Angela Martinez Dy

Developing a Critical Realist Positional Approach to Intersectionality

Abstract This article identifies philosophical tensions and limitations within contemporary intersectionality theory which, it will be argued, have hindered its ability to explain how positioning in multiple social categories can affect life chances and influence the reproduction of inequality. We draw upon critical realism to propose an augmented conceptual framework and novel methodological approach that offers the potential to move beyond these debates, so as to better enable intersectionality to provide causal explanatory accounts of the ‘lived experiences’ of social privilege and disadvantage.

A Web of opportunity or the same old story? Women digital entrepreneurs and intersectionality theory:

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 realization of entrepreneurial potential. However, it is purported that the emerging field of digital entrepreneurship may act as a ‘great leveller’ owing 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 that reveals how the privileges and disadvantages arising from intersecting social positions of gender, race and class status are experienced by UK women digital entrepreneurs. 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.

Annual review article: Is it time to rethink the gender agenda in entrepreneurship research?

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 on women’s entrepreneurial behaviour; such analyses have highlighted an embedded masculinity within the entrepreneurial discourse which privileges men as normative entrepreneurial actors. While invaluable in revealing a prevailing masculine bias within entrepreneurship, this critique is bounded by positioning women as a proxy for the gendered subject. This is a potentially limiting analysis that does not fully recognise gender as a human property with myriad articulations enacted throughout entrepreneurial activity. To progress debate, we engage more deeply with the notion of gender as a multiplicity, exploring the implications of such for future studies of entrepreneurial activity.

Critical Realism, Gender and Feminism: Exchanges, Challenges, Synergies

An increasing number of scholars have become familiar with critical realism, finding it a robust alternative to the poststructuralist perspectives that currently dominate gender studies and feminis...

Emancipation through digital entrepreneurship? A critical realist analysis

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.

Qualities and Quantities: Using Philosophy to Guide Our Research

How do we quantify a quality? The presence or absence of qualities such as integrity and compassion are vital to the human condition. They can be experienced regularly or rarely and their causal consequences on, for example, motivation in the workplace can be strikingly obvious. Yet these important qualities can often be elusive to scientific investigation. In her article, Joan Freeman draws upon extensive experience researching and working with gifted people of all ages to identify a quality that she argues sets certain individuals apart, even amongst the pool of the gifted and talented. She names this a “quality of giftedness,” establishing that it is connected to, yet distinct from, intelligence. The quality is seen as “separate and different from what is measurable,” intimating that it is more likely to be experienced “in action.” This is illustrated with a number of examples in which an individual’s “quality of giftedness” was made recognisable by their unique responses to a line of questioning, or by the agreement of independent experts on the exceptional quality of a work. It is this certain je ne sais quoi that Freeman (2011) suggests can make a critical difference in the long-term life achievement of a gifted child. Her experience and understanding of this quality is invaluable to giftedness research. It also sets us a challenge as to how we can advance our understanding when, as she describes, this quality is a concept that currently evades both measurement and definition. This, then, becomes the central challenge raised by her article – how can social scientists address elusive concepts such as human qualities in a systematic way that enables rigorous research? For this to occur, we will argue, groundwork must be put into place: science as a field must be ontologically and epistemologically prepared to grapple with such difficult subjects, while researchers should simultaneously aim to make these phenomena increasingly more overt, with the goal of consistent definition, a path down which Professor Freeman has begun to take us with this important article.

Gender, Feminism and Critical Realism: Exchanges, challenges, synergies

This book marks a pivotal moment in the intensifying dialogue between the philosophical approach of critical realism and the fields of feminist theory and gender research. During the last three decades, these fields have been decisively influenced by poststructuralist perspectives. As such perspectives are increasingly being challenged, this book argues that critical realism is able to serve as a fruitful resource for carving out new paths for feminist theorizing and research. At the same time, it argues that feminist insights on gender and knowledge production have the potential to significantly enrich the field of critical realist philosophy as well. Hence, this book serves as a forum for a number of interventions that, in different ways, explore synergetic potentials as well as tensions between critical realist and various feminist perspectives. It engages in debates over the conditions of knowledge production and the relationship of knowledge to the world, offers new ways of understanding sex, gender and power, as well as the intersectional interplay of diverse power relations, and explores how critical realism relates to new materialist and postpositivist realist approaches. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Critical Realism. (Less)

Pursuing Intersectionality, Unsettling Dominant Imaginaries

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Critical Realism on 23 Aug 2016, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2016.1193677