The dramatic expansion of scholarly interest and activity in the field of women's entrepreneurship within recent years has done much to correct the historical inattention paid to female entrepreneurs and their initiatives. Yet, as the field continues to develop and mature, there are increasingly strong calls for scholars to take their research in new directions. Within this introduction to the special issue, we expand upon the reasons for this call, describe who responded, and summarize the new frontiers explored within the work appearing in this and another related collection. We conclude by delineating new territories for researchers to explore, arguing that such endeavors will join those in this volume in not only addressing the criticisms raised to date, but also in generating a richer and more robust understanding of women's entrepreneurship. Why the Call for New Directions?Over 5 years have elapsed since Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice (ET&P) published its first ever special issue on women's entrepreneurship research. At that time, the guest editors characterized the field as being "at the early childhood stage" of development (de Bruin, Brush, & Welter, 2006). This characterization stemmed, at least in part, from prior literature reviews documenting the relative paucity (Brush, 1992;Gatewood, Carter, Brush, Greene, & Hart, 2003;Terjesen, 2004)-if not outright invisibility (Baker, Aldrich, & Liou, 1997)-of research on female business owners and their endeavors published within both scholarly outlets as well as the general media.By 2012, it already seems more appropriate to characterize women's entrepreneurship research as being at the brink of adolescence. Key indicators of the field's rapid expansion include the increasingly large number of conferences, special issues, specialty journals,
Over the past two decades the economies of Canada and many other industrialized countries have seen significant restructuring, bringing with it steadily rising levels of self-employment and small business ownership. Women have been at the forefront of this change. Of the many questions raised by women's entrance into self-employment, a central one concerns the factors fuelling its growth. While some argue that women have been pulled into self-employment by the promise of independence, flexibility and the opportunity to escape barriers in paid employment, others argue that women have been pushed into it as restructuring and downsizing has eroded the availability of once secure jobs in the public and private sector. To date, existing research on the 'push-pull' debate has not fully answered; these questions, with survey and labour force data suggesting only general and sometimes contradictory, trends. This article examines this issue in greater detail, drawing on in-depth interviews with 61 self-employed women in Canada. Overall their experiences shed further light on the expansion of women's self-employment in the 1990s, suggesting push factors have been underestimated and challenging the current contours of the 'push-pull' debate.
Existing research has failed to develop a satisfactory theoretical explanation for journalists' decisions about which crimes to highlight and which to ignore. We proposed that four forms of deviance (normative deviance, statistical deviance, status deviance, and cultural deviance) account for much of the variation in decisions about crime news. To test deviance-based explanations for crime news, we conducted a comprehensive investigation of Milwaukee, WI, homicides and how two newspapers covered them. We used content analysis and interviews with journalists. The results showed that the newsworthiness of a homicide is enhanced when Whites are suspects or victims, males are suspects, and victims are females, children, or senior citizens. We concluded that status deviance and cultural deviance are important components of newsworthiness and that statistical deviance (unusualness) may be much less important than commonly assumed.
The purpose of this ethnographic study was to understand how immigrant women caregivers accessed support from community resources and identify the barriers to this support. The study included 29 Chinese and South Asian women caring for an ill or disabled child or adult relative. All experienced barriers to accessing community services. Some possessed personal resources and strategies to overcome them; others remained isolated and unconnected. Family and friends facilitated connections, and a connection with one community service was often linked to several resources. Caregivers who failed to establish essential ties could not initiate access to resources, and community services lacked outreach mechanisms to identify them. These findings contribute new understanding of how immigrant women caregivers connect with community resources and confirm the impact of immigration on social networks and access to support.
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