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.

Abstract.This article develops a critique of contemporary approaches to analysing the impact of gender upon entrepreneurial propensity and activity. Since the 1990s, increasing attention has been afforded to the influence of gender upon women's entrepreneurial behaviour; such analyses have highlighted an embedded masculinity within the entrepreneurial discourse which privileges men as normative entrepreneurial actors.Whilst invaluable in revealing a prevailing bias which portrays women in deficit as entrepreneurial actors, their critique is limited in that they tend to position women as a proxy for the gendered subject. Analyses that fail to recognise gender as a human property with myriad articulations not only homogenise women as a category, but also ignore how gender manifests in all entrepreneurial phenomena. To progress debate, we engage more deeply with the notion of gender as a multiplicity by recognising its diversity and considering the implications of such for future studies of entrepreneurial activity.

In this essay, we call upon our fellow scholars of colour to recognise the ways Business Schools are structured by white supremacy and actively de-value our knowledge and experiences. Alongside this recognition, collective action led by scholars of colour is needed to build intergenerational support systems which will be key to dismantling racialised power structures as they appear locally and transnationally. White scholars are invited to listen and learn from this call.

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.

This article introduces an imminent critique of existing intersectional theory, suggesting that current limitations of this theory can be mapped to origins within positivist and hermeneutic schools of thought. Having identified the limitations and their causes, we offer an augmented account of intersectionality theory that reconciles and overcomes extant theoretical tensions and limitations by drawing upon critical realist principles and conceptual tools, enabling us to propose a novel methodological approach to intersectional research. IntroductionIntersectionality theory has emerged over the past thirty years as an interdisciplinary approach to analysing the concurrent impacts of social structures, with a focus on theorising how belonging to multiple exclusionary social categories can influence political access and equality. It conceptualises