Shumaila Yousafzai, Alain Fayolle, Saadat Saeed, Colette Henry and Adam Lindgreen
Introduction
Entrepreneurship is positioned within contemporary scholarship as a noun that describes the âworld as it isâ (CalĂĄs, Smircich, and Bourne 2009, 561). Krueger and Brazealâs (1994, 91) definition of entrepreneurship as âthe pursuit of an opportunity irrespective of existing resourcesâ is consistent with the common assertion that entrepreneurship offers gender-neutral meritocratic career opportunities. In practice, however, interaction with the environment determines the future of womenâs entrepreneurship, that is, women are never just women, but also are located within a specific context (Ahl and Marlow 2012; CalĂĄs, 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 institutional analysis of the âgendered terrainâ of the womenâs 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 womenâs 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 womenâs entrepreneurial activity (Ahl 2006; Brush, de Bruin, and Welter 2009; Hughes et al. 2012; Tedmanson et al. 2012). Such âall are alikeâ (Aldrich 2009) and âextreme decontextualisationâ (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 womenâs life chances (Marlow and McAdam 2013). This is important because âa mismatch between theory and context can result in false leads and inconclusive findingsâ (Zahra 2007, 445). Accordingly, researchers have pointed out that a gender-neutral approach may have accounted for the failure of research on womenâs 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 womenâs 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 womenâs entrepreneurship literature, with calls for future research to âcontextualizeâ and enrich the âvastly understudiedâ field of womenâs 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 âmore silent feminine personal endâ of the entrepreneurial process (Bird and Brush 2002, 57), with significant implications for womenâs entrepreneurship research, policy and practice (Brush and Cooper 2012; Carter, Anderson, and Shaw 2001; Hamilton 2013; Minniti and NaudĂ© 2010).
Hughes et al. (2012, 431), quoting Ahl (2006), note that the entrepreneurship literature âby 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 levelâ. These perilous suppositions are counterproductive, as they tend to perpetuate the âhierarchical gendered orderingâ 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 perspectives on womenâs entrepreneurship by inferring that individual attributes alone result in entrepreneurial 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 â rather than being grounded in a gendered perspective and based on a female norm â is developed, measured and evaluated in terms of how womenâs 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 womenâs entrepreneurship has not yet occurred (Ahl 2006; CalĂĄs, Smircich, and Bourne 2009). Consequently, as Hughes et al. (2012, 545) suggest, research on gender and entrepreneurship is reaching an epistemological âdead endâ.
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 womenâs entrepreneurship. In our call for papers, we sought contributions that offered valuable and novel perspectives on the contextual embeddedness of womenâs 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 womenâs 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 womenâs 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 âcreative destructionâ, 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, womenâs 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 memories of Palestinian traditions with the organizing actions of the socially excluded women in their study. While the women in this study could not change the restraints themselves, they find ingenious ways to circumvent and navigate the boundaries through their highly creative ventures and strategies in hidden entrepreneurial practices. They argue that these actions are instilled within the deeper purpose of defying contextual embeddedness by resisting contractual, social and patriarchal subjugation. The authors uncover the formation of a feminized economy and a secret production network led by the women to defy the supressing boundaries inflicted by their restrictive contractors, community and family members. Their findings on the proactiveness, innovativeness and risk taking actions of Arab women of Palestinian diaspora contradict much of the existing literature that portrays them as subservient, disempowered followers rather than defiant entrepreneurial leaders (Yamin 2013). The authors suggest that regardless of how constrained the context, women entrepreneurs of Palestinian diaspora can thrive and succeed when they take higher levels of risk through âhiddenâ entrepreneurial enactment. Thus, their entrepreneurial activities cannot be restrained, and eventually âfinds its wayâ.
