ABSTRACT
Women’s entrepreneurship as a growing global phenomenon has attracted considerable research attention in recent decades (Jennings and Brush, 2013; Marlow and McAdam, 2012; Henry, Foss and Ahl, 2015). Alongside this development, the importance of social networks for business creation and development constitutes a significant proportion of work in terms of entrepreneurship research (Aldrich, Rosen and Woodward, 1987; Foss, 1994; Johannisson, 2000; Greve and Salaff, 2003; Hoang and Antoncic, 2003; Jack, Dodd and Anderson, 2004; Renzulli and Aldrich, 2005; Witt, 2004). The premise of this chapter is that empirical research practice constitutes a discursive field (Foucault, 1972) that influences how researchers write and talk about entrepreneurship. Therefore, how women’s entrepreneurship is portrayed within research on entrepreneurial networks is an important area to study. Discourse analysis of empirical research articles from 1980 to 2008 revealed that almost 30 years of research have produced hegemonic statements that female entrepreneurs are not good networkers compared to their male counterparts (Foss, 2010). This is mainly due to lack of a gendered perspective, implying that treating gender as a binary category (sex) and performing quantitative analysis highlight differences instead of similarities (cf. Henry et al., 2015). Recognising that such hegemonic statements imply that female networks are only measured against male networks, this chapter builds on that previous work by analysing scholarly publications from 2008. The core research question addressed is: Which hegemonic statements characterise the discourse in published scholarly work, and is there a change in the use of gender perspectives from 2008 to 2015? In comparing the various discourses, this study contributes to future scholarship by describing the value of using institutional approaches in order to create new knowledge related to the embeddedness of gendered entrepreneurial networks. The remainder of the chapter is organised as follows: the first section describes the selection of articles from 2008 to 2015, examines how networks are defined, and describes commonalities in the research. This is followed by the identification of the relevant hegemonic statements. The final section discusses how institutional perspectives can provide scholars with new angles on how to research gendered entrepreneurial networks.
