How do women’s business networks (WBNs) help to advance women’s freedom? Drawing on Zerilli’s freedom-centred feminism, our study sets out to answer this question at the intersection of freedom, feminism and work. Critics argue that WBNs promote a postfeminist view of freedom focusing on individual self-realisation and thus participate in rolling back collective, feminist efforts to dismantle structural inequalities. We reconceptualize WBNs as political arenas and argue that making claims about shared interests and concerns in such an arena constitutes a feminist practice of freedom. With an original, inductive and qualitative research design combining topic modeling and dialectical analysis, we examine the claims made in 1,529 posts across four WBN blogs. We identify postfeminist claims and new forms of change and transformation that can help to advance women’s freedom across three ‘dialectics of freedom’: conformity and imagination; performative care and relational care; sameness and openness. Our findings show that uncertain and contradictory ways of defining and engaging with women’s freedom can emerge through claim-making in such arenas. The fragility of the process and its outcomes are, then, what can move feminism forward at work and beyond.

We examine the emergence of an organizational form, charter schools, in Oakland, California. We link field-level logics to organizational founding identities using topic modeling. We find corporate and community founding actors create distinct and consistent identities, whereas more peripheral founders indulge in more unique identity construction. We see the settlement of the form into a stable ecosystem with multiple identity codes rather than driving toward a single organizational identity. The variety of identities that emerge do not always map onto field-level logics. This has implications for the conditions under which organizational innovation and experimentation within a new form may develop.

Acknowledgements:We are grateful for extremely valuable advice and feedback from Associate Editor Andrew Nelson and three anonymous reviewers. We would also like to thank Jennifer Mueller and Poornika Ananth for insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper; the entrepreneurs and co-working space leaders who dedicated hours of time and provided support to our research; and the ESRC for making the project possible (ESRC Grant ES/N007301/1). Finally, we are grateful to Julia Oertli who worked as a research assistant on this project and a host of scholars including

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