Specification of focus

The study focuses on the exploration of SEship “as a socially constructed process embedded within everyday practices that shape and are shaped by a field of gender relations” (Bourne, 2010: 10), and draws upon data derived from the self-reported, socially embedded (Brush et al, 2009; Diaz Garcia and Carter, 2009; Shelton, 2010; Steyaert and Katz, 2004), and temporally dynamic (Morris et al, 2012; Mueller et al, 2012; Steyaert, 2007; Williams, 2009) experiences of the women participants regarding the establishment, and in some cases growth, of their SEs in the UK.

The specific focus on an exclusively women-comprised research sample reflects the feminist theoretical underpinnings of the study, which seeks to create space for the “voices of women and other ‘minorities’ [who] have been systematically marginalized” (Campbell, 2011: 42) to be heard (Mavin, 2006; McGowan et al, 2012; Neergaard et al, 2011), and to facilitate the development of new knowledge and theory (Engelstad and Gerrard, 2005; Foss, 2010; Lewis,

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2006; Shaw and Carter, 2007) with particular reference to the emergent SEship literature.

The rationale for women-focussed work derives from the feminist critique of traditional approaches to entrepreneurship research and theorisation, and serves to:

“provide new insights into organizational theories by examining the historical context in which these theories emerged, the research methods in which the theories are grounded, and the assumptions underlying the theories themselves” (Hurley, 1999:54).

To date, such critical work has revealed the androcentricity within organisations and institutions (Acker, 1992; Ahl, 2006; Calvert and Ramsey, 1992; Lockyer and George, 2012) created, defined, and legitimated by “white males [who] have created organizations and adopted management practices that have met male needs, reinforced male values and best fit male experiences of the world around them” (Ogbor, 2000: 621-622).

Within societies in which there remains a cultural expectation for women to provide the majority of unpaid domestic labour and childcare (Craig and Sawrikar, 2009; Thomas and Hildingsson, 2009; Jennings and McDougald, 2007), the result is that “women cannot become workers in the same sense as men [...] the construction of the worker presupposes that he is a man who has a woman to take care of his daily needs” (Pateman, 1988: 131, cited in Marlow, 2002: 86).

In this way, the links between gender-based barriers for women at micro (individual/family level), meso (institutional level), and macro (national/cultural level) can be revealed (Brush et al, 2009; Purkayastha, 2003), and the “top- down effects of context on entrepreneurship and bottom-up processes influencing context” (Welter, 2011: 176) can be simultaneously acknowledged, understood, and theorised, such that the effects of cumulative disadvantage can be exposed (Clark and Corcoran, 1986, Hill Collins, 1991; Fernandez-Mateo, 2009; Purdie-Vaughns and Eibach, 2008).

Within entrepreneurship research, the feminist critique has specifically problematised (amongst other things) the androcentricity of traditional research

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norms which purport to be ‘gender-neutral’ (Ahl and Marlow, 2012; Carter et al, 2001; Brush and Cooper, 2012; Limerick and O’Leary, 2006), yet which “use[s] instruments developed and tested on samples of men” (Brush et al, 2009: 15) to undertake research on women’s entrepreneurship. As a means of redressing the (im)balance, researchers working on women’s entrepreneurship “have focused on the need to correct the sampling bias by collecting parallel information on female business owners” (Mirchandani, 1999: 228).

In addition to the androcentric research ‘instruments’, feminist scholars have also criticised the application of theories of entrepreneurship derived from male- only samples to all entrepreneurs, on the basis of the reductionism and essentialism of such approaches (Engelstad and Gerrard 2005; Foss 2010). The assumption that behavioural norms observed in capitalist, white, middle class, European, heterosexual male entrepreneurs (Costa and Saraiva, 2012; Gill and Ganesh, 2007; Ogbor, 2000; Tedmanson et al, 2012; Wilson and Tagg, 2010) can be unproblematically applied to all people engaging in entrepreneurial behaviour (Ahl, 2002; Brush and Cooper, 2012; Marlow, 2002; Mirchandani, 1999) has been critiqued, as has the attendant assumption of homogeneity amongst (particularly women) entrepreneurs (Bourne, 2010; Carter and Shaw, 2006; Dalborg et al, 2012; McMullan, 2012; Tedmanson et al, 2012; Tillmar, 2007).

Such presumptions have the effect of ‘othering’ non-white, non-male etc. entrepreneurs (Ahl, 2004; Bendle, 2008; Bruni et al, 2004, 2004a; Lewis, 2006; Marlow et al, 2008), thus rendering the study of these supposedly non- normative forms of entrepreneurship as ‘niche’ or ‘special interest’ (Hughes et

al, 2012; Neergard et al, 2011), which in turn lowers the legitimacy and value of

‘non-normative’ entrepreneurship as a research topic (Ahl, 2002, 2006; Calvert and Ramsey 1992; de Bruin et al 2007; Mirchandani 1999; Ogbor 2000; Stevenson, 1999).

Many of the ontological, epistemological, and methodological themes emerging from the developing stream of critical SE scholarship - “which unveils a skeptical orientation to the ideology of entrepreneurship” (Dey and Steyaert, 2006: 34), and serves to question and challenge both the politicised ‘grand narratives’ of SEship and their attendant assumptions (Dey and Steyaert, 2010;

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Teasdale, 2012), and the application of mainstream entrepreneurship theories and research foci to the SE sector (McAdam and Treanor, 2011; Datta and Gailey, 2012; Peredo and Chrisman, 2006; Seelos et al, 2010) - mirror those within the feminist critical work.

Examples of these cross-over themes include SE as a socially constructed phenomenon (Chell, 2007; Dey and Steyaert, 2010; Mueller et al, 2011; Ruebottom, 2011), the importance of the effects of context and embeddedness on SE (Kindle, 2010; Kistruck and Beamish, 2010; Smith and Stevens, 2010), the value of contextualised narrative and person-centred experiential approaches to the exploration of SE (Diochon and Anderson, 2011; Jones et al, 2008; Morris et al, 2012; Seanor et al, 2011), a focus on the wider, non- economic goals and value creation of SEs (Felício et al, 2013; Haugh, 2012; Palmås, 2012; Steinerowski et al, 2010), and explorations of the loci of power within SE (Dacin et al, 2011; Steyaert and Dey, 2010; Teasdale, 2010; Teasdale et al, 2011).

The focus then, of a qualitative study of the experiences on women SEurs in the UK offers a unique synergistic opportunity at this point in time to meaningfully bring together two bodies of critical literature, and to thereby begin to simultaneously fill acknowledged gaps within both streams of work.