Title: Women Entrepreneurial Learning and Scale up of Women Enterprises: A Literature Review Authors: Maria Cseh, Julia Storberg-Walker, Malikah Alturki, Andrea Richards Scott Organisation affiliation/position(s): The George Washington University/faculty/doctoral students Address: 2134 G Street, NW, Room 215, Washington, DC 20052, USA Email address: cseh@gwu.edu Stream: Leadership, Management and Talent Development Submission Type: Working Paper Abstract The purpose of this working paper is to present a preliminary literature review study designed to understand the learning of women entrepreneurs and their approaches to scale up their enterprises. In order to fulfill the purpose of the study the following research questions are explored: 1) how do women entrepreneurs learn? and 2) how do women entrepreneurs approach scaling up their enterprises? The review of the 51 studies identified for this working paper and the theories that informed them revealed that the findings are dominated by the normative discourse. Only one study was guided by poststructural feminism. This working paper presents the following study findings: learning through networking/community of practice; learning about self; learning strategies for enterprise scale-up; factors facilitating and inhibiting learning and enterprise scale-up; and dispositions to entrepreneurship. Since female entrepreneurs are making vital contributions to innovation, employment and wealth creation in all global economies, human resource development researchers and practitioners are called to facilitate these contributions by understanding the learning and approaches to enterprise growth of women not only through the dominant discourse but through the lens for feminist and critical theories and the lens of cross-cultural leadership/entrepreneurship theories. Keywords: Women entrepreneurial learning, Women enterprise scale up and growth, Feminist theory, Critical theory, Cross-cultural leadership and entrepreneurship, Networking, Communities of practice Women Entrepreneurial Learning and Scale up of Women Enterprises: A Literature Review Problem Statement The existing literature on women entrepreneurship is dominated by the normative discourse and addresses a range of topics such as, inadequate entrepreneurial education, training, and prior experience (Minniti and Naude, 2010; Marlow 2013; Junquera, 2011); low opportunity identification and recognition (Treanor and Ashe, 2011); issues with self-esteem and confidence (Junquera, 2011; Minniti and Naude, 2010); lack of business skill or ability (Junquera, 2011); fear of failure (Hughes, Jennings, Bush, Carter and Welter, 2012); discrimination (Junquera, 2011; Minniti and Naude, 2010); inadequate capital, lack of external financing, and capital constraints (Junquera, 2011; Sullivan and Meek 2012; Minniti and Naude, 2010; Hughes et al., 2012; Marlow, 2014); insufficient networks (Minniti and Naude, 2010; Sullivan and Meek, 2012); and differences in aspirations, intentions, motivations, and perceptions (Sullivan and Meek, 2012; Minniti and Naude, Hughes et al., 2012), and in personality, traits, and leadership styles (Junquera, 2011; Minniti and Naude, 2010) between men and women entrepreneurs. In the past five years attempts have been made to challenge this dominant discourse through critical literature reviews (Marlow, 2013; Treanor and Ashe, 2011; Hughes et al., 2012). Although these attempts are important in setting the stage for a new paradigm of inquiring and theorizing related to women entrepreneurship, there is a dearth of studies in understanding the learning process of women entrepreneurs and their approaches to scale up their enterprises across cultures. Purpose of the Study and Research Questions The purpose of this literature review study is to understand the learning of women entrepreneurs and their approaches to scale up their enterprises. In order to fulfill the purpose of the study the following research questions will be explored: How do women entrepreneurs learn? How do women entrepreneurs approach scaling up their enterprises? Methodology Following Torraco’s (2005) guidelines, this integrative literature review will contribute to the understanding of how women entrepreneurs learn and scale up/grow their enterprises by critically analyzing existing literature; synthesizing knowledge from literature into value-added contribution into the field of women entrepreneurship; presenting a research agenda driven by the aforementioned research questions; and justifying the logic and conceptual reasoning used to synthesize the literature. This working paper presents the first part of the journey in achieving the proposed integrative literature review. The authors of this paper met numerous times to discuss the topic of women entrepreneurship from a variety of perspective in order to determine the purpose, scope, and focus of the study, as well as to develop a strategy for selecting the literature that would be included in the review. We agreed that the articles selected for this literature review study would be written in English and published in peer reviewed journals. Due to the dearth in the literature on women entrepreneurs learning and scale up from a cross cultural perspective, it was agreed that the literature search would incorporate the following keywords: women, female, gender, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, literature review, learning, growth, scale up, cross-cultural, multicultural, intercultural, global, transnational, and enterprise with a combination of these search terms. As databases are constantly changing, the university librarians were consulted to clarify the potentials of the numerous databases and behind-the-scene nuances of using Boolean search. The meeting with the librarians assisted in the determination of the appropriate keywords and databases, as well as the most efficient use of search operators to combine search terms in order to maximize reach to the relevant literature. Despite all the information we gathered about the most relevant search approaches, we discovered that several of our combinations led to hundreds of articles published in scholarly journals. After the review of their abstracts we learned that the vast majority were not specifically related to our research questions. Finally, we decided on the search by subject (su) only which means that we accessed all the articles indexed with our search terms. For the purpose of this working paper we focused on the following two Boolean search strategy using the ProQuest documents in scholarly publications: 1. su(entrepreneur*) AND su(woman OR women OR female OR females OR gender) AND su(learning) 2. su(entrepreneur*) AND su(woman OR women OR female OR females OR gender) AND su("entrepreneur* growth" OR "entrepreneur* scale up" OR "entrepreneur* scale-up" OR "enterprise growth" OR "enterprise scale-up" OR "enterprise scale up" OR "business growth" OR "business scale-up" OR "business scale up") The first search led to 31 articles. To ensure that all the cross-cultural/international related articles were included in this search we added AND (cross cultural OR cross-cultural OR multicultural OR multi-cultural OR international OR global OR transnational) to our search strategy and the retrieved articles were all included in the original 31. Each of us reviewed the articles for relevance to our research questions and then met to discuss our selection. Based on our discussions we selected 17 articles that met our criteria. The second search led to 46 articles and using the same approach we selected 34 articles. Thus we reviewed 51 articles for this working paper that are listed in the References section. In order to analyze the articles we developed a table with the following 5 columns: author/year; purpose/RQ/Hypothesis; Theoretical framework/Methodology; Findings related to RQ1 and RQ2. The following themes emerged from our discussions: learning through networking/community of practice; learning about self; learning strategies for enterprise scaleup; factors facilitating and inhibiting learning and enterprise scale-up; and dispositions to entrepreneurship. Preliminary Findings Learning through networking/community of practice. The most prevalent approach to learning of the women entrepreneurs studied in the reviewed articles were networking and mentoring that enabled learning of craft, self, and business. In addition, the review identified a gendered attitude towards networking and mentoring. For example, Dawson et al (2011) found that “Female entrepreneurs have a more positive attitude towards networks than men…networks may be more important for female entrepreneurs as they are seeking additional support to develop and grow their businesses” (p. 280) while Barnir (2104) concluded that “a significantly greater proportion of female serial entrepreneur noted mentors as an impetus for their serial activity compared to the novice, but that no such effect was found in the male sample. These results suggest mentoring becomes a more accessible resource for women in the course of their first entrepreneurial experience, a resource that facilitates additional start-up activity. Such facilitation may involve directing access to resources, or providing business help or emotional support. Further, mentoring may have an indirect effect by affecting women’s self-efficacy beliefs that lead to the decision to assume additional entrepreneurial activity” (p. 16). It is clear that through mentoring, women entrepreneurs receive resources, information, and ideas. Through these mechanisms women learn both the creative and administrative tasks associated with starting up and building a new enterprise. Women entrepreneurs also have been shown to learn a great deal about themselves. Following Esterby-Smith, Crossan & Nicolini (2000), learning can involve rational, intuitive, emotional, and social processes. Women who create a new enterprise experience used all of these processes at different times and while working on different tasks related to the enterprise. Interestingly, these women self-directed learners routinely linked personal development with learning for work (Fenwick, 2000), and both their work and personal identity was shaped by the wider environment of entrepreneurship. Fenwick’s (2000) study of 109 women entrepreneurs in Canada found that these women not only learned about doing the work, but they also learned more about themselves as they identified for themselves their own measures of success, fulfillment, and work/life balance. These important measures of self were created through resisting the male-normed discourse of entrepreneurship and listening to other discourses of work as “passionate, creative, even spiritual expressions” (p. 168). Our review also suggests specific learning strategies for enterprise scale-up. The approaches to growth show that women are taking into consideration both their context and their relationships in their decisions to grow their business, and they learn through experience, and trial and error, just as they did when initiating the enterprise. As Mitra (2002) observed “A significant number of [women] are interested in achieving growth so long as this is possible without endangering the balance they seek to achieve between their business and other relationships” (p. 232). Orser and Scott (2002) found that “Male and female business owners arrive at growth decisions using a similar process and, in most respects, use similar weights. Differences that do exist relate to the different weights women appear to accord to the opinions of their spouses and their perspectives on the availability of the managerial and spousal support ingredients that are needed for growth” (p. 297). Even Fenwick (2002) found that women focused on growth when the survival of the enterprise was at risk, but more often women “created deliberate business practices result(ing) in less profit and growth than women could achieve if they wanted to” (p. 168). Societal factors, perceptions of women entrepreneurs, and the unique challenges emerging from these in different cultural contexts as well as the resilience of the women entrepreneurs were also addressed in the reviewed studies. Mboko (2009) found that “Societal factors were perceived to cause hostility to female owned businesses in particular, and the respondents were quite emotional when discussing societal factors. …there was consistency across cases in that all the entrepreneurs have resolved not to give up” (p. 165). Dispositions to learning and enterprise growth relates to attitudes, competencies, aspirations, expectancies, intentions, motivations. Brush (1992) noted that Women business owners are similar to males across some basic demographic factors, problems, and business characteristics, but they differ widely from male business owners across individual dimensions related to education, work experience, skills, approach to venture creation/acquisition, business goals, problems, and performance. It is suggested that the major reason for these differences is that women conceive of their businesses differently than men which in turn leads to different approaches and outcomes for performance… women view their businesses as a cooperative network of relationships rather than a separate economic entity. When a woman starts or acquires a business, the set of business relationships are "integrated" into her life (p. 24) To understand these findings dominated by the normative discourse, we took in consideration the theories and models, as noted by the authors, that guided the reviewed studies such as social learning theory, entrepreneurial human capital theory, theory of entrepreneurial alertness, expectancy theory, network theory, social network theory, mentoring theory, pecking order theory, middleman minority theory, social stratification and entrepreneurship, interactional sociolinguistics, stages of business development and bootstrap financing, life cycle stages of small business. We found only one study in which the author used a feminist poststructural frame (Fenwick, 2002) that “encourages discourse analysis of how subjectivities are regulated through positionality, knowledge construction, voice and authority, and makes gender prominent in the analysis.” The focus of poststructural feminism as explained by Tisdell (1998) is the “connection between one’s individual (constantly shifting) identity and social structures” (p. 146). Discussions and Implications for HRD Research and Practice Since female entrepreneurs are making vital contributions to innovation, employment, and wealth creation in all global economies (Kelly, Brush, Greene, and Litovsky, 2012), human resource development researchers and practitioners are called to facilitate these contributions by understanding the learning and approaches to enterprise growth of women not only through the dominant discourse but through the lens of feminist and critical theories and the lens of crosscultural leadership/entrepreneurship theories. Feminist theory frames problems particular to women in a specific context, in order to challenge current societal norms and reshape the social experiences of both men and women, while critical theory enables women to engage in just interpretations of social laws, values, and institutions, motivates a reinterpretation and reproduction of existing societal interactions and communications (Creswell, 2013; Kushner & Morrow, 2003). Cross-cultural leadership theory focuses on the need for improved understanding of cultural influences on leadership due to increased interaction between businesses, fierce and dynamic international competition, and interdependence of nations (Littrell, 2013). The dearth of research using these theories calls for a research agenda to enhance the understanding of gender as it is related to learning and growth/scale up for entrepreneurial enterprises. 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