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This paper explores the ways women entrepreneurs in male-dominated industries do identity work in order to gain legitimacy. In particular, we consider such identity work as a process being prompted by their direct environment, while demonstrating the gendered structural power relations in these women’s entrepreneurial contexts. We use a postfeminist lens to show how, in their quest for more legitimacy, they seem to be interpellated by postfeminist discourse.

We have used a narrative approach to show how women entrepreneurs in masculinised contexts do identity work to acquire legitimacy, and moreover use a postfeminist perspective to reflect on this identity work as to demonstrate how these Dutch businesswomen consider their agency in specific feminist terms within these men-dominated industry environments.

We present empirical data of ten women entrepreneurs in the Netherlands and how they discursively and subjectively make sense of their surrounding gendered contexts, in order to illustrate how local gender regimes and individual actions may conspire to constrain as well as stimulate these women’s entrepreneurship. By reflecting on three different ways of identity work through a postfeminist lens, we show how these women are interpellated by postfeminist discourses when trying to gain legitimacy.

The rather small sample does not allow us to generalise our findings to the whole population of women entrepreneurs in men-dominated contexts, yet this was not our goal anyway.

Such a reflection might help policy makers and such women themselves realise how, after all, gender inequality is still persistant in the entrepreneurship field and drawing on postfeminism does not necessarily help to support these women entrepreneurs' work–life balance.

Our findings underline the importance of a more gender inclusive entrepreneurship ecosystem, in which women entrepreneurs in both masculinised ánd feminised sectors are seen and treated as legitimate entrepreneurs.

Postfeminism, to our knowledge, has hardly been applied to women entrepreneurs' experiences in men-dominated environments, and is in itself still a rather new field in entrepreneurship studies.

This descriptive study explored how community colleges are teaching leadership in technical programs. Leadership education curricular offerings were identified via a survey and selected programs reviewed. 68 Deans, Directors, or Chairpersons of a Business, Management, or Technology program completed the survey, representing 61 community colleges. A review of four programs was conducted through web searches and interviews of leaders representing two of these programs were conducted. Leadership education is an emerging area for community colleges; one that is narrowly defined as workplace readiness, communication, and confidence building activities. There appears to be a need for technical programs to teach students leadership skills, as well as technical skills. Further research is needed to determine which leadership skills are needed for technologists at the community college level.

This paper aims to add to the theorization of the gender dynamic in rural areas by investigating the motives of women who join their family firm (or their spouse's family firm) and thereby defy the demographic trend of rural flight. The context of this study is the depopulation of rural areas with the closing of basic services and relocation of the younger population, and educated women in particular, to urban areas. Consequently, rural family businesses risk failing to find successors and suffering forced closure or relocation. The empirical site of the study is rural family firms in Sweden, a context characterized by a high level of gender equality in legislation and culture but gender-conservative business structures in rural regions.

The empirical case in this paper builds on a qualitative study of nine (9) life course narratives of women entrepreneurs in a rural region of Southern Sweden who have returned to rural areas to join their family business. The authors follow the view established by gender scholars that women are active agents in navigating their lives, and their life story narratives offer insight into the considerations that inform their choice to stay or return to rural locations. In Sweden, the setting for the study, gender equality is widely supported by legislation, policy and institutional frameworks and popular understanding of gender relations. In contrast to the gender-progressive policies of Sweden at large, women's entrepreneurship in rural regions of Sweden tends to follow traditional gender hierarchies and face similar constraints as in rural areas of other countries. The juxtaposition of these competing sets of ideals makes Sweden an important and interesting place to study and draw insights from the experiences of women entrepreneurs.

The findings reveal that women who choose to join rural family firms view them primarily in a positive light and see this choice as aligned with their need for professional flexibility and assertiveness, rewarding relationships, and a calm, secure, well-balanced life. Theoretically, the study implies that women choosing to engage in rural family firms seek non-material benefits, such as work–life balance and social support, and may be driven in part by a sense of psychological ownership that extends to the rural community.

The findings provide novel insights on women as active agents in navigating their lives and the intrinsic (e.g. alignment of personal values) and extrinsic (e.g. community support) motives that inform their decisions. The study also raises questions regarding how women perceive themselves as “fitting in” to rural settings and to what extent the sense of security within these settings that the women describe may be contingent upon factors such as their families' embeddedness within the community as well as their conformity to the local social norms.

Despite the popularity of facilitating coaching cultures, very little is known about this phenomenon, especially from the perspective of different organisational stakeholders. We aim to add the enacting practitioner perspective in developing coaching cultures that has not yet been explored through empirical research.

We interviewed 20 organisational development and coaching practitioners who work in or with organisations to develop coaching cultures.

We apply Braun and Clarke’s reflexive thematic analysis (TA) and unpack four intersecting themes: (1) “It flows through the veins of the organisation”; (2) “More powerful than anything else is having that one-to-one time”; (3) “The roadmap emerges”; and (4) “Means to an end and an end in itself”. We construct a coaching culture as an ever-evolving, psychologically safe, and empowering dialogic “container” or subculture that is developed and sustained by change agents with first-hand experience of coaching.

The findings add to our understanding of coaching cultures by offering a conceptualisation of coaching culture based on practitioners’ perspectives and constructing a framework of assumptions, values and behaviours that underpin them. We conclude by setting an agenda for further research in the advancement of coaching culture theory and practice in coaching psychology.

This conceptual, multi-voiced paper aims to collectively explore and theorize family entrepreneuring, which is a research stream dedicated to investigating the emergence and becoming of entrepreneurial phenomena in business families and family firms.

Because of the novelty of this research stream, the authors asked 20 scholars in entrepreneurship and family business to reflect on topics, methods and issues that should be addressed to move this field forward.

Authors highlight key challenges and point to new research directions for understanding family entrepreneuring in relation to issues such as agency, processualism and context.

This study offers a compilation of multiple perspectives and leverage recent developments in the fields of entrepreneurship and family business to advance research on family entrepreneuring.

According to thesaurus definitions, the absurd translates as “ridiculously unreasonable, unsound, or incongruous”; “extremely silly; not logical and sensible”. As further indicated in the Latin root absurdus, “out of tune, uncouth, inappropriate, ridiculous,” humor in absurd registers plays with that which is out of harmony with both reason and decency. In this article, the authors make an argument for the absurd as a feminist method for tackling heterosexism.

By focusing on the Twitter account “Men Write Women” (est. 2019), the rationale of which is to share literary excerpts from male authors describing women's experiences, thoughts and appearances, and which regularly broadens into social theater in the user reactions, the study explores the critical value of absurdity in feminist social media tactics.

The study proposes the absurd as a means of not merely turning things around, or inside out, but disrupting and eschewing the hegemonic logic on offer. While both absurd humor and feminist activism may begin from a site of reactivity and negative evaluation, it need not remain confined to it. Rather, by turning things preposterous, ludicrous and inappropriate, absurd laughter ends up somewhere different. The feminist value of absurd humor has to do with both its critical edge and with the affective lifts and spaces of ambiguity that it allows for.

Research on digital feminist activism has largely focused on the affective dynamics of anger. As there are multiple affective responses to sexism, our article foregrounds laughter and ambivalence as a means of claiming space differently in online cultures rife with hate, sexism and misogyny.

This article results from a survey on national and international research articles published from 1947 to 2018 that aimed to produce a theoretical framework and description of education governance.

The study was based on bibliographic research techniques. Its bibliometric analysis (Pritchett, 2001) focused on three structural indicators: 1) keywords, 2) most relevant journals and 3) most productive researchers. A survey was made targeting national and international research articles on education governance published from 1947 to 2018 as available on Scopus.

The survey pointed out the fundamentals of the education governance dimensions as posited in Hufty’s (2011) Governance Analytical Framework, namely: problems, social norms, actors, nodal points and processes.

The study provides the theoretical framework for establishing operational definitions of aforementioned dimensions that can be used in an education governance assessment instrument.