Thesis

Liberty matters : emergent theories towards expanding the potential for personal and social emancipation through female entrepreneurship

Downloadable Content

Download PDF
Creator
Rights statement
Awarding institution
  • University of Strathclyde
Date of award
  • 2026
Thesis identifier
  • T17689
Person Identifier (Local)
  • 201854743
Qualification Level
Qualification Name
Department, School or Faculty
Abstract
  • “Oppressive forces are known to precede emancipation because, without oppression, the need for emancipation would not exist.” (Laclau, 1996) Entrepreneurship is more than enterprise. Formation and development are socially contextualised and brings agency benefits to participants beyond the financial metrics of trade. Female entrepreneurship brings hope of increased personal empowerment to women. This is both through increasing financial capacity and by extending their social agency. Expectations are high that individual empowerment leads to wider emancipation of women within society (Rindova et al, 2009). The literature demonstrates the impact of female entrepreneurship on a country’s economic development (Hsieh, Hurst, Jones & Klenow, 2019). Women also hire other women (West & Sundaramurthy, 2019; Lenz & Aspan, 2018) within new ventures, leading to increased economic agency for both founders and staff. However, there is little evidence of a reliable pathway toward wider female emancipation. The aspiration is that women will use increased economic agency to shift the social norms that circumscribe their social agency. The literature offers little hope (Laine & Kibler, 2022). There is a gap in both empirics and theory to establish how increasing female entrepreneurship can advance female social emancipation (Berglund, Gaddefors & Lindgren, 2016). The rise of accessible digital trading opportunities, considered a breakthrough for women, is not enough to alleviate female precarity and constrained agency (Martinez, Martin & Marlow, 2018). It is not clear whether female entrepreneurship has an entourage effect that may bring forth a swathe of consequential norm changes. Alternatively, social agency effect might be minimal, limited to the individual, financial, and social impacts of participants. Institutional norms may remain relatively unchanged (UNDP, 2022).
Advisor / supervisor
  • Dodd, Sarah
  • Lassalle, Paul
Resource Type
DOI
Date Created
  • 2022

Relations

Items

Thumbnail Title Date Uploaded Visibility Actions
file details PDF of thesis T17689 2026-06-04 Public Download