The last decades have seen major welfare state retrenchment in Europe, not least in Sweden with public sector downsizing, including privatization of schools, care, and health care. The rhetoric connected to privatization stressed the unique opportunities for formerly publicly employed women to start their own businesses in sectors now open for enterprise. Did this materialize? Analyzing twenty years of empirical research on women's entrepreneurship in Sweden we find that privatization resulted in oligopolization and masculinization of the market(s), and that gendered public sector practices were reproduced in the private sector – women turned from low-wage labor to low-profit entrepreneurship. In addition, divisions among women along lines of ethnicity resulted.

Purpose

Contrasting two countries with different gender regimes and welfare states, Sweden and Tanzania, this paper aims to analyse how the institutional context affects the ways in which a neo-liberal reform agenda is translated into institutional changes and propose how such changes impact the preconditions for women’s entrepreneurship.

Design/methodology/approach

This study uses document analysis and previous studies to describe and analyse the institutions and the institutional changes. This paper uses Scandinavian institutional theory as the interpretative framework.

Findings

This study proposes that: in well-developed welfare states with a high level of gender equality, consequences of neo-liberal agenda for the preconditions for women entrepreneurs are more likely to be negative than positive. In less developed states with a low level of gender equality, the gendered consequences of neo-liberal reforms may be mixed and the preconditions for women’s entrepreneurship more positive than negative. How neo-liberalism impacts preconditions for women entrepreneurs depend on the institutional framework in terms of a trustworthy women-friendly state and level of gender equality.

Research limitations/implications

The study calls for bringing the effects on the gender of the neo-liberal primacy of market solutions out of the black box. Studying how women entrepreneurs perceive these effects necessitates qualitative ethnographic data.

Originality/value

This paper demonstrates why any discussion of the impact of political or economic reforms on women’s entrepreneurship must take a country’s specific institutional context into account. Further, previous studies on neo-liberalism have rarely taken an interest in Africa.

Purpose

Contrasting Sweden and Tanzania, this paper aims to explore the experiences of women entrepreneurs affected by entrepreneurialism. This study discusses the impact on their position in society and on their ability to take feminist action.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper analysed interviews conducted in the two countries over 15 years, using a holistic perspective on context, including its gendered dimensions.

Findings

The results amount to a critique of entrepreneurialism. Women in Sweden did not experience much gain from entrepreneurship, while in Tanzania results were mixed. Entrepreneurialism seems unable to improve the situation for women in the relatively well-functioning economies in the global north, where it was designed.

Research limitations/implications

In mainstream entrepreneurship studies, there is a focus on the institutional context. From the analysis, it is apparent that equal attention must be given to the social and spatial contexts, as they may have severe material and economic consequences for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. The paper raises questions for further studies on the gendering of markets in different contexts, as well as questions on the urban-rural dimension.

Practical implications

In Sweden, marketisation of welfare services led to more women-owned businesses, but the position of women did not improve. The results strongly convey the need for a careful analysis of the pre-existing context, before initiating reforms.

Originality/value

The paper adds to the understanding of context in entrepreneurship studies: Africa is largely an underexplored continent and contrasting North and South is an underexplored methodological approach. This paper further extends and develops the model of gendered contexts developed by Welter et al. (2014).

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore and discuss to what extent and why women's entrepreneurship contributes to rural economic viability and gender equality in an advanced welfare state. Design/methodology/approach The authors use detailed register data to explore men's and women's rural businesses in the most common industries for rural women entrepreneurs in the Swedish welfare state. Based on a literature review, the authors develop hypotheses and analyse how family, business and industry factors influence earnings. Findings Women's rural entrepreneurship is important for rural viability, as women's businesses provide a wide range of services necessary for life in rural areas. Although women's rural businesses are not significantly smaller than those of men, women's income is lower and more sensitive to business and industry variables. Marriage has positive effects for the earnings of men but negative effects for the earnings of women. The authors argue that the results are contingent on the gendering of entrepreneurship and industries, as well as on the local rural gender contracts. For these reasons, the importance of women entrepreneurs for rural viability is not reflected in their own incomes. Hence, women's rural entrepreneurship does not result in (economic) gender equality. Originality/value Entrepreneurship scholars rarely explore women's rural entrepreneurship, and particularly not in the Global North or Western welfare states. Therefore, this empirical study from Sweden provides novel information on how the gender order on the business, industry and family levels influences the income of men and women entrepreneurs differently.

In this chapter, we discuss the entrepreneurial university as a part of the entrepreneurialisation of society. To investigate how this affects the University we take inspiration from Mazzucato´s discussion about the entrepreneurial state. Based on a rich empirical case where entrepreneurship has been introduced in a different way than described in extant literature (and policy), two conceptualisations of the entrepreneurial university are elaborated on. In “The Entrepreneurial University” (TEU) focus is set on how existing technology can be used in a new context or turned into innovations. In contrast, in the “Alternative Entrepreneurial University” (AEU) processes and practices are introduced to facilitate reflexivity with regards to the role of entrepreneurship in late capitalism. It is proposed that, rather than choosing one of these two ‘idea(l)s’, it may be beneficial to find ways to unite the two approaches, finding ways to create stability for knowledge production that can feed into both new technologies and novel ways of organizing society for the betterment of its constituents. Further it is suggested that the two conceptualisations can help to advance research approaches on the entrepreneurialisation of universities in order to learn how this sets and shifts boundaries for democracy and our understanding of knowledge production.

Critical perspectives have called for the study of women's entrepreneurship as a route to social change. This social turn' claims women are empowered and/or emancipated through entrepreneurship with limited problematisation of how these interchangeably used concepts operate. Using an institutional perspective in combination with a narrative approach, we investigate women entrepreneurs' life stories on their road to freedom' where entrepreneurial activity enables them to break free' from particular gendered constraints. Through juxtaposing women's narratives in the contexts of Saudi Arabia and Sweden, the relationship between empowerment and emancipation is disentangled and (re)conceptualised. The findings distinguish between empowerment narrated as individual practices to achieve freedom for the self within institutional structures and emancipation as narrated as a wish to challenge and change structures of power and reach collative freedom. The yearning for collective emancipation propels women's stories of entrepreneurship by raising expectations for entrepreneurship as a vehicle for institutional change. Such stories may fascinate and inspire others to engage in entrepreneurial endeavours to become empowered, but whether they reach emancipation remains an empirical question to be answered. The performative dimension of entrepreneurial narratives is, however, their ability to turn emancipation into an (un)reachable object of desire, with a quest for even more individual empowerment and entrepreneurial activity, at the same time excluding other forms of human conduct as conducive for change.

En livskraftig landsbygd med tillgång till arbetskraft, arbetstillfällen och välfärdsservice är en aktuell samhällsfråga. Företagandets omfattning på landsbygden är en aspekt som kan ha betydelse för landsbygdskommunernas sårbarhet. Syftet med rapporten är att utveckla kunskap om kvinnors entreprenörskap på landsbygden, som kan ligga till grund för att stimulera landsbygdsutveckling, jämställdhet och vidare forskning, exempelvis genom kvalitativa forskningsmetoder.

Med hjälp av en databasstudie beskrivs och analyseras omfattningen och karaktären av kvinnors företagande på landsbygden. Till viss del studeras också likheter och skillnader i företagandet mellan kvinnor födda i Sverige och kvinnor födda utomlands, samt mellan kvinnor och män.

Företagandet är mer omfattande bland de sysselsatta kvinnorna på landsbygden än bland de sysselsatta kvinnorna i tätorterna. Skillnaderna i omfattningen av kvinnors företagande är små mellan olika typer av landsbygdskommuner – de som är avlägset belägna, mycket avlägset belägna eller belägna nära en större stad. Resultaten indikerar snarare att det är kommunernas företagskaraktär eller tradition av företagande som avgör andelen företagare per sysselsatta. Kartläggningen pekar mot att arbetslöshet kan vara ett incitament för företagande – något starkare för de utlandsfödda kvinnorna än för kvinnorna födda i Sverige. Skogsförvaltning och blandat jordbruk är bland de vanligaste näringsgrenarna för både kvinnor och män på landsbygden. I övrigt är dock företagandet mycket könssegregerat med avseende på bransch. De tio vanligaste näringsgrenarna för kvinnor och män skiljer sig markant åt. Kvinnors företag är mest representerade i Hår- och kroppsvård, Restaurangverksamhet, Redovisning och bokföring, Konsultverksamhet avseende företags organisation, Fysioterapeutisk verksamhet samt Litterärt och konstnärligt skapande. Mäns vanligaste näringsgrenar är mer relaterade till landsbygdens kontext av mark- och naturresurser. Kvinnors företag är små, 76 procent är soloföretag och lönsamheten varierar stort. De näringsgrenar där kvinnors företag redovisar högst lönsamhet är i de numerärt mansdominerade näringsgrenarna inom tillverkningsindustrin. Resultaten indikerar därmed könssegregering och hierarki med avseende på arbets- och resursfördelning.

Kvinnor på landsbygden är mer benägna att vara företagare än anställda om de är gifta, har hemmavarande barn eller en utbildningsnivå lägre än den eftergymnasiala. Det kan tolkas som att företagandet är en lösning för att kombinera arbetsliv med ansvar för hem och barn. De företagande kvinnornas disponibla inkomster är i genomsnitt lägre än för kvinnor med anställning, för män som är företagare och för män med anställning. Att vara gift innebär för kvinnor en lägre disponibel inkomst, men för män en högre disponibel inkomst jämfört med att att inte vara gift. Resultaten visar dock att det inte är de individrelaterade faktorerna som mest bidrar till skillnader i disponibel inkomst, utan, näringsgren och antalet sysselsatta. Manligt könskodade näringsgrenar och stora företag ger högre inkomst. Den övergripande slutsatsen är att företagandet på landsbygden är traditionellt könssegregerat och hierarkiserat, i fråga om resursfördelning.