The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, particularly SDG 5, seek to attain gender equality and empower all women and girls. While rural women face multiple challenges, the innovative and entrepreneurial leadership of women in farming and rural areas can foster resilient and sustainable rural communities. Although studies on women and innovation are increasing, a clear definition of women-led innovation is missing. One objective of this paper is to outline what makes women-led innovations a distinct kind of innovation, and why that should matter for policy. Drawing on the conceptual framework devised for the EU Funded Horizon Europe FLIARA (Female-Led Innovation in Agriculture and Rural Areas) project, we propose a context to understand women-led innovation on farms and in rural areas within the geographical scope of the European Union, while also identifying a set of distinguishing features that make women-led innovation categorically different from other types of innovations. Furthermore, another key objective is to show how a better understanding of the distinctiveness of women-led innovations can contribute to policy by using the European Commission Long-term Vision for Rural Areas as an example. We conclude by advocating for an increased focus on women-led innovations in policymaking for a number of compelling reasons. Firstly, women have significant potential to drive progress in rural development, sustainability, and equality. They have a unique perspective and approach which can offer transformative solutions to the challenges facing rural communities. Moreover, supporting women-led innovations serves as a catalyst for revitalising rural areas in an evolving rural landscape. Additionally, prioritising equal opportunities for all individuals and genders in rural areas is not only an issue of common sense, but is a moral imperative. By making sure women have the same access to education, resources, and opportunities as their male counterparts, we endorse basic principles of fairness and justice. 

There has been a gap in knowledge regarding how civil society organisations (CSOs) interact at different levels when working to integrate refugees into the labour market—its causes and limitations. To contribute to filling the gap, this study employs both a rational choice perspective and sociological institutionalism to analyse how and why CSOs in Jönköping municipality in Sweden interacted with other relevant actors, both other CSOs (horizontally) and the public sector (vertically), to integrate refugees into the labour market after the refugee crisis in 2015 and what challenges they faced. It analyses different forms of interaction, that is, not only the relationship between the state and the civil society but also the one between different civil society organisations, which brings a new analytical dimension to the concept of coproduction to support refugees. By analysing the organisations’ interactions at different levels, the study identifies four themes: Striving to be flexible and service-minded organisations; between rational choice and institutionalisation of horizontal interactions; obstacles to horizontal interactions; and difficulty of measuring goal attainment.

Introductory paragraph: In Sweden, a growing number of mothers are starting a new venture when their children are young. This is surprising in a country where the welfare system with its family policies favors employees, not entrepreneurs. Because the Scandinavian welfare systems promote employment over entrepreneurship, we were were curious why so many mothers of young children still choose to launch ventures of their own.

Many civil society organizations (CSOs) were originally formed to address social problems that governments did not address, and often in direct opposition to government. In contemporary society, governments instead look to CSOs to help solve social problems, for example by providing project funding. However, by financing and evaluating these organizations, the state also risks co-opting them, changing their mission and perhaps also the level or type of voluntary engagement. The paper discusses this dilemma by following sixteen state-sponsored projects carried out by Swedish CSOs aiming at integrating refugees after the refugee wave in 2015. However, most of the projects were discontinued after the original project period. Using institutional theory to interpret these results, it is suggested that the projects were too decoupled from the core activities of the organizations to be integrated long term. The concept “inefficient decoupling” is consequently introduced to institutional theory. If governments want to successfully engage CSOs, programs must align with their core activities, and evaluation criteria must meet their core values. However, when the state co-opts civil society organizations for the aims of the state, their potential for social transformation risks getting lost.  

Using positioning analysis we examine how women entrepreneurs construct their entrepreneurial identities in conversations with journalists. The data consists of every interview with women entrepreneurs in every Latvian monthly women’s magazine over a 30-year period. Eleven countries in Eastern Europe, including Latvia, broke away from the communist regime in the 1990s and embraced neoliberal and entrepreneurial values that rely on the use of agency in a free market and where individuals were considered autonomous agents, no longer constrained by gender inequalities and power imbalances. However, an analysis shows that identity constructions by women entrepreneurs have been built on neo-conservative assumptions regarding gender. The default option expressed in the magazines reveals that entrepreneurship is normatively masculine, and the entrepreneurial identity that is on offer for women is either as a ‘secondary entrepreneur’ or a ‘failed woman’. The post-feminist conception of a woman who can have it all, i.e. both a successful business career and a traditional feminine identity with a happy family life, is absent in the interviews. When neoliberalism entered Latvia and merged with neo-conservative gender roles, a specific Eastern European postfeminist regime emerged where neither entrepreneurship nor structural change can be seen as challenging the prevailing patriarchal gender order.

While research has pointed to the lack of gender mainstreaming 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 constructs gender inequality problems and gendered subjects. We employ the 'What's the problem represented to be' approach to analyse the implementation of the European Union's Rural Development Policy in one Swedish region, Jönköping County. We conclude that gender inequality is largely left unproblematic in relation to rural development, placing women in the subject position of being uninterested in rural development policy and lacking the ability to take it on. The focus on farmers and ICT broadband positions adult, Swedish-born men as the norm, reflecting a neoliberal emphasis on economic growth through competitive businesses. We also conclude that the policy twists 'gender mainstreaming' by claiming that it promotes gender equality, while it in fact takes no action. Paying lip service to gender equality rural policy thereby co-opts feminism, in line with a neoliberal 'postfeminist' discourse, which is harmful to the feminist project. Alternative approaches to gender inequalities suggest that there may be broader, and different, ways of discussing them in relation to rural development, making for a broader spectrum of problematisations and subject positions, which may, in turn, allow a transformation towards gender equality.

Principal TopicExtant literature presents the combination of entrepreneurship and motherhood as a difficult and conflict-ridden one, requiring the adaptation of the business to the family situation. To investigate the relation, we build on the literatures on motherhood (Bueskens, 2018; Smyth, 2012) and women’s entrepreneurship and take the post-structuralist perspective of the self as discursively constructed (Bruner, 1990) and requiring subject positioning, and negotiating  (Czarniawska, 2013). 

MethodUsing qualitative interviews with 15 women entrepreneurs we explore how women position themselves simultaneously as good mothers and good entrepreneurs. We analyze the collected material via thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). The context is Sweden, which is characterized by a strong gender equality ideology and by generous family policies including 18 months paid parental leave and affordable daycare from age 1.

ResultsWe find that women engage in doing and undoing motherhood. The undoing includes renegotiating their positions vis-à-vis societal norms and expectations that a woman must prioritize her child above all. The doing includes constructing a new discourse in which a happy mother is one who is able to pursue her passions and realize her dreams and in so doing models desirable attitudes and values in life for her child. We find that entrepreneurship can be a vehicle for crafting this identity.

We also find that mothers engage in undoing of the “mumpreneurship” discourse according to which women engage in entrepreneurship as a flexible form of part-time job that allows them to harmonize work and family responsibilities. Rather, these women engage in full-time, income-generating ventures motivated by a genuine desire to seize promising business opportunities. As such, our findings confront the prevailing misconception that businesses initiated by mothers are primarily geared toward convenience and exhibit lower economic ambition. These mothers are equally committed, driven, and dedicated to achieving success in their businesses as anyone else in the entrepreneurship landscape. Our findings have important policy implications in that they call for a reevaluation of the potential economic contribution of mother entrepreneurs.

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 rural women entrepreneurs contribute to rural development and discuss the implications for entrepreneurship policy. This paper aims to focus on the aforementioned objectives.  

Design/methodology/approach: The authors interviewed 32 women entrepreneurs in rural Sweden representing the variety of businesses in which rural Swedish women are engaged. The authors analysed their contributions to rural development by analysing their motives, strategies and outcomes using Korsgaard et al.’s framework of “entrepreneurship in the rural” and “rural entrepreneurship” as a heuristic, interpretative device.

Findings: Irrespective of industry, the respondents were deeply embedded in family and local social structures. Their contributions were substantial, multidimensional and indispensable for rural viability, but the policy tended to bypass most women-owned businesses. Support in terms of business training, counselling and financing are important, but programmes especially for women tend to miss the mark, and so does rural development policy. More important for rural women entrepreneurs in Sweden is the provision of good public services, including for example, schools and social care, that make rural life possible.

Research limitations/implications: Theoretically, the findings question the individualist and a-contextual focus of much entrepreneurship research, as well as the taken-for-granted work–family divide. How gender and how the public and the private are configured varies greatly between contexts and needs contextual assessment. Moreover, the results call for theorising place as an entrepreneurial actor.

Practical implications: Based on the findings, the authors advise future policymakers to gender mainstream entrepreneurship policy and to integrate entrepreneurship and rural development policy with family and welfare state policy.

Originality/value: The paper highlights how rural women respond to policy, and the results are contextualised, making it possible to compare them to other contexts. The authors widen the discussion on contributions beyond economic growth, and the authors show that policy for public and commercial services and infrastructure is indeed also policy for entrepreneurship.