A Conceptual Framework of Internet Contributions to Young Adult Entrepreneurship

This paper develops the basis of a conceptual framework of the effects of the Internet and World Wide Web on entrepreneurship in the present day. As academic literature suggests Web experience and familiarity with search tools can contribute significantly to usage for beneficial purposes, and journalists credit the Internet for rising numbers of young Internet entrepreneurs due to the various types of access it enables, young adult Internet users are the focus of the paper. In July 2010, a survey of 104 18-35 year olds was conducted using the Facebook social networking platform with a follow-up qualitative questionnaire sent by e-mail. Years of usage, hours of use per day, amount of time used for work or business, and entrepreneurial intention were tested in a logistic regression analyses for their bearing on online and offline idea generation and implementation. Usage statistics, along with additional independent and control variables both Internet and non-Internet related, were also tested in a probit analysis for their contributions to entrepreneurial intention. Significant relationships were found between use of the Internet for work or business and opportunity pursuit as well as between the importance of the Internet to one’s most significant business idea and entrepreneurial intention. Survey results point to the rise of a new class of young adult entrepreneurs and potential entrepreneurs as a result of the ways in which the Internet has changed the “rules of the game.” Various implications for future research, educators and policymakers are suggested to further the reach of the Internet for entrepreneurial purposes, promote access and the development of digital literacy and online skills among the information poor

A Conceptual Framework of Internet Contributions to Young Adult Entrepreneurship

This paper develops the basis of a conceptual framework of the effects of the Internet and World Wide Web on entrepreneurship in the present day. As academic literature suggests Web experience and familiarity with search tools can contribute significantly to usage for beneficial purposes, and journalists credit the Internet for rising numbers of young Internet entrepreneurs due to the various types of access it enables, young adult Internet users are the focus of the paper. In July 2010, a survey of 104 18-35 year olds was conducted using the Facebook social networking platform with a follow-up qualitative questionnaire sent by e-mail. Years of usage, hours of use per day, amount of time used for work or business, and entrepreneurial intention were tested in a logistic regression analyses for their bearing on online and offline idea generation and implementation. Usage statistics, along with additional independent and control variables both Internet and non-Internet related, were also tested in a probit analysis for their contributions to entrepreneurial intention. Significant relationships were found between use of the Internet for work or business and opportunity pursuit as well as between the importance of the Internet to one’s most significant business idea and entrepreneurial intention. Survey results point to the rise of a new class of young adult entrepreneurs and potential entrepreneurs as a result of the ways in which the Internet has changed the “rules of the game.” Various implications for future research, educators and policymakers are suggested to further the reach of the Internet for entrepreneurial purposes, promote access and the development of digital literacy and online skills among the information poor

Developing a critical realist positional approach to intersectionality

This article identifies philosophical tensions and limitations within contemporary intersectionality theory which, it will be argued, have hindered its ability to explain how positioning in multiple social categories can affect life chances and influence the reproduction of inequality. We draw upon critical realism to propose an augmented conceptual framework and novel methodological approach that offers the potential to move beyond these debates, so as to better enable intersectionality to provide causal explanatory accounts of the ‘lived experiences’ of social privilege and disadvantage

Women entrepreneurs and their ventures: complicating categories and contextualising gender

Women entrepreneurs and their ventures: complicating categories and contextualising gende

Emancipation through digital entrepreneurship: a critical realist analysis

Digital entrepreneurship is presented in popular discourse as a means to empowerment and greater economic participation for under-resourced and socially marginalised people. However, this emancipatory rhetoric relies on a flat ontology that does not sufficiently consider the enabling conditions needed for successful digital enterprise activity. To empirically illustrate this argument, we examine three paired cases of UK women digital entrepreneurs, operating in similar sectors but occupying contrasting social positionalities. The cases are comparatively analysed through an intersectional feminist lens using a critical realist methodological framework. By examining the relationships between digital entrepreneurship, social positionality, and structural and agential enabling conditions, we interrogate the notion of digital entrepreneurship as an emancipatory phenomenon producing liberated workers

Unmasking the internet: investigating UK women’s digital entrepreneurship through intersectionality

This thesis investigates the experiences of women digital entrepreneurs in the United Kingdom from an intersectional cyberfeminist perspective. Informed by feminist theories of technology and critical entrepreneurship scholarship, it challenges mainstream discourse on digital entrepreneurship with the argument that, similar to traditional (offline) entrepreneurship, online or digital entrepreneurship is deeply embedded in the social world. It draws upon intersectional feminist theory that conceptualises the social world as composed of intersecting hierarchies of race, class, and gender, in which individuals and groups are positioned in dynamic yet durable ways, and by which they are affected simultaneously. This positionality is found to be tied to unequal resource distribution, and for this reason, holds important implications when mapped to extant entrepreneurship theory. The thesis also provides interdisciplinary evidence for the continued coding of Internet technology as predominantly white and male, and for the online environment itself as a stratified and unequal space, countering public discourse that portrays it as a neutral and meritocratic ‘great equaliser.

A web of opportunity or the same old story? Women digital entrepreneurs and intersectionality theory

This article critically analyses the manner in which intersectionality and related social positionality shape digital enterprise activities. Despite popular claims of meritocratic opportunity enactment within traditional forms of entrepreneurship, ascribed social characteristics intersect to influence the realisation of entrepreneurial potential. However, it is purported that the emerging field of digital entrepreneurship may act as a ‘great leveller’ due to perceived lower barriers to entry, disembodiment of the entrepreneurial actor and the absence of visible markers of disadvantage online. Using an interpretivist approach, we analyse empirical evidence from UK women digital entrepreneurs which reveals how the privileges and disadvantages arising from intersecting social positions of gender, race and class status are reproduced online. This analysis challenges the notion that the Internet is a neutral platform for entrepreneurship and supports our thesis that offline inequality, in the form of marked bodies, social positionality and associated resource constraints, is produced and reproduced in the online environment

Bios, mythoiand women entrepreneurs: A Wynterian analysis of the intersectional impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on self-employed women and women-owned businesses

Decolonial philosopher Sylvia Wynter theorises the human animal as formed by both bios and mythoi, or matter and meaning. This article adopts this ontological perspective to explore the effects of the COVID-19 crisis on UK self-employed women and women-owned businesses through an intersectional lens accounting for race, class and gender. We argue that unequal health outcomes from COVID-19 are not solely biological; rather, they are also the outcome of social inequalities. Drawing upon the Wynterian elaboration of Fanon’s work on sociogeny – the shaping of the embodied human experience by the norms of given society – to explain this phenomenon, we contend that the same inequalities emerging in health outcomes will be reflected in entrepreneurship and self-employment. Drawing on Labour Force Survey data for the past decade, we peer through the Wynterian prism of bios and mythoi to argue that marginalised entrepreneurs are likely to experience extreme precarity due to COVID-19 and so require targeted support

Unmasking the internet: investigating UK women’s digital entrepreneurship through intersectionality

This thesis investigates the experiences of women digital entrepreneurs in the United Kingdom from an intersectional cyberfeminist perspective. Informed by feminist theories of technology and critical entrepreneurship scholarship, it challenges mainstream discourse on digital entrepreneurship with the argument that, similar to traditional (offline) entrepreneurship, online or digital entrepreneurship is deeply embedded in the social world. It draws upon intersectional feminist theory that conceptualises the social world as composed of intersecting hierarchies of race, class, and gender, in which individuals and groups are positioned in dynamic yet durable ways, and by which they are affected simultaneously. This positionality is found to be tied to unequal resource distribution, and for this reason, holds important implications when mapped to extant entrepreneurship theory. The thesis also provides interdisciplinary evidence for the continued coding of Internet technology as predominantly white and male, and for the online environment itself as a stratified and unequal space, countering public discourse that portrays it as a neutral and meritocratic ‘great equaliser.