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Institutional perspectives on gender and entrepreneurship
Edited by Helene Ahl & Teresa Nelson
Introduction
For nearly two decades, the importance of social networks for acquiring resources needed for business creation has been one of the main areas within entrepreneurship research. The premise of this paper is that research practices constitute a discursive field, influencing the ways in which researchers write and talk about entrepreneurs ([34] Foucault, 1969/1972). As gender is a part of this discourse, the critique of entrepreneurship research for conducting studies that "measure" women against the standards of men ([64] Mirchandani, 1999; [4] Ahl, 2006; [58] Lewis, 2006) needs to be articulated. There are too few examples of an explicit gender perspective in studies of entrepreneurial networks, which constitutes a scholarly challenge. My question here is: how can a gendered analysis of entrepreneurial networks benefit from recent developments in feminist epistemology?
In answering this question, the first section of this paper examines how the requirements in feminist constructionism for situating knowledge of a phenomenon ([46] Haraway, 1991; [68] Prins, 1997; [16] Brenna, 2005; [32] Engelstad and Gerrard, 2005) can move research on entrepreneur's networks beyond feminist empiricism and feminist standpoint theory. With this framework in mind, examples from network research on entrepreneurs are reviewed as a discursive field of practices, and hegemonic statements in current research are revealed. Based on this, four future research themes for creating situated knowledge of entrepreneurs' networks are suggested, and narrative approaches are proposed as a methodological tool.
A constructionist feminist theory perspective: moving away from feminist empiricism and feminist standpoint theory
Over the last 40 years perspectives on gender have been developed from gender-as-a variable approach ("feminist empiricism") to gender-as-relation ("feminist standpoint theory") ([12] Berg, 1997; [4] Ahl, 2006). Feminist empiricism and feminist standpoint theory came to be criticised for being essentialist in character as they assumed that certain traits are unique to men and women, respectively. Furthermore, these approaches reinforced the sameness (empiricist feminism) or difference (feminist standpoint) between men and women, hence taking little account of within-sex variation. Inspired by the early work of [80] West and Zimmermann (1987) and their concept of "doing gender", social scientists such as [27] Di Stefano (1990), [15] Bordo (1990) and [46] Haraway (1991) introduced gender-as-process ("post-structuralist feminism")....