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Examines the French approach to residential commonhold management, the over‐regulation in commonhold management in France and the problems that this causes. Considers the implications of the French system for the introduction of commonhold in the UK. Concludes that UK commonhold management is likely to follow a less highly regulated path than France, having more in common with the legislation in Australia and the USA.

Women entrepreneurs face gender‐specific barriers surrounding access to: networks of information, assistance, finance and investment funds, in addition to socio‐cultural barriers. Business incubation literature indicates the supports provided to tenant incubator companies (including: assistance from incubation managers, access to academic institutions and facilities and access to contact networks), generally increase survival rates and can accelerate growth in turnover, employment levels and export sales. Business incubators could, therefore, offer an ideal environment for women entrepreneurs to overcome many gender‐related barriers. The Irish Government has invested, via “Enterprise Ireland”, over €46 million in campus‐incubators but the gender composition of incubation tenants accessing this state funding has not been explored.

A study of all “Enterprise Ireland” funded campus‐incubators in Ireland was undertaken between November 2006 and March 2007. A survey of 100 per cent of centre managers explored their background, demands on time, the contact networks and relationships with the academic host in each centre and services provided. For cross‐referencing purposes, some tenants and prospective tenants were also surveyed in relation to tenant expectations and service delivery; the culture of incubation centres; incubation centres' policies are: tenant recruitment and selection.

This paper highlights the under‐representation of women‐owned businesses in Ireland's campus incubation centres.

These findings highlight key areas requiring attention from researchers, policy makers and incubation managers to facilitate best practice.

This paper contributes to current knowledge as there has, to date, been no comprehensive study or evaluation of gender equality, or suitability of services provided, in campus‐incubators.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the convergence of female entrepreneurship, women in management and leadership fields from a gender perspective to bring a gender consciousness to the development and construction of the emerging entrepreneurial leadership theory base.

A conceptual paper that argues for the convergence of the entrepreneurship and leadership fields to enable an interchange of ideas, and learn from the developments within each field from a gender perspective. Whilst scholars have recently begun to explore the concept of entrepreneurial leadership, these early developments have remained gender blind, gender defensive and gender neutral.

A central argument is that female entrepreneur leader's experience social role incongruity. In order to be perceived by their followers as credible and legitimate entrepreneurial leaders, women are expected to manage their dual presence across the symbolic spaces of femininity and masculinity, doing gender well and doing gender differently to meet social role expectations of being a woman, whilst also meeting dominant masculine constructions of leadership and entrepreneurship.

This paper extends understandings of entrepreneurial leadership, highlighting the importance of foregrounding gender, to make visible and integrate the historical developments of gender within the entrepreneurship and leadership fields. Both scholars and practitioners must “unlearn” and “rethink” our learnt state of being in relation to gender, leadership and entrepreneurship in order to move beyond the “given” and disrupt masculinities' hierarchical superiority.

The paper argues that blends of agentic and communal behaviours must be recognized as accessible to both women and men for effective entrepreneurial leadership. This will provide female entrepreneurial leaders the fluidity to do both and be something else as a person. Offering understandings of gender to extant gender blind, gender neutral and gender defensive constructions of entrepreneurial leadership will progress understandings of the framework emerging from this conceptualization.

Women‐owned businesses are frequently described as under‐performing in that the majority remain small and marginal. The authors dispute this description; within this paper, it is argued that such performance profiles reflect the constrained performance of most small firms. The assertion that women owned firms under‐perform reflects a gendered bias within the entrepreneurial discourse where femininity and deficit are deemed coterminous. In addition, women‐owned firms are expected to under‐perform given expectations of female weakness in the context of male normativity and superiority. Accordingly, the aim of this paper is to critically evaluate the association between gender and business performance suggesting that this critique has implications for the broader development of our understanding of entrepreneuring behaviours.

This is a conceptual research note which explores the notion of performance and under‐performance in the context of gender.

It is argued that gendered socio‐economic positioning ensures that women‐owned businesses demonstrate constrained performance but this is not synonymous with under‐performance. Furthermore, ingrained epistemological gendered biases persist which portray women as flawed entrepreneurs despite the absence of convincing data regarding essential gendered differences between the performance of male and female entrepreneurs.

The paper suggests that far greater reflexive criticism is called for regarding epistemological assumptions which shape the current research agenda.

This discussion develops a critical analysis of the association between gender, performance and entrepreneuring.

This feminist standpoint study aims to make an empirical contribution to the entrepreneurial leadership and HRD fields. Women entrepreneur leaders' experiences of gender will be explored through a framework of doing gender well and doing gender differently to unsettle the gender binary.

Against a backcloth of patriarchy, a theoretical gender lens is developed and a feminist standpoint research (FSR) approach taken in this study. There are five case studies of women entrepreneur leaders operating small businesses across North East England in sectors of IT, law, construction, beauty, and childcare. In each case study a two‐stage semi‐structured interview process was implemented and the women's voices analysed through a framework of doing gender well and differently.

This paper highlights the complexities of gender experiences offering four themes of women entrepreneurs' experiences of gender within entrepreneurial leadership: struggling with entrepreneurial leadership; awareness of difference; accepting and embracing difference; and responding to difference, which are offered to challenge the gender binary and capture the complexities of how gender is experienced.

The field must begin to shift its focus from the dominant masculine discourse to foster understandings of gender experiences by using gender as an analytical category to enable the field to truly progress.

Women are still an under‐represented group within entrepreneurship and within the higher echelons of organisations. This requires greater attention.

This feminist study calls for both scholars and practitioners to analyse critically their underlying assumptions and bring a gender consciousness to their HRD research and practice to understand gender complexities within entrepreneurial leadership and organisational experiences more widely.

Purpose – An investigation of how women construct their entrepreneurial identities as owners of high growth technology ventures within the context of business incubation.

Methodology/approach – A qualitative case study approach is adopted to enable the development of an in-depth and nuanced picture of high technology business incubation.

Findings – The women oscillated between trying to emulate the behaviour of their male colleagues within the incubator as the prevailing ‘entrepreneurial identity’ was embedded in masculinity; thus, to achieve credibility and legitimacy, the women attempted to deny associations with femininity by undertaking a metaphorical sex change. Once, however, the firms became successful, they again felt comfortable displaying elements of their femininity as the tensions surrounding entrepreneurial and feminine characterizations could be negated by demonstrations of business competence.

Research limitations/implications – The documented limitations of case study research are noted. There are a number of implications surrounding the utility and accessibility of incubation for female entrepreneurs and the underlying assumption that these are spaces specifically for male entrepreneurs.

Practical implications – It is essential to critically evaluate current policy initiatives and managerial strategies informing current incubation practices.

Social implications – Gender disadvantage is reproduced within business incubators.

Originality/value of chapter – There are few explorations of the accessibility of business incubators to encourage and support female entrepreneurship.

This study aims to investigate how educational attainment and entrepreneurial competencies affect entrepreneurial motives of women (vs men) in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). This study shows that education has a more positive effect on women’s entrepreneurial motives compared with men. On the other hand, there is a greater positive effect of competencies on men’s motives. Moreover, the moderating effects of culture are compared. The results of the multiple regression analysis show that, within the MENA region, the cultural value of self-expressionism engenders increased opportunity-motivated entrepreneurship by men. Yet, it has no significant effect on women’s entrepreneurial motives.

This study analyses survey data using multiple regression analysis, relationship between independent variables, educational attainment and entrepreneurial competencies, as well as culture, and the dependent variable, entrepreneurial motivation. The present study focuses on data records concerning 13 MENA countries, notably, Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and Yemen. The sample includes early-stage and established female entrepreneurs, a total of 1,551 respondents, for all countries for the entire period.

Entrepreneurs with higher levels of education and competencies are more likely to exploit market opportunities. However, effects from educational attainments and competencies are significantly stronger for men. Moreover, the increasing introduction of liberal or post-modern values in MENA societies has significant effects on men but no effect on women, suggesting that men tend to benefit much more than women in the Arab world with regards to their entrepreneurial behaviour.

The study is one of the few attempts to clarify the relationship between individual factors, here represented by education and competencies, and environmental factors, here represented by culture (post-modern values) and entrepreneurial motivation. Moreover, it addresses the MENA region, which is a politically and economically important and challenging environment, and which, to date, has received relatively little attention in entrepreneurship research.

To outline the experiential nature of hidden mental illnesses (or “invisible disabilities”) in sport and physical cultures. A sociological account is given of how people living with a hidden mental illness or disorder manage their identities in physical culture.

The chapter begins by addressing the role of social stigma as a barrier to sport and exercise participation for young people living with hidden mental illnesses. From there, and venturing beyond typical sociological tropes about social stigma, the chapter presents ethnographic findings from a study of people living with epilepsy and their tactical uses of a range of physical cultures to craft their selves in innovative ways.

People living with so-called simple or nonmajor “hidden/invisible” disabilities are often overlooked as a differential needs population with sport and health zones. The people in this study identify how the desire to be mobile, self-expressive, and authentic through the physical activity pursuits is important yet unavailable to them in a wide range of sport, leisure, and health fields because of the ways in which these places privilege particular types of brain and bodies. Through their own self-styled physical cultural involvements, however, these people challenge the dominance of sport-based model of health promotion in broader culture and disrupt dominant ideological frames that privilege the normative, rational, calculating, and predictable brain in athletic zones.

The importance of identifying persons who may not participate in sport and physical culture due to perceived and felt stigma is highlighted. In addition, developing creative strategies and programs for these populations is underscored.