The importance of belonging, of fitting in, feeling included and accepted is implicit in empirical studies of women's entrepreneurship. There remains, however, little direct attention to belonging as a concept. This article is novel in proposing belonging as a mediatory and explanatory concept to better understand the relationship between women entrepreneurs and socially embedded gendered assumptions in entrepreneurial practice. Drawing on social theories of belonging and extant entrepreneurial literature, the article explores what belonging involves for women in the entrepreneurial context to offer a conceptualization of entrepreneurial belonging as relational, dynamic, gendered and in continual accomplishment. Five forms of women's performing of belonging are identified; By proxy, Concealment, Modelling the norm, Tempered disruption and Identity-switching. Illustrating how women both reinforce and challenge gendered norms through strategic and tempered use of legitimacy practices and identity work, these findings also highlight the significance of socio-cultural and political knowledge in efforts to belong.
A continuing challenge for organizations is the persistent underrepresentation of women in senior roles, which gained a particular prominence during the global financial crisis (GFC).The GFC has raised questions regarding the forms of leadership that allowed the crisis to happen and alternative proposals regarding how future crises might be avoided. Within this context women's leadership has been positioned as an ethical alternative to styles of masculinist leadership that led to the crisis in the first place Through a multimodal discursive analysis this article examines the socio-cultural assumptions sustaining the gendering of leadership in the popular press to critically analyse how women's leadership is represented during the GFC of 2008-2012. Highlighting the media's portrayal of women's leadership as a gendered field of activity where different forms of gender capital come into play, we identify three sets of dialectics: women as leaders and women as feminine, women as credible leaders and women as lacking in credibility, and women as victims and women as their own worst enemies. Together, the dialectics work together to form a discursive pattern framed by a male leadership model that narrates the promise of women leaders, yet the disappointment that they are not men. Our study extends understandings regarding how female and feminine forms of gender capital operate dialectically, where the media employs feminine capital to promote women's positioning as leaders yet also leverages female capital as a constraint. We propose this understanding can be of value to organizations to understand the impact and influence of discourse on efforts to promote women into leadership roles
This article focuses on women's learning from their lived experiences of leadership. In an examination of how six women leaders at a UK University learn to deploy (in)visibility, I draw on conceptualisations of (in) visibility more commonly found in feminist research. These include surface ideas of (in)visibility as states of exclusion or difference due to a lack of women in leadership roles, and deeper ideas of how states of visibility and invisibility are maintained through power relations. I also refer to ideas on how (in)visibility operates and is produced and reproduced through organisational processes and practices. This analysis extends critical perspectives of leadership learning and development. Specifically, it adds to understandings of the tacit nature of social and situated learning through an articulation of the ways in which gender and power operate in women's learning of leadership from experiences of (in)visibility. This article concludes by indicating further areas for research, including more developed understandings of women's learning to think strategically from experience, examining the role of management educators in revealing women's leadership learning and identifying methodologies to examine women leaders' learning experiences.
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