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This chapter makes a case for a decolonial, intersectional approach to narrative criminology. It argues that in growing contexts of deepening inequalities, research approaches that humanise people on the margins and that explicitly centre questions of social justice are ever more urgent. This chapter explicates a decolonial, intersectional narrative analysis, working with the data generated in interviews with women sex workers on their experiences of violence outlining how a decolonial, intersectional, narrative analysis may be accomplished to analyse the intersections of power at material, representational and structural levels. The chapter illustrates the importance of an intersectional feminist lens for amplifying the complexity of women sex workers' experiences of gendered violence and for understanding the multiple forms of material, symbolic and institutionalised subordination they experience in increasingly unequal and oppressive contexts. It ends by considering the contributions decolonial, intersectional feminist work can offer narrative criminology, especially the emerging field of narrative victimology.

The focus of this chapter is intersectional bullying and harassment in the rail sector in Britain, where the workforce is male-dominated, gender-segregated and ethnically diverse. There have been significant gender and race equality issues in the sector that have resulted in a number of high profile legal cases. The authors draw on data from a trade union survey of members (Transport and Salaried Staffs Association) focussing on their experiences achieving equality at work. The survey received 1,054 useable responses. The authors have used both additive and multiplicative data analysis methods to capture the methodological debates concerning intersectional analysis. The analyses provided some varied responses, depending on the methods used, but an enduring factor was that older, ethnic minority women were the group who were most likely to feel that they had suffered bullying and harassment. The authors discuss these findings in relation to the limited legal interventions for intersectional bullying and harassment. The authors argue that employers and trade unions must develop proactive institutional responses to mitigate its damaging consequences.

This study aims to explore inefficiencies that arise from public and private policy initiatives undertaken in suburbs and outlying localities, where various intersecting economic, educational, ethnic and geographical disadvantages mutually reinforce each other. The authors propose to transpose the cross-disciplinary concept of intersectionality from an individual and community-based level (i.e. encompassing a variety of racial, ethnic and socio-economic minority communities) to a locality-based context.

The empirical data underlying this study were based on a long-term field study drawing on both interviews and observations. A self-administered ethnographic research approach was combined with classic analyses of conversations transcribed verbatim, using qualitative coding.

The main actors’ inability to understand the concrete situations experienced by subjects residing in outlying localities, as well as the managers’ failure to cooperate and engage collectively to promote employment among these populations, can be explained by the ineffectiveness of the categories that were designed and used in carrying out managerial action, as part of corporate policy, and then implemented within factories. These findings are particularly well-illustrated by the relatively lower inefficiency of SMEs, which had more limited resources, as compared with the actions undertaken at production facilities run by large companies, even though the latter devoted considerable resources to vocational inclusion (recruitment, integration and job preservation) and efforts to combat discrimination.

In identifying a new way to categorize a certain type of social dynamic driven by businesses and various social actors, the authors sought to overcome the epistemological obstacles that arise from relying on neo-institutional theory, which, when applied to the case at hand, would have merely resulted in mimetic similarities, without offering any means for unblocking the socio-economic factors that come into play. The limitations of the study are related to its strict temporal and geographic isolation (i.e. a two-year study examining three production facilities located within the same suburb north of Paris).

The authors hope the study will urge actors operating in the same disadvantaged locality to collectively address the multiple intersectional challenges that tend to render policies for social inclusion and economic development so difficult to implement within areas suffering from a myriad of socio-economic ills. The first step in that direction, the authors feel, consists in naming these intersectionalities adequately.

Using a rich empirical database, this paper aims to show the relevance of the concept of intersectionality beyond its traditional scope of application (disadvantaged minority communities and individuals) while directing interest toward a less anthropocentric level of analysis: the locality.

Purpose – This chapter examines the relationship between intersections of race and gender for vulnerability for human trafficking and criminalization of exploitation in the United States that is rooted in the broader socio-historical contexts dating to colonization and chattel enslavement.

Methodology/approach – This chapter utilizes intersectional criminology and historical intersectional criminology as epistemological frameworks to contextualize the construction of race and gender that began with colonization of indigenous populations to chattel enslavement of Africans and their descendants. Overall, this chapter’s approach is a call for contextualization within the study of human trafficking and an intersectional approach to understanding the structures that enable trafficking and the ramifications it has for victims.

Findings – Through an application of intersectional criminology, the findings herein demonstrate how racial ideologies and legacies within the United States contributed to the vulnerabilities of race and gender for sex trafficking predation as well as criminalization for Black and Native American girls and women. The gendered analysis of men and women who chose to become sex traffickers reveal different gendered pathways into trafficking offending and addresses the significance of these pathways for trafficking victims and potential future traffickers. These analyses demonstrate that intersectional criminology problematizes current research on human trafficking and future directions research should incorporate.

Originality/value – Current criminological research has a scarcity of intersectional criminological applications and fewer that offer a critical analysis of structural inequalities, histories of colonization and chattel enslavement, and interrogation of identities in both vulnerabilities for trafficking victims, how they may interact with agents from the criminal justice system, and the impacts of intersecting identities for traffickers and their offending. If criminology scholars aim to use their research in anti-trafficking efforts and policy recommendations, these analyses are vital both for addressing victimization and offending pathways for exploitation victims and their exploiters.

This chapter describes methodologies used in the project ‘Out-of-school activities and the education gap’. The project explored how the out-of-school environment affects children, whether it impacts on primary school attainment and whether it reinforces existing socioeconomic differences. A mixed-methods approach combined three areas of research: statistical analysis of the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) linked to the National Pupil Database (NPD); a qualitative study through interviews with key stakeholders in 10 schools in London and the North East and the articulation of theories of change for how out-of-school activities may affect attainment. Patterns in how children spend their time, and whether and how this affects attainment, were investigated by analysis of the MCS linked to the NPD. Qualitative research with parents, teachers, pupils and activity providers from schools in London and the North-East afforded an in-depth understanding of drivers and barriers influencing how children spend their time and pathways by which activities may affect children's learning and development. The qualitative research also provided a narrative intersectional analysis of responses in terms of class, gender, ethnicity, religion and disability. Mixing quantitative and qualitative research was made difficult by the volume of data and the time needed to analyse and report each area separately, the different nature of data in the three areas of research and the timing of each phase of data collection. However, meaningful combining of methods occurred at the level of research questions and contributed to a more critical analysis of children's out-of-school activities than had been possible before.

This conceptual paper has two central aims: to critically analyse the potential of intersectionality theory as a means by which to understand aspects of context in entrepreneurship studies, and advocate for the value of a realist perspective and mixed methods approaches to produce better intersectional research on entrepreneurship. This paper aims to discuss these issues.

Highlighting context as an emerging topic within entrepreneurship literature, the paper examines how drawing upon notions of intersectionality and positionality can help to explain the social context for entrepreneurial activity and outcomes, particularly in terms of agency and resources.

The paper complements and extends existing intersectional approaches to entrepreneurship studies by introducing Archer’s critical realist philosophical perspective on agency and Anthias’ positional perspective on resource access, considering the usefulness of realism and mixed methods approaches for such work, and outlining a methodologically informed potential research agenda for the area.

The paper offers a theoretical foundation for researchers to begin systematically exploring social entrepreneurial context by accounting for the effects of overarching intersecting structures such as gender, race, and socio-economic class (amongst others), presents empirical methods through which these social-structural influences, and the degree of their impact, can be identified and analysed, and suggests a philosophically robust means of conceptualising how, in combination with agency, they influence essential aspects of entrepreneurial activity.

This paper intervenes in existing literature on entrepreneurship and inequalities by proposing a novel reframing of intersectionality as a threshold concept, an important idea that enables us to deepen and progress the understanding of complex subjectivities.

Drawing from education studies, intersectionality is explored through the five key features of threshold concepts: (1) transformative, (2) irreversible, (3) integrative, (4) bounded and (5) troublesome. We offer a set of reflection questions for what we call “doing intersectionality.”

We develop a metacritique of the way in which the concept of intersectionality has thus far been treated in feminist theory and applied in entrepreneurship studies – namely, as the culmination of thinking about difference and inequality, decoupled from its roots in collectivist analysis and Black and anti-racist feminism. The paper invites scholars of entrepreneurial inequalities to both engage and look beyond an intersectional lens to better elucidate the range of historically emergent social hierarchies and systems of power that shape their phenomena of interest.

Through reframing intersectionality as a threshold concept, this paper challenges entrepreneurship researchers to view intersectionality as a foundational starting point for the conceptualisation of complex interactions of social structures, and the structural inequality and power relationships present within their research, rather than a destination.

Taking an intersectional approach, this chapter makes a theoretical and empirical contribution to the study of mothers’ movements in the context of social welfare cutbacks in Israel. I argue that the political use of the maternal identity provides an important cultural resource to women’s social movements, yet all women cannot access this advantage equally. By adding an intersectional perspective to the literature on women’s movements and media debates, this empirical study shows that the ability of different groups of women to politically mobilize their maternal identity in the news is impacted by their class and racial backgrounds. I focus on Israel as an ambiguous case that reflects both the political relevance of maternal identity as mobilized by different political actors, as well as the intersectional dynamics of marginalization of women’s movements within contentious media debates about austerity policies. Using critical discourse analysis, I analyzed 268 newspaper articles that discuss the Israeli Single Mothers’ Movement, a welfare rights movement of low-income women of color (Mizrahi). I find two competing frames converging across the newspapers analyzed: the first draws on a nationalist discourse of the “mother of the nation” to present a positive image of a heroic “mothers’ movement”; the second draws on racist and sexist images to negatively frame activists as a “Mizrahi movement” of undeserving poor mothers. I show how the contested construction of the Single Mothers’ Movement in the news media is directly connected to hegemonic Israeli discourse on motherhood and ethnicity, and demonstrate how this shapes the movement’s public image and its political and feminist value.

Addressing the challenges expressed by organization researchers and Leslie McCall with her conceptual framework of intercategorical analysis, this paper contributes to the methodological debate on intersectionality. The purpose of this paper is to explore intersectionality on the organizational level in the Finnish defence forces (FDF). In the paper, the authors explore how the interactions between categories of gender, age, and position in the organization explain the concerns of employees in the changing military organization. Furthermore, the authors also investigate the types of intersectional mechanisms behind the empirical observations.

The logistic regression analysis is based on a survey addressed to the whole salaried personnel in the FDF in 2011 (n=8,093, response rate being 54 per cent).

In line with McCall’s (2005) intercategorical approach, the analysis shows that the plain examination of main effects of the variables will not suffice, but the interaction effects of the variables must also be examined. The analysis indicates that even though women in general experienced more concerns, gender does not alone explain the concerns expressed by the members of the FDF, but age and especially personnel group are significant in understanding configurations of positions in relation to the organizational change process.

The methodological limitation of the study is that although the data were large, it was not possible to conduct three-ways analysis, because of the size of some groups.

The study offers a noteworthy addition to the rare research of practising intersectionality in the conceptual framework using quantitative methods.

Relations between Indigenous women and the Australian women’s movement have never been easy. For some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women the white women’s movement has seemed irrelevant to the real struggles in Aboriginal women’s lives, which have tended to be more politically aligned with Indigenous struggles more broadly. Many Aboriginal women have viewed white feminists as insensitive to their own role in Australia’s colonial history and the implications of this for contemporary intercultural relations. In response to such criticism, many white feminists have struggled with the challenge of effective cross cultural engagement and collaboration.

This chapter brings an intersectional analysis to bear in an effort to understand these challenges, developing a framing of agonistic processes of collective identity as a way of thinking about the potentially productive role of conflict in social movements. Through an examination of Indigenous and non-Indigenous responses to a particular policy framework, the chapter suggests that feminist interventions focussing on the negative, racist impacts of the policy have tended to neglect the gendered dimensions of the underlying problem. As a result these arguments risk neglecting (some) women’s lived experiences.