Search results

This editorial aims to investigate the interface between gendered processes and family business by exploring the extent to which gendered processes are reinforced (or not) in family business operations and dynamics. This approach will complement the agency and resource-based view theoretical bases that dominate family business research (Chrisman et al., 2009) and further contribute to extending gender theories.

Acknowledging that gender is socially constructed, this editorial discusses the interface between gendered processes and family business within entrepreneurship research.

Despite a growing interest in gender and family business, there is limited literature that explores gender theory within family business research. A gender theory approach embracing family business research contributes to a needed theoretical deconstruction of existing perspectives on the operations, sustainability and succession of family businesses in the twenty-first century.

This editorial makes a contribution to extant scholarship by extending gender theories through an exploration of the gendered processes in family business research.

The purpose of this paper is to engage with contemporary gender and entrepreneurship theories to gain insights into the division of labour, capitals and capacities and gendered identities within husband and wife heterosexual copreneurial businesses. This paper acknowledges copreneurship as a constituent sub group of research within family business and in doing so, the wider small business domain.

A multiple exploratory interview approach was used, with data generated through face-to-face in-depth interviews and ethnographic participant – observer multi-setting observation. This approach provided exceedingly rich and detailed data, and thus insights into the complex relationships found within copreneurial businesses.

The interviews generated a large amount of qualitative data, which were organised into themes through a process of recursive abstraction. Expelling the myth of the “male lead entrepreneur”, this study found that entrepreneurial identity and roles and responsibilities within a copreneurial business are shared and complementary, and are dependent upon the unique capacities and capitals of each partner. While there is evidence of duties that could be stereotypically described as either “men’s work or women’s work”, there was no apparent role tension between the partners. Thus, no partner’s contribution was deemed more valuable than the other.

By examining the division of labour and unique value/contribution of both men and women within the copreneurial/familial relationship the stereotyped perception of the husband being the lead (male) entrepreneur is challenged in favour of the more complementary capacities, roles, responsibilities and, thus, value of each actor/participant.

The purpose of this paper is to explore links between a revisionist view of the “feminisation of poverty” in developing countries and women’s work and home-based enterprise in urban slums.

The paper’s discussion of the “feminisation of poverty” draws substantially from ethnographic field research conducted in The Gambia, The Philippines and Costa Rica. This research led the author to propose the notion of a “feminisation of responsibility and/or obligation”. The latter approach draws attention to issues such as gendered disparities of labour, time and resource inputs into household livelihoods, which are often most marked in male-headed units, and are not captured in conventional referents of the “feminisation of poverty”, which are rather narrowly confined to incomes and female household headship.

An integral element of the author’s critique is that the main policy response to classic “feminisation of poverty” thinking, to date, has been to “feminise” anti-poverty initiatives such as Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) and microfinance programmes.

The paper argues that the “feminisation of poverty” compounds the tensions women already face in terms of managing unpaid reproductive and/or “volunteer” work with their economic contributions to household livelihoods, and it is in the context of urban slums, where housing, service and infrastructure deficiencies pose considerable challenges to women’s dual burdens of productive and reproductive labour. The paper emphasizes that to more effectively address gender inequality while also alleviating poverty, policy interventions sensitive to women’s multiple, time-consuming responsibilities and obligations are paramount.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the contribution of “Matriarchy” to the entrepreneurship and family business literature. The literature on gendered aspects of entrepreneurship is expanding and maturing in its level of theoretical sophistication and subject coverage. At the same time, our nuanced understanding of how gender influences entrepreneurial action also expands, as does our appreciation of how men and women do entrepreneurship. It is widely acknowledged that although the theories of entrepreneurship and small business are cognate literature, entrepreneurship has primacy. The heroic male entrepreneur is the master narrative against which we measure other forms of entrepreneurship. The role played by wives, partners, family and employees is often left unstated. In our eternal quest to theorise and explain entrepreneurial action in its entirety, we seldom consider the explanatory power of the sociological theory of “Matriarchy”. Consequentially, in this theoretical paper, we present and discuss several important aspects of the theory which are applicable to our understanding of the diverse nature of gendered enactment within entrepreneurship and small business in which entrepreneurship provides the action to be measured and small business, the setting in which it is encountered. The work primarily concentrates on the theoretical aspects of Matriarchy as well as building upon the extant literature of entrepreneurship, gender and small and family business.

The literature on Matriarchy is presented and analysed in conjunction with appropriate texts from the above literature. The readings help construct a theoretical framework which is tested against narratives of Matriarchial figures encountered via research and written up using retrospective ethnography. This unusual qualitative methodology allows the author to test and develop the utility of the theoretical framework. The resultant narratives and vignettes are both illuminating and enlightening.

The stories of the Matriarchs illustrate how gender differences impact upon entrepreneurial identities and the everyday practicalities of doing business. While the male head of the family may be the titular business owner, many privately defer to the Matriarchal voice which acts as a positive driving force in business, binding a family together.

The theory of Matriarchy offers another powerful explanatory variable in how gendered relationships influence entrepreneurial identities and in making the theory the focal point, we can avoid some of the common assumptions we make when we concentrate on entrepreneurship as the key variable. In perpetuating heroic entrepreneurial narrative as success stories, we as the ultimate consumers of such socially constructed fiction are also complicit. This article, therefore, has the potential to influence how we as authors of such narratives narrate stories of women in family business.

The paper challenges the universality of traditional renditions of family businesses as entrepreneur stories. It re-examines and challenges accepted wisdom building up a discussion, which confronts accepted theories of entrepreneurship and family business.

The purpose of this paper is to study women’s entrepreneurship from the family-firm context and radical subjectivist (RS) economics. While women’s entrepreneurship is a long-standing topic of research interest, there have been calls for more theory-oriented research and research which takes context factors in women’s entrepreneurship seriously. The paper responds to this by using an RS’s view of economics as a theoretical lens to consider women’s entrepreneurship in family firms.

The paper briefly reviews the potential of the family-firm context for examining women’s entrepreneurship in a non-reductive fashion, then outlines radical subjectivism (RS). The three main elements of RS’s “entrepreneurial imagination” are explained, then linked with other theories of family-firm behaviour and applied to casework on women entrepreneurs in family firms.

Each element of the entrepreneurial imagination, empathy, modularity and self-organization, generates new research questions which contest previous apparently settled views about women entrepreneurs. Protocols for investigating the questions are suggested. The third element, self-organization, while more difficult to operationalize for empirical testing, suggests how women’s entrepreneurship might generate new industries.

While this is primarily a conceptual study, its case studies invite further exploration of both women entrepreneurs and family firms. The RS perspective could also increase understanding of shared leadership and innovation in family firms. Specific research questions and protocols for investigating them are offered.

Insights from the research have practical implications for entrepreneurship education, for understanding entrepreneurship at the level of society, the firm and the individual.

The importance of both family firms and women entrepreneurs to society makes it important to understand both of them better. The RS perspective can help.

The paper highlights the value of combining attention to entrepreneurial context (family firms) and theory (RS) to reinvigorate some old research questions about women entrepreneurs. The combination of family firms and RS is also novel.

The purpose of the paper is to present a case example of the power struggles and gender issues one daughter faced when she became a partner, and future successor, in the family business. This paper uses an ethnographic approach in order to study a small family farm in England. The case focuses on a small family farm, these businesses are unique in terms of their values and expectations for succession (Haberman and Danes, 2007), and identified by Wang (2010) as a fruitful avenue for research on daughter succession.

The empirical work was gathered through the use of a single site ethnographic case study involving participant observation as the researcher worked on the family farm and semi-structured interviews with family members over two years.

The results shed light on some of the social complexities of small family farms and power struggles within the family exacerbated by perceived gender issues. The work also highlights the potential threat to the daughter’s position as a partner, from her father’s favouritism of male employees.

Institutions that provide help to family farm businesses need to be aware of the potential power issues within the family specifically related to gender, particularly in terms of succession planning.

Using ethnography in family firms allows the researcher to be a part of the real-life world of family farmers, providing rich data to explore daughter succession.

There has been increased policy and research interest in the growing number of female entrepreneurs and their potential contribution to both the local and global economy. Nevertheless, the extant literature on female entrepreneurship is often limited to the start‐up phase of business. An important gap in the literature is an enquiry into the development of these female‐owned organisations from inception to maturity, and their growth in domestic and/or international markets. This paper therefore aims to address key themes such as motivation to start‐up, growing the business, gender issues and the challenges faced by these women.

An innovative, internet‐based methodology was employed to collect the data in the chosen locations. Using internet resources such as online media, company web sites and other pertinent sites, a significant volume of information was gathered. Any information gaps or issues requiring further clarification were then addressed via e‐mail exchanges with the individual entrepreneur.

Initial findings demonstrate threads of commonality between female entrepreneurs in different countries. It also highlights differences in the experiences of these women, not only across countries but also within certain countries. A comprehensive discussion of these findings is contained in the paper.

This research has highlighted a number of issues which merit further investigation; however, the issue of social responsibility within this sample of female entrepreneurs would indicate that women have much more socially‐oriented motives for starting and developing a business. The authors would like to investigate this further using qualitative investigation of a larger sample within one country before drawing any definitive conclusions.

Given a limited understanding of such issues mentioned above, this contribution seeks to provide an insight into the heterogeneous experiences of female entrepreneurs using cross‐national data rather than a one‐country study.