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This study aims to investigate the entrepreneurial actions of successful Iranian women entrepreneurs. It is an attempt to find the roots, motivations, challenges and strategies of successful actions of these women, despite the unequal and masculine structure of the society.

This research was conducted through the theoretical framework of poststructuralist feminism and the qualitative method. By purposive sampling, the researchers selected 10 women entrepreneurs living in Khorasan Razavi province for in-depth interviews. These women have created many jobs based on local potential and become recognized as top entrepreneurs. The narratives of these women were analyzed phenomenologically.

The actions of these women are fertilized under the influence of family background and early socialization and in the combination of internal motivations and external stimuli. These women resist social barriers such as widespread patriarchy, gender division of labor in society and complex bureaucratic processes through the “strategic cycle” resulting from the interaction of “reliance on intertwined social networks,” “social entrepreneurship,” “gradual formation of social capital” and “reliance on local potentials.”

The strategies to overcome gender inequalities at the micro (family) and macro (society) levels introduced in this research can inspire women entrepreneurs who seek success in their businesses.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first qualitative research that, by studying the actions of successful Iranian women entrepreneurs, describes how they overcome structural inequalities and their success strategies.

Women's violence is periodically raised as a cause for concern both in the media as well as in discussions among the general public in other platforms, such as online forums. These concerns are linked with anti-feminist efforts to discredit the benefits of feminisms and to counter feminist knowledge on gendered patterns in violence. In this chapter, I discuss the ways these concerns and the associated discrediting of feminism have been manifested in various contexts, including academic research on intimate partner violence. My specific focus is on online forums, where women's use of violence is frequently highlighted for the purpose of creating an image of reversed gender discrimination experienced by men. I illustrate how such meaning-making is employed in online discussions derived from various online discussion forums in Finland. The empirical example is focussed on identifying discursive methods frequently employed in the online contexts and specifically illustrates how those methods are employed for the rhetorical effect of othering feminists, highlighting the severity of women's violence as a social problem and portraying men instead of women as victims of inequality. I conclude with a discussion on connections between this meaning-making and broader patterns in anti-feminist mobilisations of the issue of women's violence.

Relying on social influence and sociomateriality theories, this research provides new insights about the social and material drivers relating to the sexualisation of online behaviour of social media influencers.

Using a netnographic approach, observation data were gathered from the Instagram accounts of 20 influencers dedicated to beauty and fashion. In addition, 15 in-depth interviews were conducted with women adopting sexualisation practices online. The data were analysed using an abductive strategy; all materials were coded according to thematic analysis principles.

The authors observe that sexualisation is a result of a complex system of social interactions encouraged and reinforced by multiple factors and actors. In particular, the authors outline the major influence of technology that has become a non-human authority defining implicit norms and shaping the beliefs and behaviours of women influencers.

In contrast to existing literature which mainly focuses on the negative consequences of sexualisation, this work sheds some light on social constructs in social media. The authors contribute to the growing literature on social media influencers. Although many works focus on their persuasiveness, this work helps to better understand the social setting, motivations and pressures that are contained in social and technological contexts.

This article aims to explore the potential of feminist phenomenology as a conceptual framework for advancing women’s entrepreneurship research and the suitability of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to the proposed framework.

The article critically examines the current state of women’s entrepreneurship research regarding the institutional context and highlights the benefits of a shift towards feminist phenomenology.

The prevailing disembodied and gender-neutral portrayal of entrepreneurship has resulted in an equivocal understanding of women’s entrepreneurship and perpetuated a male-biased discourse within research and practice. By adopting a feminist phenomenological approach, this article argues for the importance of considering the ontological dimensions of lived experiences of situatedness, intersubjectivity, intentionality and temporality in analysing women entrepreneurs’ agency within gendered institutional contexts. It also demonstrates that feminist phenomenology could broaden the current scope of IPA regarding the embodied dimension of language.

The adoption of feminist phenomenology and IPA presents new avenues for research that go beyond the traditional cognitive approach in entrepreneurship, contributing to theory and practice. The proposed conceptual framework also has some limitations that provide opportunities for future research, such as a phenomenological intersectional approach and arts-based methods.

The article contributes to a new research agenda in women’s entrepreneurship research by offering a feminist phenomenological framework that focuses on the embodied dimension of entrepreneurship through the integration of IPA and conceptual metaphor theory (CMT).

Using data from a feminist discourse analysis of comments on Facebook news articles, this research outlines backlash and regulatory practices directed towards youth activists Greta Thunberg, X González and Malala Yousafzai. A conceptual framework of semiotic violence highlights how these comments function to silence, delegitimise, vilify and punish sociopolitically active girls who challenge the status quo. The first mode of semiotic violence works to symbolically annihilate girl activists by silencing or rendering their political contributions invisible. The most obvious manifestation of this is instructing girls to shut up and go away. Additionally, their activism is ignored by refusals to acknowledge it as appropriate through suggestions they focus on gender-normative activities, such as domestic chores, playing with dolls and finding boyfriends. Undermining girls’ agency by describing them as puppets, mouthpieces, script readers, pawns and tools is also common. Here, girls’ contributions are rendered invisible through implications that they are being brainwashed and manipulated. The second mode of semiotic violence reinforces ideologies that girls are not politically competent and punishes them for being outspoken. This includes explicitly discrediting girls’ knowledge and abilities. Regulating their emotionality is also prevalent. This is consistent with Liberal political theory which justified women’s exclusion from public life by associating men with reason and women with emotion. Finally, insults degrade them for transgressing into a space demarcated as an adult and masculine realm. The semiotic violence directed towards these ‘girl power’ figures highlights that many people do not believe girls have the right to assert their sociopolitical opinion.

The purpose of this paper is to share findings from empirically driven conceptual research into the implications for English teachers of understanding generative AI as a “tool” for writing.

The paper reports early findings from an Australian National Survey of English teachers and interrogates the notion of the AI writer as “tool” through intersectional feminist discursive-material analysis of the metaphorical entailments of the term.

Through this work, the authors have developed the concept of “coloniser tool-thinking” and juxtaposed it with First Nations and feminist understandings of “tools” and “objects” to demonstrate risks to the pursuit of social and planetary justice through understanding generative AI as a tool for English teachers and students.

Bringing together white and First Nations English researchers in dialogue, the paper contributes a unique perspective to challenge widespread and common-sense use of “tool” for generative AI services.

This chapter outlines the underpinning author’s perspective to explain the approach to decoloniality and untangle the current praxis and research method from coloniality. This chapter also describes the subsequent chapters’ structure, moving from colonialism and its roots to decoloniality in practice and research.

The authors sought to examine how hegemonic masculinity and sexism functioned in a storied, historic corporation, a test of MAnne's (2017) claim that misogyny is a structural phenomenon rather than being about anger and hatred of individual men.

This study was an archaeological excavation of discourse in a well-documented employment relationship. The researchers were informed by feminist poststructuralism and drew on critical discourse analysis of labour arbitration and media from the case of a woman, twice wrongfully dismissed.

The authors concluded that the employer was the site of hegemonic masculinity, which led to a train conductor being repeatedly targeted and demeaned in a bad faith and discriminatory manner for disrupting the conductor’s employer's patriarchal strictures. The authors found that misogyny shaped the conductors’s experience as a repeated pattern of abuse, a gendered feature of a patriarchal organisation, and a coercive matter of maintaining the conductor’s subordination. The authors also found that the male arbitrator in the conductor’s second dismissal arbitration became complicit in misogyny by penalising the conductor for acts of resistance, giving the employer what the employer wanted, to purge the conductor for violating the patriarchal norms.

The authors traced how a historic corporation demonstrated vulnerability to the resistance of a lone female worker, who faced discriminatory, disturbing and bad faith managerial behaviour in the creation of the conductor’s own meaning and resistant identity. The authors concluded that evidence of the regulation of employee relations, such as the decisions of arbitrators, can reveal the processes and outcomes of work under hegemonic masculinity, sexism and misogyny.

Spirituality in the workplace is a concept that has been emphasized a lot in recent years. However, the relationship of this concept with gender and discrimination has not been adequately addressed. Individual and organizational positive outcomes of spirituality in the workplace cannot be obtained when discrimination is in question. This is because the concepts of spirituality and discrimination in the workplace are completely opposite to each other. In order to prevent discrimination based on gender, sexual orientation, race, age, religion, disability and to establish spirituality in the workplace, organizations should follow awareness and training programs to eliminate prejudices of their management and employees, give importance to differences, develop an understanding of democracy and justice within the organization and development egalitarian and anti-discrimination policies and application. In this direction, while the differences are managed correctly, spirituality will be established in the workplace.

The authors explore the entanglement of smartphone technology and power in this paper. This paper explores the following question: In what ways does the actualization of smartphone affordances result in empowering outcomes (i.e. increase or reduce oppression) in the daily lives of refugees? Leveraging both affordance and feminist theories, the authors develop a hybrid lens bringing attention to the contextualized relationship between social process goals and affordances for sociality, upon which the authors introduce the notion of “goal-affordance interrelations”. The authors then trace how the actualization of these interrelations increases or reduces oppression.

Using an abductive approach, the authors analyze 32 semi-structured interview transcriptions conducted with Syrian refugees in Lebanon.

The analysis in this study reveals four categories of social process goals (meet financial needs, satisfy security needs, communicate and learn and maintain pre-existing social ties) that are intimate components of contextually meaningful affordances. When actualized, the goal–affordance interrelations fundamentally shape refugee experiences of power outcomes. The findings suggest forms of empowerment where powerlessness, marginalization, violence and exploitation are perceived to be reduced. Actualization outcomes are also found to increase perceived oppression. Additionally, the findings reveal that not all interrelations are actualized, such that the anticipation of an oppressive power outcome may limit the actualization of affordances for sociality.

This research raises considerations concerning technology and oppression, and that efforts to empower refugees through technology should critically question whether the lived experiences of oppression will be reduced. The findings of this study reveal various forms of less empowering (i.e. oppressive) outcomes for the refugees sampled, they also point to the potential politicization of the actualization of goal–affordance interrelations.