Call for Papers Journal of Small Business Management Special Issue on Entrepreneurial Leadership and Gender:Exploring theory and practice in global contexts

摘要

The women's entrepreneurship literature has developed significantly in recent decades, with research emphasis shifting from purely descriptive explorations, devoid of theoretical focus, towards studies demonstrating a clear effort to embed research within highly informed conceptual frameworks. Most research published to date on gender and entrepreneurship has tended to focus on a number of common themes, adopting mainly a gender as a variable approach (Carter & Shaw, 2006). Perhaps not surprisingly, many of the earlier studies suggested that male-owned businesses outperformed female-owned businesses in economic terms, with women's apparent under-performance directly linked to their distinct lack of entrepreneurial capital at the start-up stage (Schwartz, 1976; Johnson & Storey, 1993; Watson & Newby, 2007). Collectively, while such studies have advanced the field of women's entrepreneurship-enhancing understanding and highlighting the contribution of women-led businesses to the global economy-contemporary scholarship in this area now acknowledges the inadvertent tendency of some accepted research practices to contribute to the highly gendered perception of women entrepreneurs as being somewhat inferior to their male counterparts (Ahl, 2006), thus maintaining and reproducing the subordination of the feminine (Marlow & Patton, 2005).