This paper examines the emergence of digital entrepreneurship in the context of emerging economies. Given that these economies generally lack a well-developed institutional framework, we draw on the concept of institutional voids as our theoretical lens. We argue that digital entrepreneurship facilitates the navigation and bridging of socio-cultural institutional voids but also provides opportunities for entrepreneurs to directly and indirectly alter the existing institutional context. We illustrate these arguments by drawing upon six biographical narrations of female digital entrepreneurs in Saudi Arabia. Accordingly, through our development of a multi-level model, we make explicit the two-way causal interaction between entrepreneurial action, institution altering behaviour and the social and cultural context, thus providing a framework for future research.

Digital entrepreneurship has been described as a "great leveler" in terms of equalizing the entrepreneurial playing field for women. However, little is known of the emancipatory possibilities offered by digital entrepreneurship for women constrained by social and cultural practices such as male guardianship of female relatives and legally enforced gender segregation. In order to address this research gap, this paper examines women's engagement in digital entrepreneurship in emerging economies with restrictive social and cultural practices. In so doing, we draw upon the analytical frameworks provided by entrepreneurship as emancipation and cyberfeminism. Using empirical data from an exploratory investigation of entrepreneurship in Saudi Arabia, we examine how women use digital technologies in the pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities. Our findings reveal that women in Saudi Arabia use digital entrepreneurship to transform their embodied selves and lived realities rather than to escape gender embodiment as offered by the online environment.

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Networking is generally seen as an important mechanism for small scale and rural enterprises to overcome their relative disadvantage by leveraging knowledge and resources. Communities of practice (CoP) are a type of network where close relationships develop around a shared identity and understanding. However, a commonly occurring critique of the CoP literature is that little attention is paid to asymmetric and unequal relationships and knowledge access among members. Thus, a gap remains regarding differences in the ability and willingness of members to engage with and develop the CoP, and, as a result, the different networking roles that emerge. In order to address this research gap, we present a full population, country-level study set in the Irish artisan cheese sector. We adopted a two-stage research design consisting of social network analysis (SNA) and 51 in-depth qualitative interviews. In this particular CoP, we find that membership is not negotiated in a uniform manner and that differences in participation can be identified and categorised by a focus on the intersection of owner-managers' participation identity and firm network positions. Building on this, we develop an original role typology depicting five distinct networking roles and examine how these different network identities relate to firm network positions and roles. It is posited that this typology can act as a sense-making tool for researchers and practitioners by which to diagnose and understand variation in small firm horizontal peer networking behaviour, particularly within the artisan based agri-food sector.