Loughborough University
Browse
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

Download (1.03 MB)
journal contribution
posted on 2016-05-06, 10:50 authored by Angela Martinez Dy, Susan Marlow, Lee Martin
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.

History

School

  • Loughborough University London

Published in

Human Relations

Volume

70

Issue

3

Pages

286 - 311

Citation

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 Authors

Version

  • 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

2016-04-18

Publication date

2016-06-10

Copyright date

2016

Notes

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal, Human Relations. The definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0018726716650730

ISSN

0018-7267

eISSN

1741-282X

Language

  • en

Usage metrics

    Loughborough Publications

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC