HR Final Manuscript 29 03 16.pdf (1.03 MB)
A web of opportunity or the same old story? Women digital entrepreneurs and intersectionality theory
journal contribution
posted on 2016-05-06, 10:50 authored by Angela Martinez Dy, Susan Marlow, Lee MartinThis 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.
History
School
- Loughborough University London
Published in
Human RelationsVolume
70Issue
3Pages
286 - 311Citation
MARTINEZ DY, A., MARLOW, S. and MARTIN, L., 2017. A web of opportunity or the same old story? Women digital entrepreneurs and intersectionality theory. Human Relations, 70 (3), pp. 286-311.Publisher
SAGE Publications / © The AuthorsVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Acceptance date
2016-04-18Publication date
2016-06-10Copyright date
2016Notes
This paper was accepted for publication in the journal, Human Relations. The definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0018726716650730ISSN
0018-7267eISSN
1741-282XPublisher version
Language
- en