Empowerment, constraint, and the entrepreneurial self: A study of white women entrepreneurs
Keywords
discourseempowerment
entrepreneurial self
entrepreneurship
frontier myth
feminism
gender
intersectionality
whiteness
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http://hdl.handle.net/10289/1920Abstract
Discourses of entrepreneurship and research on women entrepreneurs have proliferated in the last two decades. This study argues that a particular conception of an entrepreneurial self underlies much literature on women entrepreneurs and their empowerment, and identifies several key assumptions of this entrepreneurial self. The study then assesses the motivations and experiences of several white women entrepreneurs in a northwestern state in the United States, finding that aspects of the entrepreneurial self are most evident in the reasons that women provide about why they became entrepreneurs. However, the experiences the women narrate reveal a more constraints-centered discourse, which features a particular interpretation of the frontier myth of the American West, and bears traces of an emergent, collective notion of empowerment. The authors explain such empowerment from critical and feminist perspectives, offering the concept of bounded empowerment as a lens through which to examine entrepreneurship and gender, and discussing its practical implications.Date
2009-01-29Type
Journal ArticleIdentifier
oai:researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz:10289/1920Gill, R. & Ganesh, S. (2007). Empowerment, constraint, and the entrepreneurial self: A study of white women entrepreneurs. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 35(3), 268-293.
http://hdl.handle.net/10289/1920
10.1080/00909880701434265