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The purpose of in this study is to examine how scholarship on women’s entrepreneurship/gender and entrepreneurship has contributed to understandings of the embeddedness of entrepreneurial activity. The authors review studies from the past four decades (1975-2018) to assess the extent to which research has examined the embeddedness of entrepreneurial activity in two key institutions – the family and the labour market – that remain pervasively and persistently gendered.

The authors blend a systematic quantitative analysis of scholarly publications with qualitative analysis, identifying key themes and contributions. The corpus of material comprises over 1,300 scholarly publications, including both empirical and theoretical contributions.

This analysis shows that attention to the embeddedness of entrepreneurial activity in gendered social institutions is a clear legacy of women’s entrepreneurship research. The systematic quantitative review found that over one-third (36.6 per cent) of scholarly publications examines questions of family and/or labour market embeddedness in some way. The qualitative analysis identifies a rich array of themes over the past four decades and a growing global reach of scholarship in recent years.

This paper contributes to knowledge about the embeddedness of entrepreneurial activity. It offers a comprehensive review of how entrepreneurship is shaped by the embedding of such activity in two predominant (and gendered) social institutions – families and labour markets. It will be of use to scholars seeking an overview of this topic and considering new research questions to pursue.

Inspired by the “responsibility turn” in the broader organization/management literature, the overarching aim of this article is to help scholars working at the gender × entrepreneurship intersection produce research with a higher likelihood of being accessed, appreciated and acted upon by policy- practitioners. Consistent with this aim, we hope that our paper contributes to an increased use of academic-practitioner collaborations as a means of producing such research.

We selected Cunliffe and Pavlovich’s (2022) recently formulated “public organization/management studies” (public OMS) approach as our guiding methodology. We implemented this approach by forming a co-authorship team comprised of a policy professional and an entrepreneurship scholar and then engaging in a democratic, collaborative and mutually respectful process of knowledge cogeneration.

Our paper is comprised of four distinct sets of ideas. We start by describing who policy-practitioners are and what they want from academic research in general. We follow this with a comprehensive set of priorities for policy-oriented research at the gender × entrepreneurship nexus, accompanied by references to academic studies that offer initial insight into the identified priorities. We then offer suggestions for the separate and joint actions that scholars and policy-practitioners can take to increase policy-relevant research on gender and entrepreneurship. We end with a description and critical reflection on our application of the public OMS approach.

The ideas presented in our article offer an original response to recent work that has critiqued the policy implications (or lack thereof) within prior research at the gender × entrepreneurship nexus (Foss et al., 2019). Our ideas also complement and extend existing recommendations for strengthening the practical contributions of academic scholarship at this intersection (Nelson, 2020). An especially unique aspect is our description of – and critical reflection upon – how we applied the public OMS approach to bridge the academic-policy divide.

How do new professional service firms strategically position themselves in fields where developing a favourable external reputation is critical to performance? Are certain positioning strategies more effective than others? This study reveals that most professional service firm start-ups attempt to establish themselves by pursuing a strategy of moderate divergence from a field's institutionalized practices. Those that do so, however, do not perform as well as those that either conform more closely to these institutional prescriptions or depart more radically from them. In other words, balance beguiles but purism pays.

The assumption of wealth creation as the dominant motive underlying entrepreneurial efforts has been challenged in recent work on entrepreneurship. Taking the perspective that entrepreneurship involves emancipatory efforts by social actors to escape ideological and material constraints in their environments (Rindova, Barry, & Ketchen, 2009), researchers have sought to explain a range of entrepreneurial activities in contexts that have traditionally been excluded from entrepreneurship research. We seek to extend this research by proposing that entrepreneurial acts toward emancipation can be guided by different notions of the common good underlying varying conceptions of worth, beyond those emphasized in the view of entrepreneurial activity as driven by economic wealth creation. These alternative conceptions of worth are associated with specific subjectivities of entrepreneurial self and relevant others, and distinct legitimate bases for actions and coordination, enabling emancipation by operating from alternative value system perspectives. Drawing on Boltanski and Thévenot’s (2006) work on multiple orders of worth (OOWs), we describe how emancipatory entrepreneurship is framed within – and limited by – the dominant view, which is rooted in a market OOW. As alternatives to this view, we theorize how the civic and inspired OOWs point to alternate emancipatory ends and means through which entrepreneurs break free from material and ideological constraints. We describe factors that enable and constrain emancipatory entrepreneurship efforts within each of these OOWs, and discuss the implications of our theoretical ideas for how entrepreneurs can choose among different OOWs as perspectives and for the competencies required for engaging with pluralistic value perspectives.

Strengthening the nation’s technological workforce, competing and expanding its relevance in the global economy, and maintaining personal as well as homeland security will be highly dependent on the quantity, quality, and diversity of the next generations of scientists, engineers, technologists, and mathematicians. Production of a diverse generation of human resources with relevant, competitive skills is critical. However, so too is the need to raise an enlightened citizenry with cross-cultural experience and cultural awareness competency, with a broad worldview and global perspectives. These requirements are critical to understanding the challenges and opportunities of scholarly activity in a pluralistic global environment and positioning ourselves to capitalize upon them. Scholars with cross-cultural experience and competency are empowered to adapt and work collaboratively, nationally and globally, with scholars of different races, geopolitical, socioeconomic, and cultural backgrounds. Development of effective strategies to transform science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) departments for inclusion and to broaden the participation in STEM across cultures, socioeconomic standing, race, and gender in higher education has been a dominant topic of pedagogical interest of national priority in the last several decades. However, success in these endeavors is achievable only through systemic change and a cultural shift to address the underlying root causes of socioeconomic disparity, gender, and racial disparities and a paucity of cultural awareness among all educational stakeholders. STEM departments can only be truly transformed for inclusion through the development of sensitive, creative, and student-engaging curricula and targeted recruitment and retention of underrepresented minorities in STEM. Formation of well-coordinated alliances spanning educational sectors, governmental and non-governmental organizations, and community engagement and outreach are also critical to promoting inclusive and broad participation in STEM education.

The first section of the chapter gives an introduction to various challenges, obstacles, and hindrances that prevent a successful transformation of K–12 science education as well as STEM departments in higher education for inclusion. The second section discusses historical perspectives of the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith (UAFS) – the institutional profile, missions, and visions of UAFS as a regional university. Policies and strategies for addressing the socioeconomic disparity, faculty gender, and racial disparities and cultural competency awareness at UAFS are also highlighted in this section. Other approaches including targeted efforts to recruit and retain underrepresented minority students, provision of financial assistance for students from low-income families, and a creative “Math-up” curriculum innovation to promote inclusive and broad participation in STEM at UAFS are highlighted in the latter section of the chapter. Formation of alliances between UAFS, local K–12 school districts, and governmental and non-governmental agencies to promote broad participation in STEM at UAFS are discussed. The last section of the chapter provides recommendations for adaptation and sustainability of strategies and efforts aimed at transforming national STEM departments for inclusion.

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the four major factors known to contribute to self-efficacy in general (enactive mastery, vicarious experience, physiological arousal and verbal persuasion) can help account for observed differences in the entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE) of young women and men, in particular.

The authors adopted a two-stage design, which included collecting data from 222 university students via an online survey followed by a quasi-experiment involving an opportunity evaluation task.

The findings demonstrate that the significantly lower ESE of the young women in the sample was attributable to their lower level of prior entrepreneurial experience, their lower level of positive and negative affect towards entrepreneurship and their higher likelihood of receiving failure feedback due to their actual performance on an opportunity evaluation task.

Given the importance of understanding why females continue to be under-represented in entrepreneurial activity the world over, these findings provide additional insight into why young women tend to feel less efficacious than young men about their ability to successfully undertake an entrepreneurial career.

This paper offers a comprehensive and unified theoretical framework, derived from social learning theory, for furthering the understanding of the factors that contribute to gender differences in ESE. The authors also offer a novel quasi-experimental design involving an opportunity evaluation task that others might find useful, particularly for empirical research adopting a cognitive and/or affective lens on entrepreneurship.