Attila Bruni

Entrepreneur‐mentality, gender and the study of women entrepreneurs

Uses the neologism “entrepreneur mentality” – paying implicit homage to Foucaults govermentality – to highlight how an entrepreneurial discourse is mobilized as a system of thinking about women entrepreneurs which is able to make some form of that activity thinkable and practicable, namely: who can be an entrepreneur, what entrepreneurship is, what or who is managed by that form of governance of economic relations? Discourses on women entrepreneurs are linguistic practices that create truth effects. Argues that social studies of women entrepreneurs tend to reproduce an androcentric entrepreneur mentality that makes hegemonic masculinity invisible. They portray womens organizations as “the other”, and sustain social expectations of their difference, thereby implicitly reproducing male experience as a preferred normative value. Taking a deconstructive gaze on how an entrepreneur‐mentality discourse is gendered, reveals the gender sub‐text underpinning the practices of the scientific community that study women entrepreneurs and, in so doing, open a space to question them.

Knowing in a System of Fragmented Knowledge

Knowing is a situated activity. Adopting a practice-based approach, this article describes a workplace characterized by technologically dense practices as a setting in which human actors and technological objects work “together.” The case of remote cardiological consultation is paradigmatic of how information and communication technologies (ICT) enter workplaces and reshape them as “systems of fragmented knowledge:” that is, learning settings in which people, symbols, and technologies work jointly to construct and reconstruct understanding of social and organizational action. Working at a distance, therefore, requires the acquisition of skills relative to the mobilization of fragmented knowledge, and the latters alignment into a fully-fledged work practice. Knowing-in-practice is accomplished by discursive practices: Framing and postscripting, as practices that generate a “space” of signification for the subsequent action; footing, as the dialectic that enables people to align themselves within a predetermined frame and disrupt its coordinates; and delegation to the nonhuman, as the ability of humans to delegate the performance of clinical practice to nonhuman systems, which come to be regarded as active subjects within the remote consultation

Entrepreneuring together: his and her stories

Purpose – Among the various “critical” voices which have contributed to problematizing the discourse on entrepreneurship, that of gender studies is indubitably one of the most significant and fruitful. Applying a gender perspective to the study of entrepreneurship has led to the uncovering of the (male) gender assumptions embodied in the dictates of entrepreneurship and to distinguish between study of women entrepreneurs and study of the relationship between gender and entrepreneurship. One aspect little explored within this diversified array of studies concerns “mixed” situations in which a firms management is shared between a woman and a man. Such situations are interesting in that: first, they make it possible to problematize the economic rhetoric which promulgates entrepreneurship as an individual and isolated, activity; second, the simultaneous presence of a man and a woman allows observation of whether and how gender stereotypes and practices are at work in the process of positioning Him and Her wi...

Abriendo la caja negra de la investigación académica: evaluación, publicación y perspectivas críticas

What does it mean today to take a critical stance on scientific knowledge, its production and its dissemination? And what tactics should one adopt for this purpose? These questions are relevant to all disciplines; but for STS they are crucial, because the processes by which knowledge is produced and institutionalized are among the main themes of the entire STS field of study. This paper tries to answer the above questions by outlining the main features of the scenario in which the production and assessment of scientific knowledge today take place. It then concentrates on a concrete case in the field of open-access scientific publishing in order to show some of the tactics useful for pursuing a critical perspective on both the production and dissemination of knowledge at academic level.

Dalla produzione automatizzata agli ambienti tecnologicamente densi: la dimensione sociomateriale dell’agire organizzativo

The relationship between work processes and technological innovations is a recurring theme of all the disciplines interested in organizational analysis. The majority of the studies focus on the introduction on new technologies to evaluate the effects of work organization while less common are the analysis of long term effects and of the stratification of technical artefacts that, over time, lead to the creation of Technologically Dense Environments. This work addresses these issues through an empirical analysis of “junction work”, the array of apparently marginal activities performed by human actors to allow information systems to be aligned. The interest in junction work stems from its being considered a undesired by-product of innovation. Junction work takes the form of copying hand notes, transcribing data from one system to another (digital or paper-based), data inputting and so on. We present the case of information management in an oncological department ten years after the deployment of an electronic medical record and is based on qualitative interviews and participant observation aimed at discovering the origin of junction work, its analysis and the changes in the professional profile of the people that perform it. Results show that innovation process, guided by medical doctors, is intertwined with a delegation to nurses of a growing role as information managers. The overall outcome is the transformation of the ward into a technologically dense environments in the nurses experience, required to perform a constant junction work to ensure the information flow within the department and with the rest of the other facilities. Results therefore confirm how the cumulative effects of technological stratification have a different impact on organizational actors. Despite being represented as transient and accidental, junction work appears a constitutive element of technologically dense environments and it can therefore be considered as a useful unit of analysis to study them.