Critical perspectives have called for the study of women's entrepreneurship as a route to social change. This 'social turn' claims women are empowered and/or emancipated through entrepreneurship with limited problematisation of how these interchangeably used concepts operate. Using an institutional perspective in combination with a narrative approach, we investigate women entrepreneurs' life stories on their 'road to freedom' where entrepreneurial activity enables them to 'break free' from particular gendered constraints.Through juxtaposing women's narratives in the contexts of Saudi Arabia and Sweden, the relationship between empowerment and emancipation is disentangled and (re)conceptualised. The findings distinguish between empowerment narrated as individual practices to achieve freedom for the self within institutional structures, and emancipation as narrated as a wish to challenge and change structures of power and reach collative freedom. The yearning for collective emancipation propels women's stories of entrepreneurship by raising expectations for entrepreneurship as a vehicle for institutional change. Such stories may fascinate and inspire others to engage in entrepreneurial endeavours to become empowered, but whether they reach emancipation remains an empirical question to be answered. The performative dimension of entrepreneurial narratives is, however, their ability to turn emancipation into an (un)reachable object of desire, with a quest for even more individual empowerment and entrepreneurial activity, at the same time excluding other forms of human conduct as conducive for change.

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PurposeThe purpose of this research paper is to investigate opposing versions of entrepreneurship and to introduce a metaphor to stimulate a dialogue about the diversity and complexity of enterprising communities.Design/methodology/approachA discourse framework is developed in order to describe dominating – and even new and challenging – versions of entrepreneurship. The discourse analysis is presented in three steps: the introductory text to a handbook of entrepreneurship is deconstructed to expose some basic assumptions of entrepreneurship; drawing on several research articles, some dominating versions of entrepreneurship are analysed; drawing on research articles which have recently been published in two special issues in entrepreneurship journals, alternative versions of entrepreneurship are analysed.FindingsThis paper compares three dominating and three alternative versions of entrepreneurship. All the versions are related to the idea of entrepreneurship as a story of creation for our times, where it is implied that entrepreneurship appears to be something inherently good for society and for people. The versions share a common denominator but are also distinguished by different ontological and epistemological assumptions that make a dialogue between the versions problematic.Research limitations/implicationsThe results of this research paper have obvious limitations because of the methodology employed and due to the limited number of texts analysed.Originality/valueThe concept of a discursive web to analyse the world of entrepreneurship is introduced.