9789147088058

Vol. 25

“Female ethnic entrepreneurship is particularly interesting nowadays in order better to understand the normative pressures of hegemonic masculinity in business ethic (and business

SERIES EDITORS: Clegg & Stablein

New Directions in Postheroic Entrepreneurship: Narratives of Gender and Ethnicity

studies as well!). Essers’ book is highly persuasive in showing Muslim businesswomen‘s coping Professor Silvia Gherardi, University of Trento

“Research on both mainstream and immigrant entrepreneurship is mostly gender blind, whereas gender research tends to ignore ethnicity or religion. Essers’ ethnographic study goes beyond such limitations and describes how the socially constructed categories of gender, entrepreneur-

Caroline Essers

strategies.”

ship, ethnicity, family and religion intersect and simultaneously circumscribe and enable the construction of an entrepreneurial identity. The study challenges received notions of entrepreneurship and is a timely and much needed contribution to entrepreneurship scholarship. ” Associate Professor Helene Ahl, Jönköping University

“Essers has written an accessible, interesting and enjoyable book which will be of value to anyone concerned with the relationship between ethnicity, gender and management.”

Associate Professor Alison Pullen, University of Technology, Sydney New Directions in Postheroic Entrepreneurship

This book critiques the mainstream, popular discourse on entrepreneurship, which traditionally constructs a heroic male, white archetypical entrepreneur. Caroline Essers contends that the interlocking of gender and ethnicity needs to be included in the theorizing of entrepreneurship in order to acquire a more complete picture of what happens when people are involved in entrepreneurial activities. Traditional images of entrepreneurship not only do little justice to the experiences of certain groups of entrepreneurs, such as the female migrant businesswomen that were interviewed for this book, but they also limit the entrepreneurial identification of such entrepreneurs in a problematic way. The intersectional analysis of these businesswomen’s experiences, identities, and coping strategies leads to a better specification of the notion of entrepreneurship.

Vol.25

Liber Copenhagen Business School Press Universitetsforlaget

Best.nr 47-08805-8

Tryck.nr 47-08805-8-00

omslag.indd 1

09-03-12 13.44.07

A D VA N C E S I N O R G A N I Z AT I O N S T U D I E S

SERIES EDITORS: Stewart R. Clegg & Ralph Stablein

Caroline Essers

New Directions in Postheroic Entrepreneurship: Narratives of Gender and Ethnicity

Liber Copenhagen Business School Press Universitetsforlaget

New Directions1.indd 1

09-03-16 08.50.14

New Directions in Postheroic Entrepreneurship: Narratives of Gender and Ethnicity ISBN 978-91-47-08805-8 (Sweden) ISBN 978-82-15-01501-9 (Norway) ISBN 978-87-630-0226-4 (Rest of the world) © 2009 Caroline Essers and Liber AB Publisher’s editor: Ola Håkansson Series editor: Stewart Clegg and Ralph Stablein Typeset: LundaText AB 1:1 Printing: Sahara Printing, Egypten 2009

Distribution: Sweden Liber AB S-205 10 Malmö, Sweden tel +46 40-25 86 00, fax +46 40-97 05 50 http://www.liber.se Kundservice tel +46 8-690 93 30, fax +46 8-690 93 01 Norway Universitetsforlaget AS Postboks 508 NO-0105 Oslo phone: +47 14 75 00, fax: +47 24 14 75 01 post@universitetsforlaget.no www.universitetsforlaget.no Denmark DBK Logistics, Mimersvej 4 DK-4600 Koege, Denmark phone: +45 3269 7788, fax: +45 3269 7789 www.cbspress.dk North America International Specialized Book Services 920 NE 58th Ave., Suite 300 Portland, OR 97213, USA phone: +1 800 944 6190 fax: +1 503 280 8832 Rest of the World Marston Book Services, P.O. Box 269 Abingdon, Oxfordshire, OX14 4YN, UK phone: +44 (0) 1235 465500, fax: +44 (0) 1235 465555 E-mail Direct Customers: direct.order@marston.co.uk E-mail Booksellers: trade.order@marston.co.uk

All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrival system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo-copying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

New Directions1.indd 2

09-03-16 08.50.14

Advances in Organization Studies Series Editors: Stewart Clegg Professor, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia Ralph E. Stablein Professor, University of Otago, New Zealand Advances in Organization Studies is a channel for cutting edge theoretical and empirical works of high quality, that contributes to the field of orga足niza足 tional studies. The series welcomes thought-provoking ideas, new perspec足 tives and neglected topics from researchers within a wide range of disciplines and geographical locations. www.organizationstudies.org

New Directions1.indd 3

09-03-16 08.50.14

Table of Contents Acknowledgements.........................................................................

6

Introduction......................................................................................

The gendered and ethnically determined discourse of entrepreneurship......................................................................

The aim of this book....................................................................

Identity, intersectionality and female ethnicity.............................

The societal relevance of this research..........................................

Organization of the book.............................................................

9 10 12 13 16 21

1. Female Ethnicity: the inter­twinement of ­gender and ethnicity within ­entrepreneurial contexts.......................

Female ethnicity: Identity construction in entrepreneurial activities.......................................................................................

Fatna’s story.................................................................................

Dürrin’s story...............................................................................

Karima’s story..............................................................................

Leila’s story..................................................................................

Concluding remarks.....................................................................

Intermezzo: Ayse’s life-story.........................................................

23 26 29 31 33 35 38

2. Doing entrepreneurship at the intersection of gender and ethnicity: enterprising from two cultures........................

Multiple identities theorized.........................................................

‘The migrant entrepreneur’ and culturalism.................................

Multiple identities in practice.......................................................

Between prejudice and restriction.................................................

‘Honour and shame’....................................................................

Hybrid identities..........................................................................

Identity work...............................................................................

Concluding remarks ....................................................................

Intermezzo: Nadia’s life-story.......................................................

42 43 48 50 50 52 56 59 61 62

3. Reflections on the narrative approach: dilemmas of power, emotions and social location while constructing life-stories.

Collecting life-story narratives......................................................

Pride and guilt..............................................................................

A friend or a manipulator?...........................................................

67 68 70 72

22

4

New Directions1.indd 4

09-03-16 08.50.14

Being in charge.............................................................................

Interpreting and writing up life-story narratives...........................

Concluding remarks.....................................................................

74 77 81

4. Affiliating with Islam: female Muslim business­women doing boundary work...............................................................

Ethnicity, gender and entrepreneurship in relation to Islam.........

Contexts of Islamic affiliations.....................................................

Between opportunity and restriction............................................

Legitimizing female entrepreneurship through Islam....................

Concluding remarks.....................................................................

Intermezzo: Melekka’s life-story...................................................

84 85 89 90 95 98 100

5. Entrepreneurship at the public-private divide: female migrant entrepreneurs playing family ties..............................

Social identity...............................................................................

Characters in the episodes............................................................

Episode 1: ‘Becoming a good woman’..........................................

Episode 2: Remaining a good wife, housewife, daughter and mother...................................................................................

Discussion and concluding remarks: Playing family ties at the public-private divide...............................................................

Intermezzo: Atalya’s life-story......................................................

105 106 110 111 114 119 122

6. Discussion and conclusions.......................................................

General conclusions.....................................................................

Enterprising from two cultural contexts.......................................

Islam, female entrepreneurship and identity construction............

Family dynamics, gender and ethnic identity................................

Female ethnicity and identity within an entrepreneurial context A better specification of the notion of entrepreneurship: different routes towards autonomy..............................................

Contribution to the societal debate .............................................

Limitations and suggestions for further research..........................

Final remarks...............................................................................

128 128 129 132 133 135 137 140 142 145

Appendix..........................................................................................

Methodological concerns.............................................................

146 146

References........................................................................................

Index............................................................................................

152 164

5

New Directions1.indd 5

09-03-16 08.50.14

Acknowledgements This book is about female entrepreneurs of Moroccan and Turkish back­ ground in the Netherlands. I had the privilege to capture the life-stories of twenty enterprising migrant women. Of course I have asked myself many times why this group of women was so fascinating to me. One of the reasons might be my own life-story: I have some female entrepreneurial ancestors with diverse ethnical backgrounds. My grandmother on my father’s side was German and met my grandfather, a travelling tailor, in Germany just after the First World War. She started a grocery store, and her daughter was also attracted to becoming her own boss and thus started a jewelry business in the fifties. Additionally, from my mother’s side, there were a few enterpris­ ing migrant women.The story goes, for instance, that the Turkish mother of my grandmother’s grandfather had to flee during the Ottoman period to the Netherlands. She did not know anyone else besides her brother, who started a transport company, a business which is still flourishing today. One by one these were hardworking, creative and enterprising women who acted against stereotype, just as the women I interviewed for this book.

It is particularly these women that have inspired me to write this book.

However, any book is the outcome of the efforts of many different people: from creating first ideas and discussing rough material to scrutinizing analy­ ses. Therefore, I would like to thank a few people who have supported me in the process of my doctoral research and the writing of this book. First of all, Yvonne Benschop and Hans Doorewaard, who have been terrific supervi­ sors while I was doing this research and with whom I still pleasantly coope­ rate. From the start of my research I have been fortunate to exchange some research ideas with a few wonderful researchers, such as Marjo Buitelaar, Halleh Ghorashi, Deirdre Tedmanson, Edwina Pio, Fatima Sadiqi, Souraya Naamane-Guessous, Ton van Naerssen, Jan Hoogland and Harry van den Tillaart.

Not only scientific scholars, but also diverse practicioners from the field of (migrant) entrepreneurship have helped me to carry out my research; also, writers such as Naima el Bezaz have been inspirational to me while writing this book. But above all I would like to thank the businesswomen I inter­ viewed. It is quite something to tell your life-story to a complete stranger, but they did decide to give me their trust. There are a few women that I got to know a bit better during the years, and ‘Dürrin’ (a pseudonym that I use in this book) even became a friend of mine. Through the many nice con­ versations I had with her, not only about entrepreneurship but also about her life as a Turkish woman in the Netherlands, I developed a much better ‘feeling’ for the material and the various themes. I would like to thank her for her honesty and for just being herself.

6

New Directions1.indd 6

09-03-16 08.50.14

Furthermore, I am very grateful to Stewart Clegg for the encouragement to publish this book and providing me the opportunity to do so. I am also much obliged to the journals Gender, Work and Organization, Organization Studies, Organization and Human Relations who gave me the permission to use the papers published in their journals as a basis for the chapters (respec­ tively chapter 1, 2, 3 and 4) in this book, as well as co-authors Yvonne Benschop and Hans Doorewaard, with whom I published a few of the origi­ nal papers (chapter 1, 2 and 4).

Finally I would like to thank my father for all his support. During the course of the writing of this book he sadly passed away. But his motto was always: ‘whatever happens, work is the best remedy’. This turned out to be a good advice. I would like to dedicate this book to my father, a researcher and entrepreneur himself, and one of the sources of inspiration in my work.

7

New Directions1.indd 7

09-03-16 08.50.15

New Directions1.indd 8

09-03-16 08.50.15

Introduction Entrepreneurship has always been an intriguing phenomenon which has gained attention from many different professional and scientific angles. The importance of entrepreneurship as the motor for our economy is stressed by scientists and policy-makers. The self-made man who ‘started his business from scratch’ is frequently praised by governments – American and European alike – and governments often emphasize the importance of taking new initiatives and setting up new companies (Perren and Jennings, 2005).

To understand entrepreneurship1, which in this book is seen as the creation of new organizations (Gartner, 1988: 15), it should be viewed as a discourse.

By discourse I mean everyday speech and writing used by diverse layers in society that encompass a truth effect and as such, function ideologically to produce, maintain, and reproduce divisions of power and control (Van Dijk, 1997). Accordingly, Western governmental discourses on entrepreneurship reveal a structural ‘grand narrative’ of entrepreneurs who are seen to have an important role in the ‘machine’ of the economy, an implicit responsibility to deliver economic results, and to provide a ‘steady basis’ of growth so that the national economy can progress (Perren and Jennings, 2005: 177). The discourse on the important function of entrepreneurs and their life-worlds is powerful as it calls upon the wider ‘taken for granted’ ideology of rational economic behaviour and enterprise (Fairclough, as cited in Perren and Jennings, 2005: 178). As a result, founders of large companies, such as Bill Gates, are often admired and celebrated in the media. They are elevated to heroic status as if there was something unique to their psyche that is the ultimate cause of their economic success (Jones and Spicer, 2005: 237). In her essay ‘The Entrepreneur as Hero’, Candace Allen (1997: 1) confirms the heroic journey of the entrepreneur, and stresses societies should hail the entrepreneurial function with much more acclaim, as they are ‘honest, courageous and steadfast’ and hence set a good example to emulate in the future.

Consequently, the popular discourse on entrepreneurship is girded with her-

1

Often, the word ‘entrepreneurship’ is used interchangeably with ‘self-employment’. Some­ times the word ‘self-employment’ is even preferred over ‘entrepreneurship’, either to account for small-scale businesses or to avoid the heroic, capitalistic and Western connotation of the word ‘entrepreneurship’. Yet, all the women cited in this book call themselves entrepreneurs.

Furthermore, self-employment might also imply in a critical management perspective the act of ‘exploiting’ oneself. Therefore, this term would not do justice to the women interviewed.

Moreover, not using the terms entrepreneurship or entrepreneur might imply (in line with the hegemonic entrepreneurial discourse) that we as researchers would have or use the power to decide that these women were not (worthy) entrepreneurs. Additionally, self-employment does not necessarily entail the accountability for other people, whereas entrepreneurship does assume responsibility for others as well (Bruni et al., 2005).

9

New Directions2.indd 9

09-03-16 08.42.09

oism, action, adventure and growth. Smith and Anderson (2004) describe this as ‘the entrepreneur eulogized’. The ‘grand entrepreneurial narrative’ often celebrates the entrepreneur succeeding against all odds, the entrepreneur taking on the establishment (such as Richard Branson), and the positive aspects of the development of hubris (see Smith and Anderson, 2004: 135).

Jones and Spicer (2005: 235) even emphasize the ‘phantasmic’ character of ‘the entrepreneur’, and by doing so they suggest that ‘the entrepreneur’ is an empty signifier, an open space or ‘lack’ whose operative function is not to ‘exist’ in the usual sense but to structure phantasmic attachment. In this sense, the entrepreneurship discourse would offer a narrative structure to the fantasy that coordinates desire (idem: 237).

The gendered and ethnically determined discourse of entrepreneurship Entrepreneurs: born or made?

In line with popular discourse, mainstream academic literature on entrepreneurship argues that entrepreneurial success depends on particular personality traits (Schumpeter, 1976; McClelland, 1987; Chell, 2001). Although the definition of ‘the entrepreneur’ might vary, this ‘trait’ school develops the idea of an archetypical entrepreneur; one who is innovative and creative, has the urge for achievement and autonomy, and exhibits risk-taking behaviour (Thomas and Mueller, 2000). In addition, entrepreneurs are said to be looking for recognition, are assumed to have an individualistic character, and are believed to possess a strong internal locus of control (Carter et al., 2003). Consequently, this popular discourse portrays a static and universal entrepreneurial identity. People are fated to be an entrepreneur in this discourse, and scholars, the media and business people themselves have contributed to the creation of this archetypical entrepreneur. Accordingly, the fictional entrepreneur is found to be a skewed construct as this image is romanticized and laden with myth (Smith and Anderson, 2004: 136). Yet, this view of ‘the entrepreneur’ is contested and so is the idea that the above mentioned traits are innate.

A gendered and ethnically determined discourse This book criticizes discourse on entrepreneurship as not only constructing a heroic archetype but also one which is gendered and ethnocentrically determined (Ogbor, 2000). A scrupulous discourse analysis of research texts on entrepreneurship reveals that feminine aspects of the entrepreneur are rarely promoted (Ahl, 2004); the accepted notion of morality in entrepreneurial narratives is patently a ‘masculine’ gendered form (Smith and Anderson, 2004: 137) and entrepreneurship typically has a masculine ­label 10

New Directions2.indd 10

09-03-16 08.42.09

Vol. 25

“Female ethnic entrepreneurship is particularly interesting nowadays in order better to understand the normative pressures of hegemonic masculinity in business ethic (and business

SERIES EDITORS: Clegg & Stablein

New Directions in Postheroic Entrepreneurship: Narratives of Gender and Ethnicity

studies as well!). Essers’ book is highly persuasive in showing Muslim businesswomen‘s coping Professor Silvia Gherardi, University of Trento

“Research on both mainstream and immigrant entrepreneurship is mostly gender blind, whereas gender research tends to ignore ethnicity or religion. Essers’ ethnographic study goes beyond such limitations and describes how the socially constructed categories of gender, entrepreneur-

Caroline Essers

strategies.”

ship, ethnicity, family and religion intersect and simultaneously circumscribe and enable the construction of an entrepreneurial identity. The study challenges received notions of entrepreneurship and is a timely and much needed contribution to entrepreneurship scholarship. ” Associate Professor Helene Ahl, Jönköping University

“Essers has written an accessible, interesting and enjoyable book which will be of value to anyone concerned with the relationship between ethnicity, gender and management.”

Associate Professor Alison Pullen, University of Technology, Sydney New Directions in Postheroic Entrepreneurship

This book critiques the mainstream, popular discourse on entrepreneurship, which traditionally constructs a heroic male, white archetypical entrepreneur. Caroline Essers contends that the interlocking of gender and ethnicity needs to be included in the theorizing of entrepreneurship in order to acquire a more complete picture of what happens when people are involved in entrepreneurial activities. Traditional images of entrepreneurship not only do little justice to the experiences of certain groups of entrepreneurs, such as the female migrant businesswomen that were interviewed for this book, but they also limit the entrepreneurial identification of such entrepreneurs in a problematic way. The intersectional analysis of these businesswomen’s experiences, identities, and coping strategies leads to a better specification of the notion of entrepreneurship.

Vol.25

Liber Copenhagen Business School Press Universitetsforlaget

Best.nr 47-08805-8

Tryck.nr 47-08805-8-00

omslag.indd 1

09-03-12 13.44.07