Explaining leadership in family firms: Reflexivity, social conditioning and institutional complexity

Research on leadership in family firms has concentrated on the drivers of performance viewed in the context of reciprocal family and business logics, family or non-family CEOs operating within different family governance and administrative settings. The explanatory aim is to ascertain the optimum configuration of elements for achieving improved economic rents so the benefits of family loyalty do not negatively impact firm performance. Our thesis challenges this research, which treats family leadership as a contingent outcome of the governance and administrative contexts within which family and non-family CEOs make strategic choices. We argue that family leadership studies restrict explanations of action to a narrow bandwidth because leadership is effectively black-boxed when it is treated as an outcome of these contingent relations. To overcome this limitation we propose a nested framing of social conditioning that explains the connections between actors, organizations and multiple social orders (and not just family and business). Our contribution is to theorize family leadership in the context of multiple ‘social context – personal preference’ modes; that is, leadership is conceived through reflexivity, which is the personal process mediating the effects of our circumstances upon our actions

Understanding tourism development: A representational approach

The article investigates hotel employees and postgraduate students’ representations of “tourism development”, using social representations theory. Data from a sample of eighty participants were collected on Chios Island, Greece. To reveal social representations a word association procedure was applied followed by a correspondence analysis. The analysis attempts to map the meanings associated with “tourism development” and to pinpoint the links between those meanings. Results highlight differences and similarities in the representation of “tourism development” according to individuals’ social membership, offering an interesting insight for employers and educators

Relationally reflexive women: Household strategies of female entrepreneurs as social change

Building on research that favors a view of entrepreneurship as social change the study explores the actions of female entrepreneurs facing life discontinuities as examples of entrepreneurship. Despite increase in numbers, women still face structural inequalities in accessing entrepreneurial opportunities. We focus on understanding their experiences and how they negotiate the gendered structures in order to set up new ventures, paying particular attention to the family, occupational and household nexus. We conceive their actions through Archer’s work on “reflexivity”, which is the process mediating the effects of our circumstances upon our actions. We identify three household strategies that female entrepreneurs engage with during moments of life discontinuities in order to overcome the gendered structures they experience and set up a business: “leverage relationships”, “repair relationships” and “maintain relationships”. These strategies highlight female entrepreneurs’ agency as they have the power to implement practices they deem appropriate for their lives and become successful. The theoretical frame and empirical data analysis presented in this article challenges the individualism that permeates normative entrepreneurship research and indicates how female entrepreneurs are active and at the same time pragmatic in in the way they conduct business. Entrepreneurship is this instance is a response to social instability

Negotiating Gendered Ageing:Intersectional Reflexivity and Experiences of Incongruity of Self-Employed Older Women

This article analyses the experiences of self-employed older women. Developing an intersectional reflexivity approach, our analysis shows how older women negotiate their concerns in relation to gendered ageing and realize self-employment. Our study reveals three practices: ‘Expressing the self’, ‘Exploring learning’ and ‘Embracing solidarity’. We contribute to the neglected intersection of gender and age in studies of work, and to an appreciation of the transformational potential of self-employment for older women

Relational practices and reflexivity: Exploring the responses of women entrepreneurs to changing household dynamics

This qualitative study explores how and why women, positioned as mothers, wives, or carers, navigate changing household dynamics, related to care and reproductive resources, and become entrepreneurial. Drawing on relational reflexivity, we show how women’s embodied, intimate relations with important others in the household form the focal point for entrepreneurial activities and offer evidence of their entrepreneurial agency. Our analysis reveals the emergence of three relational practices that result in a new venture as the entrepreneurial response of women. We critically evaluate normative analyses on gender, entrepreneurship, and household

Being a Self-Employed Older Woman: From Discrimination to Activism

This article presents an autobiographical account of an older woman’s lived experience of self-employment. Little is known about women who experience ongoing self-employment into their 50s and beyond. Shoshanna’s personal narrative describes her experiences and the challenges she has faced as she reflects upon her attempts to grow and sustain her business and the implications of ageism and gender inequality in laying a claim to entrepreneurship. The narrative proceeds to reflect on her activist work, as it is constructed through the creation of a social enterprise to support older people. Shoshanna’s narrative provides valuable insights into the intersection of age and gender in self-employment moving from discrimination to active support

Feminism in women’s business networks: A freedom-centred perspective

How do women’s business networks (WBNs) help to advance women’s freedom? Drawing on Zerilli’s freedom-centred feminism, our study sets out to answer this question at the intersection of freedom, feminism and work. Critics argue that WBNs promote a postfeminist view of freedom focusing on individual self-realisation and thus participate in rolling back collective, feminist efforts to dismantle structural inequalities. We reconceptualize WBNs as political arenas and argue that making claims about shared interests and concerns in such an arena constitutes a feminist practice of freedom. With an original, inductive and qualitative research design combining topic modeling and dialectical analysis, we examine the claims made in 1,529 posts across four WBN blogs. We identify postfeminist claims and new forms of change and transformation that can help to advance women’s freedom across three ‘dialectics of freedom’: conformity and imagination; performative care and relational care; sameness and openness. Our findings show that uncertain and contradictory ways of defining and engaging with women’s freedom can emerge through claim-making in such arenas. The fragility of the process and its outcomes are, then, what can move feminism forward at work and beyond

How does responsible leadership emerge? An emergentist perspective

Increasing academic and practitioner conversations regarding corporate responsibility, have led some leadership scholars to question the possibilities to accomplish responsible leadership. Drawing on an emergentist perspective, through an empirical study in three organizations, the article develops the responsible leadership literature by offering a critical analysis of the emergence of responsible leadership. Our key finding is that responsible leadership emerges as participants’ ‘shared concerns’, namely: ‘environmental and communal concerns’, ‘professional concerns’, ‘employment concerns’, and ‘commercial concerns’, which constitute social arrangements that give meaning to what is responsible and possible. The theoretical perspective we develop highlights the conditioning role of shared and nested concerns of the study participants and unpack how the social context variously shapes responsible leadership