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.