Invitation to a one day Conference on

“Re-thinking Female Entrepreneurship”

Durham University Business School, UK

Millhill Lane, Durham DH1 3LB

Thursday 21st June 2018

Time: 10.00 – 17.00

Academics and practitioners are invited to come together for a one day conference on “Re-thinking female entrepreneurship” to bring to the fore the voices of female entrepreneurs (including social entrepreneurs); explore the diversity and heterogeneity of their experiences and challenge the gendered discourse of entrepreneurship.

The conference programme promises a diversity of perspectives. It will explore various aspects of (women’s) entrepreneurial experiences and identities including entrepreneurial leadership, the representation of women’s working lives, household dynamics and growth decisions, and the impact of the entrepreneur’s values on the business. The conference will also discuss enterprise policy initiatives including the policy-practice gap and the role of activist research in closing the gap.

The conference is generously funded by the British Academy as part of part of a three year British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship which explores the journey of female entrepreneurs in Yorkshire using oral history approaches. In the introductory session of the conference, I will share with the audience the project’s main findings.

I am delighted to confirm that we have secured a really strong field of expert speakers who will present their cutting-edge research on women’s working lives including:

Prof. Sarah Carter (awarded the OBE for services to women entrepreneurs in 2008) – Professor of Entrepreneurship – University of Strathclyde 

Households as a Site of Entrepreneurial Activity

 Prof. Jackie Ford – Professor of Leadership and Organisation Studies – Durham University 

Entrepreneurial Leadership: Women’s Accounts

 Prof. Mark Learmonth – Professor of Organisation Studies – Durham University 

Women’s Work: As Represented in Disney Animations

 Prof. Claire Leitch – Chair in Entrepreneurial Leadership – Lancaster University 

Gender and the Production of Entrepreneurial Legitimacy

 Dr Patricia Lewis – Reader in Management – University of Kent 

Exploring the Lived Body of (Female) Entrepreneurship in Postfeminist Times

 Prof. Sue Marlow (holder of the Queen Award for Enterprise) – Professor of Entrepreneurship – Nottingham University 

Women’s entrepreneurship – The Empresses New Clothes?

 Prof. Julia Rouse – Professor of Entrepreneurship – Metropolitan Manchester University 

How Do We Create Change for Women in Entrepreneurship? Exploring the potential of Engaged and Activist Scholarship

 Prof. Kerrie Unsworth – Chair in Organizational Behaviour – Leeds University 

What Do You Get Out of Being an Entrepreneur? Rethinking via the Goal Hierarchy

The conference will include three panel discussions and will conclude with a discussion between practitioners and academics on how both parties can work together to better represent the experiences of women business owners and make their voices heard.

Due to the high calibre of the speakers we are expecting a high level of demand for conference places, so please book your place before 22 May 2018 by sending an email to business.researchadmin@durham.ac.uk.  Please make sure you can make the date before you book your place.

The conference is free of charge with lunch and refreshments included. Please advise of any dietary requirements.

We look forward to seeing you for a day-long engagement for what we expect to be some fascinating discussions and debates on gender and entrepreneurship.

Dr Hannah Dean

British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Durham University Business School

A Short Bio of the Keynote Speakers

Professor Sara Carter OBE FRSE is Associate Principal (Learning & Teaching) at the University of Strathclyde and Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship, Strathclyde Business School. Her research examines the effects of business ownership on the individual, the economic wellbeing of entrepreneurial households, and the consequences of structural inequalities on resource access, particularly finance, on the SME sector. Sara holds several external appointments. She is a member of the Council of Economic Advisers to the First Minister of Scotland; the Enterprise & Skills Strategic Board; the Scottish Framework and Action Plan for Women in Enterprise Action Group; Non-Executive Director of Women’s Enterprise Scotland; and a member of the Leverhulme Trust Research Awards Advisory Committee. Previously, she served on the UK Government’s Women’s Enterprise Task Force, and was awarded the OBE for services to women entrepreneurs in 2008. From 2006 – 2012 Sara was Editor and Senior Editor of Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice.

Dr Hannah Dean is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Durham University. Hannah’s research focuses on gender and entrepreneurship using critical perspectives and innovative research methods.  Most recently Hannah extended her work to look at the experiences of social entrepreneurs.  Hannah is currently leading a three years project funded by the British Academy Postdoctoral Research Grant. The project involves collecting oral history accounts from women business owners in Yorkshire. The interviews will be deposited in “Feminist Archive North” will bring to light women’s achievements.

 Professor Jackie Ford is Professor of Leadership and Organization Studies at Durham University Business School. Throughout her career, Jackie has fostered a long-established passion for her work in critical leadership studies and in gender and organization theory, and as former 50th Anniversary Chair in Leadership and Organization Studies at Bradford School of Management and before that Professor of Leadership and Organization Studies at Leeds University, she founded an interdisciplinary research centre and led an active research group in critical leadership studies. She has been committed to develop this research field, informed by her interests in feminist, critical, poststructural, and psychosocial research methods and approaches that enable rich interpretive accounts of experiences of working and organizational life.

 Professor Mark Learmonth is Professor of Organisation Studies at Durham University. Mark spent the first 17 years of his career in management posts within the British National Health Service. Prior to taking up his post in Durham he has worked at the universities of Nottingham and York.

Mark has particular research interests in:

• Critical perspectives on health care management and/or public sector management;
• Leadership as discourse;
• Debates aboutthe use of interpretative methods;
• The nature of “knowledge” and “evidence” in management and organization studies;
• Popular images of executives and their impact on managerial identity work.

Professor Claire Leitch holds the Chair in Entrepreneurial Leadership at Lancaster University Management School and currently is Head of Department of Leadership and Management. Her research sits at the interface between entrepreneurship and leadership and takes a critical perspective, drawing on ideas of gender and power to examine the interrelationships between the micro-level and macro-level experiences that shape women’s understanding and experiences. Recent work explores the enduring and global problem of the underrepresentation of women in leadership roles and positions of influence, including in entrepreneurial ventures. Her work has been published in a number of leading international journals and she is Editor of International Small Business Journal.

Professor Susan Marlow is Professor of Entrepreneurship and divisional research director for management at Nottingham University Business School, UK. She is holder of the Queens Award for Enterprise, an Editor for Entrepreneurship, Theory and Practice, Consulting Editor for the International Small Business Journal, Fellow of the UK Institution for Small Business and Entrepreneurship and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Manchester Metropolitan University and AUB, Beirut, Lebanon. Her research interests focus upon entrepreneurial behaviour with a particular expertise in gender issues having published in this area in top rated US and UK journals.

Dr Patricia Lewis is a Reader in Management in the Kent Business School, University of Kent. Working in the area of Gender and Organization Studies she has published in a range of journals including Organization Studies, British Journal of Management, Human Relations, Work, Employment & Society, Journal of Business Ethics, Gender, Work & Organization & International Journal of Management Reviews. Her current research involves critical use of the concept of postfeminism in understanding gendered organizational phenomena. She has recently edited (with Yvonne Benschop and Ruth Simpson) a book entitled Postfeminism and Organization, published by Routledge 2018. She is currently Joint-Editor-in-Chief of Gender, Work & Organization and previously was an Associate Editor of the journal for seven years

Professor Julia Rouse is the Director of ‘Decent Work and Productivity’, a newly formed research and knowledge exchange centre at Manchester Metropolitan University. She founded the Sylvia Pankhurst Gender and Diversity Research Centre that now sits within Decent Work and Productivity. She has a passionate interest in creating feminist research communities and was the founder of the Gender and Enterprise Network. She is developing an Engaged-Activist methodology that experiments with ways of creating change through scholarship in projects concerned with entrepreneur maternity rights and Generating Routes for Women’s Leadership (GROWL).

Professor Kerrie Unsworth is a Professor of Organisational Behaviour and Head of the Management Division at Leeds University Business School. She is Director of the Workplace Behaviour Research Centre, a research group dedicated to improving the world through better organisational behaviour. Kerrie is interested in understanding how people juggle their different goals and identities and the effect this has on their behaviours and well-being. She has published in a range of top academic journals such as Journal of Applied Psychology and has won in excess of £1.5m in public and private sector research funding.