Entrepreneurship among the Displaced and Dispossessed: Exploring the Limits of Emancipatory Entrepreneuring

Abstract

This paper explores the links between entrepreneurship, emancipation and gender within the international development arena. Through a longitudinal analysis of a micro‐enterprise development project in which intermediary organizations contract traditional handicrafts from female home‐based producers, we focus on the impact of contracting policies on the ability of the desperately poor to improve their disadvantaged position. Our critical analysis reveals how intermediaries who impose exclusive contracting conditions, supposedly to protect the women's interests, actually constrain the emancipatory potential of the women's entrepreneurial activities. However, such contractual limitations generate collaborative networks enabling the women to challenge these constraints in an effort to assert control over their activities. Accordingly, this paper contributes to contemporary debates concerning the emancipatory potential of entrepreneurship within the context of development. We advance this analysis through a gendered evaluation of the role of intermediary organizations on entrepreneurial emancipation and related empowerment.

Annual review article: Is it time to rethink the gender agenda in entrepreneurship research?

“…As a social ascription, gender is performed by everyone -but it is a dynamic construct, so how it is enacted in time, space and place is crucial to analysing its impact. Thus, how gender positions a Palestinian women micro entrepreneur in Jordan navigating her status as a displaced person operating in an overtly patriarchal social order (Al-Dajani et al, 2015) will differ from how gay partners in the Global North turn to entrepreneurship to avoid employment discrimination . Moreover, we must move away from conceptualizing any individual entrepreneur as representative of a category or gendered subjecthood, and axiomatically acknowledge that entrepreneurial activity is nested in social interaction between teams, couples, families and households, so our analyses incorporate the complex and differentiated gender performances manifest therein (Carter, et al, 2017).…”

“…As a dynamic, descriptive construct (Walby, 2013), recognising the effect of patriarchal processes upon women owned ventures in transitional, developing and disrupted economies is now being recognised (Welter, 2011;Scott et al, 2012;Al-Dajani et al, 2015) but much scope for further analyses remains. In particular, given the global focus upon entrepreneurial activity as an allegedly promising pathway to individual and collective empowerment for women, how cultural and institutional patriarchal subordination constrains such possibilities must be recognised more clearly.…”

“…Given the pressing need to generate income under circumstances in which traditional economic activities for male heads of households are volatile, it may be expected that where employment opportunities are poor, more women will turn to self-employment to supplement or replace lost income streams. There is already some evidence that such activity challenges embedded patriarchal ordering as necessity challenges tradition (Al-Dajani et al, 2015) which has some empowerment potential but also, can lead to increasing gender based violence as accepted orders are challenged (Kim et al, 2007;Ritchie, 2016). Again, this suggests the need to consider disruptions within gendered orders in household authority if more opportunities are afforded to women in relation to external constraints upon traditional male roles.…”

“…This leads to an untenable transposition where women, as a substantive category, are conflated with -or at the least, representative of -gender, a complex theoretical construct with countless iterations and interpretations (Butler, 2004;Linsted and Pullen, 2006;Schippers, 2009;Kelan, 2010;. Additionally, there are implicit assumptions of heteronormativity , whiteness (Ogbor, 2000) and place [Global North] (Carter et al, 2015) embedded into the prevailing critique.…”

The process of embedding a small firm in its industrial context

“…Interpretivist research rejects the ontological separation of reality and consciousness and, instead, seeks to comprehend individual perspectives on social phenomena (Al-Dajani et al, 2015;Pret et al, 2015). Interpretivist approaches are gaining traction within entrepreneurship research (cf.…”