This article critically analyses the manner in which intersectionality and related social positionality shape digital enterprise activities. Despite popular claims of meritocratic opportunity enactment within traditional forms of entrepreneurship, ascribed social characteristics intersect to influence the realisation of entrepreneurial potential. However, it is purported that the emerging field of digital entrepreneurship may act as a 'great leveller' due to perceived lower barriers to entry, disembodiment of the entrepreneurial actor and the absence of visible markers of disadvantage online. Using an interpretivist approach, we analyse empirical evidence from UK women digital entrepreneurs which reveals how the privileges and disadvantages arising from intersecting social positions of gender, race and class status are reproduced online. This analysis challenges the notion that the Internet is a neutral platform for entrepreneurship and supports our thesis that offline inequality, in the form of marked bodies, social positionality and associated resource constraints, is produced and reproduced in the online environment.

Digital entrepreneurship is presented in popular discourse as a means to empowerment and greater economic participation for under-resourced and socially marginalised people. However, this emancipatory rhetoric relies on a flat ontology that does not sufficiently consider the enabling conditions needed for successful digital enterprise activity. To empirically illustrate this argument, we examine three paired cases of UK women digital entrepreneurs, operating in similar sectors but occupying contrasting social positionalities. The cases are comparatively analysed through an intersectional feminist lens using a critical realist methodological framework. By examining the relationships between digital entrepreneurship, social positionality, and structural and agential enabling conditions, we interrogate the notion of digital entrepreneurship as an emancipatory phenomenon producing liberated workers.

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This article introduces an imminent critique of existing intersectional theory, suggesting that current limitations of this theory can be mapped to origins within positivist and hermeneutic schools of thought. Having identified the limitations and their causes, we offer an augmented account of intersectionality theory that reconciles and overcomes extant theoretical tensions and limitations by drawing upon critical realist principles and conceptual tools, enabling us to propose a novel methodological approach to intersectional research. IntroductionIntersectionality theory has emerged over the past thirty years as an interdisciplinary approach to analysing the concurrent impacts of social structures, with a focus on theorising how belonging to multiple exclusionary social categories can influence political access and equality. It conceptualises