Karin Berglund

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Stockholm University

Entrepreneurship is often understood as acting boldly on the market, broadcasting one’s endeavours in persuasive success stories. We, in contrast, seek to understand less flamboyant entrepreneurial practices by examining the creativity and innovations pursued by a gendered and marginalized professional group in the public sector. Through an ethnogr...

While research has pointed to the lack of gender main- streaming in rural and agricultural policy, how rural policy determines what is seen as problems of gender inequality in the first place and how it constructs men and women in relation to rural development remains unexplored. In this article we perform an in-depth analysis of how rural policy c...

Purpose Policy for women's entrepreneurship is designed to promote economic growth, not least in depleted rural areas, but very little is known about the contributions of rural women entrepreneurs, their needs or how the existing policy is received by them. Using a theoretical framework developed by Korsgaard et al. (2015), the authors analyse how...

Den internationella forskningen om kvinnors företagande tog fart i början av 1990-talet. Redan 1989 publicerade pionjärerna Elisabeth Sundin och Carin Holmquist den svenska studien Kvinnor som företagare: Osynlighet, mångfald, anpassning. Studien banade väg för en livaktig svensk forskning inom ämnet. I början handlade forskningen om att visa att k...

Purpose: In this paper, women entrepreneurs are seen as leaders and women leaders as entrepreneurial, making both groups an easy target of postfeminist expectations, governed by calls to embody the entrepreneurial self. Acknowledging that the entrepreneurial self has its roots in the universal, rational and autonomous subject, which was shaped in a...

The social entrepreneurship (SE) discourse habitually casts social entrepreneurs as heroic, creating economic and social value, whereas those whom they strive to assist are portrayed as disadvantaged and in need of interventions. This implies an implicit differentiation between knowing, agentic entrepreneurs and less-knowing, more passive beneficia...

Building on Alistair Anderson’s work, this paper proposes transforming enterprise education to deeply address questions of sustainability, social justice and hope in our time of multiple and complex crises. New pedagogies, practices, vocabularies and connections help us to enact crises in entrepreneurial, ethical and creative ways, enabling us to r...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore and discuss to what extent and why women's entrepreneurship contributes to rural economic viability and gender equality in an advanced welfare state. Design/methodology/approach The authors use detailed register data to explore men's and women's rural businesses in the most common industries for rura...

recognise activity and passivity as enmeshed – as ‘pactive’. Activity is found to perpetuate the mainstream innovation discourse, aligned with a male construct of an active and rational being. Thus, passivity is viewed as a concept that helps problematise, analyse, negotiate and transgress the discursive borders of innovation. The study is empirica...

Purpose Contrasting Sweden and Tanzania, this paper aims to explore the experiences of women entrepreneurs affected by entrepreneurialism. This study discusses the impact on their position in society and on their ability to take feminist action. Design/methodology/approach This paper analysed interviews conducted in the two countries over 15 years...

Purpose Contrasting two countries with different gender regimes and welfare states, Sweden and Tanzania, this paper aims to analyse how the institutional context affects the ways in which a neo-liberal reform agenda is translated into institutional changes and propose how such changes impact the preconditions for women’s entrepreneurship. Design/m...

Innovation is filled with aspirations for solutions to problems, and for laying the groundwork for new technological and social breakthroughs. When a concept is so positively charged, the hopes expressed may create blindness to potential shortcomings and deadlocks. To disclose innovation blind spots, we approach innovation from a feminist viewpoint...

Published video ethnography: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyKq513PJNs&feature=youtu.be The purpose of this paper is to develop videographic methods for the study of alternative entrepreneurship, with a theoretical focus on “ethical uncertainties”, exemplified in this paper by the exploration of evolving actions and unpredictable outcomes in a...

This article offers reflections based on the special issue on unsettling entrepreneurship education (EEP 3(3)) in which contributions have resisted the tendency to see students as consumers with the ‘right’ to take part in entrepreneurship education (EE) so as to effectively shape their enterprising selves. Here we resume our editorial discussions...

The projectified self is suggested in this article as a way to advance emancipatory project studies toward improved understandings of how individuals in contemporary neoliberal societies are urged to become self-controlling, self-improving, self-commercializing, life-compartmentalizing, and deadline driven. We propose (1) a developed theoretical fo...

This special issue confronts taken-for-granted views on entrepreneurship education (EE), raises critical questions both about EE and how it is taught, and allows investigations of the potential dark sides of entrepreneurship and EE. The contributions in this issue challenge our teaching positions and evoke a pedagogical approach to invention where...

Entrepreneurship education (EE) theory and practice show increasing interest in the concept of identity work as integral to entrepreneurial learning. EE offers various approaches to guiding students towards entrepreneurial identities, but critics note that these meet neoliberal manifestations of the entrepreneurial self, leaving little room for alt...

Purpose Following the example of the critical management education tradition, the purpose of this paper is to argue whether we should keep EE vital by disturbing it, in particular by interrogating that which has seemingly become “untouchable” from interrogation. Design/methodology/approach This paper takes inspiration from Paolo Freire’s work by p...

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 approa...

Since the early 1990s, there has been investment in women's entrepreneurship policy (WEP) in Sweden, which continued until 2015. During the same period, Sweden assumed neoliberal policies that profoundly ch7anged the position of women within the world of work and business. The goals for WEP changed as a result, from entrepreneurship as a way to cre...

How can we study a company's call for "openness" and ambition to create an alternative form of entrepreneurship? This article introduces a videography (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cX1QzYCcXdo) of the Hungarian company Prezi, with a focus on their efforts to nurture an internal organisational culture defined by openness, as well as a desire to a...

Entrepreneurship has spread via an abundance of organizations and people that embrace the prosperity its logic currently promises. Apart from the generation of new companies and market places this promise also entails a flexible invention of entrepreneurial subjectivities and self-investment via alternative choices (Bröckling, 2016). We have recent...

In this article, our interest is in what subjectivities are fostered among schoolchildren through the recent introduction of entrepreneurship initiatives in primary and secondary school. The educational terrain is but one example where entrepreneurship has been discursively transformed during recent decades from the notion of starting businesses in...

Policy actors seeking to stimulate entrepreneurship sometimes give special attention to women. It is not given, however, that policy initiatives for women entrepreneurs necessarily contribute to gender equality, to social change for women – such as enhancing entrepreneurship as a means to women's well-being and financial or other independence – or...

What form does entrepreneurship take when companies aim for social value creation? This videography (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cX1QzYCcXdo) illustrates how the Hungarian company Prezi engages in the Roma community in the village Bag, one hour from Budapest. Based on an ethnographic method, the documentary is produced by entrepreneurship resea...

In this article, we briefly identify three main challenges/issues that should be taken into consideration in the institutionalization of entrepreneurship research: (1) recognizing the complexity of the phenomenon under study; (2) producing interesting, relevant and useful research results for all stakeholders; and (3) developing a critical posture...

Using Schumpeter’s concept ‘creative destruction’ as the starting point, we approach innovation as a discursive terrain where discourses compete to ascribe meanings to innovation. We conduct a discourse analysis of the most influential management articles to explore the dominant academic management discourse of innovation. The analysis shows that t...

This article discusses entrepreneurship in a depleted community in transition. The purpose is to develop knowledge about how discourses are used in the positioning of identity in regional development. The concept positioning illustrates how identities are provoked, challenged, negotiated and moved into identity positions that break away from the id...

Feminism in the Nordic countries was primarily formulated in terms of ‘state feminism’. The women’s movement cooperated with feminist government officials and politicians, resulting in societies that can be considered to be the most gender-equal societies in the world. Historically, the state provided for a large publicly-financed welfare sector wh...

How can play be used to unravel the discourse of the gendered hero entrepreneur and instead describe mundane entrepreneuring? Further, how can the doing of gendered social orders be problematized when entrepreneuring is equated with play? In this article we answer these questions by engaging with the French social theorist Caillois’ (1961) conceptu...

The different shapes taken on by social entrepreneurship in contemporary society show that social goals are integrated by commercial enterprises and commercial goals are incorporated by organisations with a social mission. Combining a social mission with commercial goals is often presented as a ‘win-win’ situation. In this article, we highlight the...

http://video.startupday.se/video/8051559/karin-berglund-annika-skoglund-and-imre

This article pays interest to the intersection between policy and practice when implementing entrepreneurship in the educational system. Taking a point of departure in Mahieu's (2006) call for knowledge of the interplay between different policy levels and Backström-Widjeskog's (2010) conclusion about tensions occurring when teachers are introduced...

Most social ventures cross the boundaries between the private, the public and the non-profit/voluntary sectors, and this broad involvement of actors and intertwining of sectors makes the label 'societal' entrepreneurship more appropriate. Stating the importance of both the local and the broader societal context, the book reports close-up studies fr...

Drawing on Freire, this article elaborates on how pictures and artefacts benefit processes of 'prise de conscience' and 'conscientization' among those with powerful voices. Wor(l)d-making was unfolded in the Swedish think-and-do tank, 'the Smithy', emphasizing the intrinsically political nature of promoting 'societal entrepreneurship' (SE). New wor...

In this paper, we take our point of departure in the research project 'Entrepreneurship Education 2007' (EDU07), which focused on the earlier stages of the educational system as well as on what teachers do when they do entrepreneurship education. More specifically, the purpose here is to discuss the method – focus group interviews – applied in this...

This paper is based upon a regional development project in a ‘vulnerable’ Swedish region consisting of three municipalities. At a first glance, this is a region in decline that is lacking in entrepreneurial initiatives. During a crucial time period the project ‘Diversity in Entrepreneurship’ (DiE) was launched to help the region to become more entr...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to challenge a traditional image of the content of entrepreneurship, which is associated with creativity, identity and discovery recognition. Design/methodology/approach A narrative approach is used in telling the story about the artist/entrepreneur Mikael Genberg. The story is based on interviews, newspaper ma...

Purpose The 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/approach A discourse framework is developed in order to describe dominating – and even new and challenging – versio...

Inledning De små och medelstora företagens betydelse för sysselsättningen i samhället har under en längre tid uppmärksammats (Johannisson och Lindmark, 1996). Samhällets roll i att stödja denna typ av företag har under snart ett halvsekel funnits på den politiska agendan. Samtidigt har det visat sig problematiskt att utvärdera nyttan av offentliga...

What exactly follows when individuals' discover that they have ideas that could be realized in an own firm? This question will guide us towards understandings of what individuals are ahead of when they act entrepreneurial. But before exploring this question further there are some issues that need to be called in to question. The first deals with a...

In the research of Bengt Johannisson, the "essence" of entrepreneurship is not only to be found in particular individuals, business start-ups and developments (Johannisson, 2005). The point of departure is instead the enterprising and constructive efforts of a broad range of agencies in society, also including supportive contexts like personal netw...