Anne Kovalainen

Researching Small Firms and Entrepreneurship: Past, Present and Future

This paper seeks to stimulate debate on the agendas, methodologies and methods used in the field of small business and entrepreneurship. The paper raises questions regarding the research agendas pursued and provides some pointers for the direction of future research. Integral to this is the argument that there is a need to reflect on the condition of small-business research and to raise the quality of research by employing robust research methods. This may involve questioning the role of small firms and entrepreneurship in society rather than merely advocating them and the policy measures taken when supporting and/or developing the small business sector. The dominance of specific viewpoints, the methodologies used in small business studies, and the consequences of these in relation to the development of a coherent scientific field of small business studies are also discussed. Examples of research activity are discussed to illustrate these themes. Overall, the paper argues that entrepreneurship and small business is a lucrative area for research. However, if the field of inquiry is to flourish, it needs to be approached from a more critical perspective, instead of merely accepting normative, or even strongly ideologically driven, standpoints now dominant in so many studies. This has implications for research agendas, methodologies and ultimately research methods training.

Similarities and Differences Across the Factors Associated with Women's Self-employment Preference in the Nordic Countries

The trend in women’s self-employment appeared to be upward in the 1980s and 1990s, but women are still less likely than men to start new businesses. The economic growth potential in most industrialized countries is gendered, and with lack of paid employment opportunities, more hopes are targeted towards women’s entrepreneurship. We will explore women’s self-employment preferences across Scandinavian countries,1 and the influence and importance of societal and individual factors affecting self-employment preferences and their similarities and differences. Perception of self-employment skills arises across the countries as the most salient factor predicting self-employment preference. The multivariate models differ across the countries, thus challenging the existence of a universal Scandinavian model that explains the entrepreneurial activities of women. This article makes two contributions. First, we show that gender has become a key element in new firm formation activities. Second, we contribute to entrepreneurial theories by demonstrating similarities and differences across the countries and adding the importance of structural issues for explaining gender and entrepreneurial activities.

Gendering innovation process in an industrial plant – revisiting tokenism, gender and innovation

Purpose – This article provides an analysis of the gendering process in product innovation. Interwoven into this process is the encapsulation of a token position. The article expands and deepens the tokenism theory through a discussion of gender in the innovation process. The article draws from recent and classical theories of gender, ranging from gendering approaches to Ackers theory of gendered organisations and processes within organisations, and Moss Kanters tokenism theory. The main objective of the article is to address this gap in the tokenicsm discussion and introduce a new concept of “processual tokenism”. Design/methodology/approach – The article builds on an intensive single case study and uses a narrative methodology and approach in the analysis of the data of the case in question. The primary data used in the narratives consist of interview data. The article also uses documents and reports as secondary data in the narrative construction. The approach used is theoretical, interpretative and ...

Entrepreneurship within social and health care

Purpose – This article aims to look first at how entrepreneurial identity fits into the picture we currently have of social and health care professionals who most often work in paid employment in the public sector, and second, how entrepreneurial identity is constructed. We discuss whether professional identity and entrepreneurial identity can be separated, and how meaningful that question is. Is the role of entrepreneurship limited in the context of health and social care professional services, or can we see the emergence of a new kind of entrepreneurial identity with special features related to the complexity within the provision of services in social and health care?Design/methodology/approach – The materials from two previous studies by the authors are used in the article as empirical data to investigate the questions of identity and professionalism. The methodology is based on re‐reading and re‐interpretation of both empirical studies and theoretical literature.Findings – There are differences and di...

The research methods used in “doing gender” literature

Purpose – This paper aims to study the kinds of methodologies used in studying “doing gender” in working life and organisations. To do so, articles that use empirical research materials from different academic peer-reviewed journals have been analysed. By methodologies, both data gathering tools and the analysing techniques using and concerting the data have been largely understood. In the articles analysed, interviews were the main methodological tool in extracting the “doing gender”, while studies using naturally occurring data, e.g. historical materials and methods in relation to this type of data were in the minority. The following question has been proposed for further exploration: What impact does the domination of interviews as a research method have on the concept of “doing gender”? Design/methodology/approach – Qualitative content analysis, close reading and data were collected from academic peer-reviewed journals with the applied principles of literature review. Findings – The research methodolo...

How do male and female managers in banking view their work roles and their subordinates

Women are still in a minority in managerial positions in most countries. Reasons that have been put forward for this have included the gendered structures of society, the masculine image of the manager and the different kind of socialization processes to which men and women are subject. However, most earlier studies in management and leadership concerned with women in managerial positions and the possible differences between male and female managers have been carried out in the United States. This raises the question as to whether there would be differences between male and female managers as regards work role descriptions and attitudes towards subordinates in a country with a different cultural background and another business tradition. A research project was therefore designed and carried out in Finland, where, not only is there a different organizational culture, but womens participation in society in general and in the labour market and public life has also been high ever since World War II. Using a sample of 100 male and 100 female Finnish bank managers, this study demonstrates that in spite of the reported differences between male and female managers in managerial and leadership attitudes and self-descriptions, major differences were not evident. However, a slight difference in managerial attitudes towards subordinates was noted.

Epistemic Communities Facing a New Type of Agora? Centres of Science, Technology and Innovation as Defining the New Research Landscape in Finland

We analyse the question of what role and positions epistemic communities have in the agora, and more specifically in the new mediating organizations that are established at the interface of the state, businesses and universities. These new organizational structures embody the present politics of knowledge that reign in national science policy globally. The new organizational structures, as potentially new agoras, also epitomize several of the changes that have taken place in the science and industry landscape of the past decades all over Europe and the world. We are interested in understanding how epistemic communities are situated vis-à-vis agora in knowledge production. The empirical example comes from Finland, where major new institutional reforms in science policy, the new strategic centres of science, technology and innovations, have been implemented to create possibilities for new knowledge creation and new product and service development. These centres of science, technology and innovations (CSTIs) were originally planned as functioning agoras, open, simultaneous and joint platforms for the state, businesses, researchers and universities. In the article we show how the organizational structure and decision making processes adopted in the CSTIs have changed the original idea of agora, thus changing also the position of epistemic communities involved. In the process, we evaluate Nowotnys interpretation of agora.

Toward a new research model of gender in management and leadership studies

The roles of men and women have been lively discussed and investigated in the fields of psychology and sociology for years. This discussion has recently reached the field of management and leadership studies as well. However, in the studies of working life the work women do has for a long time remained rather invisible and gender has only been a variable among others.The purpose of this paper is to examine the concept of sex roles, gender and their influence on the studies of working life, with special focus on supervisory and leadership studies of working life. Before inspecting the emergence of gender in the studies of working life, it is, however, necessary to specify the concepts used and some of the models by which womens employment and the segmentation of the labour market have been explained. In addition, some implications for counselling are discussed.

Creative Work and Gender

What is considered to be creative work? Is creative work always recognizable as in artistic work, or is it something where inventions come into being, or simply any task at hand? How does creativity construct individual identity, especially work identity? And how does gender become defined in creative work leading to innovations? Creativity is in some ways surely part of every work task and its performance, from even the most repetitive and standardized job tasks to the most unpredictable problem solving and unique artistic performances. Given this wide definition, the value and importance of creative work in the contemporary economy is omnipresent. This concerns the gendered nature of creative work in relation to innovations also: the technological solutions we have discussed in earlier chapters, from the washing machine to the fitness and wearable technologies, show how embedded creativity is in the innovation, design and production of material and immaterial goods and services. This chapter examines the complexities of gender, technology, care and creativity in contemporary work and economy.

Envisioning the Future

Throughout the book, we have examined the multiple and multi-level connections and ties between gender and innovations, and different manifestations of these relations and connections in the new economy. The example cases taken range from the very early innovations that had direct effects on gendered everyday lives and on the recent developments in personal innovations, from gaming to platforms and complex gendered innovations with immaterial digital and material inventions. For most large corporations, the prevailing corporate culture is seldom an inventive culture as such. An inventive culture, however, carries possibilities for new and radical innovations and in their possibly revolutionary abilities to change everyday lives and practices. The possibilities for new breakthroughs and economic gains in an employee-driven corporate innovation culture are immense. The question of gender and innovations becomes defined anew, as employee-driven innovations in platforms take place in broader organizational and global contexts. This book has synthesized knowledge on the initiatives and mechanisms that contribute to improved understanding of gender and innovations. This chapter draws together and summarizes some of the main issues discussed throughout the book in the previous chapters.