted within a
historical context that informs and sustains the normative,hierarchical
subordination shaping women’s life chances (Marlow and McAdam 2013). This is
important because ‘a mismatch between theory and context can result in false leads
and incon
clusive findings’ (Zahra 2007, 445). Accordingly, researchers have pointed
out that a gender-neutral
approach may have accounted for the failure of research on
women’s entrepreneurship to unravel the complex web of intertwined socio-
economic and politically framed realities constructed by gendered institutions (Ahl
and Marlow 2012; Lansky 2000; Marlow and Swail 2014).
Although the impressive expansion of scholarly interest and activity in the field
of women’s entrepreneurship within recent years has done much to correct the
historical lack of attention paid to female entrepreneurs and their initiatives, scholars
consistently are being asked to take their research in new directions. Most
importantly, the need for greater gender consciousness has been highlighted in the
women’s entrepreneurship literature, with calls for future research to ‘contex-
tualize’ and enrich the ‘vastly understudied’ field of women’s entrepreneurship (de
Bruin, Brush, and Welter 2006, 585) by going beyond biologically essentialized
identities and questioning gendered hierarchies and structural constructions
embedded within highly informed conceptual frameworks (Ahl 2006; Ahl and
Marlow 2012; de Bruin, Brush, and Welter 2007). Such changes in direction help shift
the focus towards the ‘more silent feminine personal end’ of the entrepreneur- ial
process (Bird and Brush 2002, 57), with significant implications for women’s
entrepreneurship
research, policy and practice (Brush and Cooper 2012; Carter,
Anderson, and Shaw 2001; Hamilton
2013; Minniti and Naudé 2010).
Hughes et al. (2012, 431), quoting Ahl (2006), note that the entrepreneurship
literature ‘by excluding explicit discussion of gendered power structures, [and
discussing] the apparent shortcomings of female entrepreneurs . . . reinforce[s] the
idea that explanations are to be found in the individual rather than on a social or
institutional level’. These perilous suppositions are counterproductive, as they tend
to perpetuate the ‘hierarchical gendered ordering’ in which femininity is associated
with deficit in a context of masculinized normality (Marlow and McAdam 2013).
Furthermore, such suppositions challenge the importance of balancing different
perspec- tives on women’s entrepreneurship by inferring that individual attributes
alone result in entre- preneurial success. Thus, regardless of the varied contextual
settings in which entrepreneurs operate, all ultimately are alike. Consequently, our
partial understanding of the construction of the gender gap – rather than being
grounded in a gendered perspective and based on a female norm – is developed,
measured and evaluated in terms of how women’s entrepreneurship deviates from
the yardstick that is the male norm (Achtenhagen and Welter 2011; Ahl 2006; Bird
and Brush 2002; Mirchandani 1999). Accordingly, the patriarchal economies and
societies, along with their gendered power structures that not only shape the context
of entrepreneurs (men and women alike), but privilege men over women, remain
unchallenged (Vossenberg 2013). This has considerable consequences for research
and policy-making and may well explain why the gender gap continues to exist and,
more importantly, why real reform for women’s entrepre- neurship has not yet
occurred (Ahl 2006; Calás, Smircich, and Bourne 2009). Consequently, as Hughes
et al. (2012, 545) suggest, research on gender and entrepreneurship is reaching an
epistemological ‘dead end’.
In light of the above, this special issue is timely, encouraging both a change in
research direction and a move away from traditional yardsticks towards a deeper
understanding of the influence of context on women’s entrepreneurship. In our call for
papers, we sought contributions that offered valuable and novel perspectives on the
contextual embeddedness of women’s entrepreneurship, papers that were informed by
robust theoretical or empirical research and employed qualitative, quantitative or mixed
methods to critically explore the phenomenon in different countries, cultures and
industry contexts. We received 45 manuscripts and, following an initial review by the
editorial team, a shortlist of papers was subjected to a double blind, peer- review process.
After a series of review-and-revision rounds, nine papers were finally selected for
inclusion in this double special issue.
Our final selection has a strong international dimension. The selection comprises both
conceptual
and empirical papers, employs a mixture of methodological approaches
and adopts a range of gender perspectives. While each paper offers its own unique
perspective, collectively, the papers offer a contemporary view of the contextual
embeddedness of women’s entrepreneurship at the global level that should contribute
usefully to extending scholarly debates and pave the way towards a new research
agenda for the field.
In the next section, we categorize the papers according to their overarching theme,
and discuss them in the context of extant literature. We subsequently draw on this
discussion to map out a more informed future research agenda, which, if
implemented, could potentially offer a more theoretically holistic and empirically
informed understanding of the contextual embeddedness of the phenomenon that is
women’s entrepreneurship.
Defying contextual embeddedness
While entrepreneurial practices and processes are evolving, models of
entrepreneurship remain embedded in advanced economies, are masculinized and
still widely associated with beliefs of individual agency and heroism. Consequently,
defiance through entrepreneurship is rarely considered (Al-Dajani et al.,
Forthcoming). Inherent in Schumpeterian beliefs of ‘creative destruction’, defiance is
the daring and bold disobedience towards authoritarian regimes (e.g. patriarchy)
and/or opposition to forces (e.g. established cultural norms). Even though, women’s
entrepreneurship can be conceptualized as an act of defiance, it rarely has been framed
as such. The theme of defiance characterizes our first paper, by Al-Dajani, Akbar,
Carter and Shaw (Forthcoming), which explores the collective defiance practices of
Palestinian diaspohra females operating in the context of a Jordanian patriarchal
society. In a longitudinal, ethnographic study, the authors draw parallel between the
deeper political connotations of heritage craft production that has kept alive mem-