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The research group for studies in democracy, power and citizenship (DEM)

“Genuinely Swedish”: An intersectional analysis of entrepreneurship practices in the outdoor clothing and equipment sector

This project will make visible how norms are performed and mobilized, and how they intersect with entrepreneurial processes.

Project manager at MDU

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Background

Entrepreneurship has assumed importance and resources are dedicated to stimulate entrepreneurial activities. Still, there is preoccupation for those groups that often do not participate to the same extent as others to entrepreneurial projects and/or end up confined in “entrepreneurial ghettos”, that is women and people belonging to minorities.

Project approach

It is thus crucial to develop knowledge on entrepreneurial processes looking at dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. And to problematize the dominant discourse on entrepreneurship which is individualistic, masculine, ethnocentric. Hence, this project answers the call for studies with a social constructionist stance and a process view of entrepreneurship and focuses on the practices in which entrepreneurship is performed, in particular concentrating on how entrepreneurship is performed at the intersection of the doing of categories as gender, ethnicity, class, body-abledness (a term itself problematic), sexual orientation, age. An ethnography-inspired method will be used.

Also, the focus is not, as often the case with a critical perspective, on “the minority“ doing entrepreneurship. Rather, I focus on an apparently successful sector in Sweden that is tightly connected with the doing of the norm for gender, ethnicity, body abledness, class, sexual orientation and age: the outdoor clothing and equipment sector. This study will thus make visible how norms are performed and mobilized, and how they intersect with entrepreneurial processes.

Grupp av människor som tältar i fjällen.