ABSTRACT
Business has always been associated with drama, some of it playing out in the melodramas of individual lives, much more of it associated with business institutions and the booms and busts of economies. No entry that explores the global connections between gender, race, and entrepreneurship can avoid the dramatic. Given business history’s undeniable masculinism and a business world dominated by white male decision-makers and entrepreneurs, efforts to disrupt the taken-for-granted absence of others may be considered hopelessly naïve at best. At worst, such efforts can be perceived as a misguided strategy to disguise businesses’ role in perpetuating some of the world’s most intractable development problems. This chapter combines these three topics and examines their impact in creating economic shifts of wealth and power, which sometimes complicated and sometimes exacerbated inequality in the areas of entrepreneurship, gender, and race.
