Unseating Western Hegemonies in Contextualised Research on Gender and Entrepreneurship

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Introduction

We invite submissions to this Special Issue of IJGE dedicated to examining and analyzing topics of gender and entrepreneurship based on non-western, as well as indigenous thinkers and philosophies. 

Entrepreneurship and gender research is concerned with considerably varied entrepreneurial experiences in multiple cultural, economic, and political contexts worldwide. Yet, entrepreneurship and gender research, as other academic disciplines, has relied mainly on Western philosophies, theories and concepts to explain entrepreneurial phenomena across the globe with the aim to produce a generalized understanding of entrepreneurship (Brayboy et al 2012). Yet, entrepreneurship (e.g., organizational forms, behavior,  motivations, and intentions, etc.) is context specific (Welter 2011) and reliance on Western based ontologies and epistemologies has proved insufficient to increase our understanding about entrepreneurial phenomena in non-western, global south or indigenous contexts (Anderson et al 2006; Peredo and McLean 2013; Henry et al. 2018). For example, research on indigenous entrepreneurship vividly illustrates the intricate web of challenges inherent to indigenous communities, such as systemic discrimination, poverty, and the struggle to preserve communal integrity. These nuanced circumstances often evade full recognition and understanding within the confines of mainstream entrepreneurship theory (Hindle and Moroz, 2010).
In research concerned with entrepreneurship and gender, Western theoretical approaches and their underlying assumptions have generated a rather limited understanding of women’s entrepreneurship in diverse context (Wood et al. 2021; Ojediran and Anderson 2020; Welter 2020). For example, prevalent understandings of entrepreneurship as emancipatory approach (Rindova et al. 2009), as well as approaches to use entrepreneurship as a tool to promote women’s empowerment are based and measured on Western definitions and assumptions related to individualist cultural contexts and on neo-liberal traditions within the US and Europe (Bastian et al. 2019; Ojediran and Anderson 2020). They are insufficient to understand, for example, female venturing in collectivist cultures, which are prevalent in non-Western, global Southern and indigenous contexts (Ojediran and Anderson 2020; Welter 2020). Equally topics such as female entrepreneurial motivations (Rindova et al. 2008), diverse understandings of entrepreneurial opportunities (Muñoz and Kimmitt 2018), women’s use of social capital and networks (Bastian et al. 2023), as well as conceptualizations of entrepreneurs (Essers and Benshop 2007) differ substantially from Western experiences. In this context, hegemonic Western approaches have been criticized to prevent alternate visions and explanations of phenomena in the world (Brayboy et al. 2012), as they tend to ignore or marginalize non-western thought and philosophical traditions (Battiste 2020, Henderson 2000, Muñoz and Kimmitt 2018). 
This Special Issue is interested in research on micro (individual), meso (organizational) and macro levels clearly applying non-Western and indigenous theories on gender and entrepreneurship, and by this offering new critical, ethical, and culturally sensitive viewpoints to further our understanding of entrepreneurship. We also encourage work that adopts non-Western feminist perspectives. For example, post-colonial feminist perspectives (Mohanty 2003; Al Khaled 2021) that provide insights in how female venturing is influenced by colonial legacies and power dynamics. We are also interested in non-Western theories and frameworks that help understand intersectionality of gender, race and class and how these shape entrepreneurial experiences (Henry et al. 2016; Raghuram 2021).

List of Topic Areas

• Culture, gender, and entrepreneurial engagement  
• Colonialism, positionality and choices of women entrepreneurs 
• Intersectionality and entrepreneurship 
• Structure, agency, and advocacy for women in developing countries  
• Alternative knowledge within entrepreneurial practices
• Gender, equity and justice for women

Submissions Information

Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available here.
Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Please see here.
Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to ““Please select the issue you are submitting to”. 
Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.

Key Deadlines

Closing date for manuscripts submission: 16/10/2024