Making sense of women entrepreneurship research : a qualitative meta-analytical review
Abstract
In this study, we explore how extant literature contributes to the development in
women entrepreneurship research in terms of both theoretical and practical perspectives.
Accordingly, an ostensible tendency can be seen as women entrepreneurship shifting from a
marginalized discipline to a mainstream concept concerning more multi-dimensional attributes.
Gender has been used as a lens into studies and it is understood as a socially-constructed
process – to simply conduct comparative analysis between sexes cannot lead to more fruitful
research results – women entrepreneurs needs a medium to undergo their significant
contributions and important roles. Literature materials are chosen with the keywords “women
entrepreneurship” from academically well-known journals and book compilations which are
published within recent 10 years (from 2006 to 2015). Two relatively new books (published in
2014 and 2015 respectively) will be added to our research data list. Thus, certain new findings
will be generated and evolved based on our previous conference paper (which focused on the
publications ranging from 2006 to 2012). Our research objective can be reflected from three
questions: (1) Why has women entrepreneurship been a focus of entrepreneurship research? (2)
How does current research contribute to women entrepreneurship both from conceptual and
practical points of view? (3) What are the future concerns indicated by the findings? Four
positions (“equal opportunities”, “meritocracy”, “special contribution”, and “alternative
values”) synthesized by Alvesson and Billing (2009) as “approaches to the understanding of
women and leadership” will be “borrowed” for grouping and categorizing our findings. We will
build up a reflexive relationship between literature and seven codes applied in ATLAS.ti. (Seven
codes include “overall conceptual development”, “empirical data development”, “enterprising
promise”, “comparisons between male and female entrepreneurs”, “gender disparity”,
“important role performance of women entrepreneurs”, and “cultural and/or national
differences”). A qualitative meta-analysis is to underpin and concentrate on discourses related
to diverse perspectives in women entrepreneurship study.
Main Authors
Format
Conferences
Conference paper
Published
2016
Subjects
Publication in research information system
Publisher
International Council for Small Business
The permanent address of the publication
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:jyu-201609214160Use this for linking
Parent publication ISBN
978-0-9819028-9-0
Review status
Peer reviewed
Conference
International council for small business world conference
Language
English
Is part of publication
ICSB 2016 World Conference : Proceedings
Citation
- Aaltio, I., & Wang, Q. (2016). Making sense of women entrepreneurship research : a qualitative meta-analytical review. In ICSB 2016 World Conference : Proceedings (pp. 1-19). International Council for Small Business.
Copyright© the Authors & International Council for Small Business, 2016.