Lady, Inc.: women learning, negotiating subjectivity in entrepreneurial discourses

Lady, Inc.: Women Learning, Negotiating Subjectivity in Entrepreneurial Discourses Tara J. Fenwick University of Alberta, Canada This article is an early draft of an article which has been published in International Journal of Lifelong Education, 21 (2), 162-177. For the full article and references, please consult the published source.

Abstract This paper presents an analysis of individuals’ experiential learning through their work as entrepreneurs1. In particular, it examines women’s learning as a ‘working-through’ of discursive conflicts of subjectivity. The paper is grounded in a poststructural frame that understands subjectivity to be continuously constituted through engagement with cultural discourses and learning to occur at the interstices of negotiating positionality and identity amidst contradictory discourses. The data under analysis is drawn from a qualitative study examining the learning and development of women entrepreneurs across Canada. Interviews explored the process of work learning and personal change reported by these women after at least four years running their new business, their challenges and personal needs in work, the practices they chose to engage, and their meanings of both learning and success. This analysis focuses on the discursive contexts of entrepreneurship, examining the competing images and messages which implicate women, and the various ways women business-owners learn to appropriate or resist these messages to negotiate subject positions and craft their own meanings of success and work. Implications for educators are presented at the conclusion.

1The

term entrepreneur designates any person who has started a business enterprise of any kind that provides their own employment: single- or multi-employee, large or small, home-based, virtual, contractual, industrial, etc.

Lady, Inc.: Women Learning, Negotiating Subjectivity in Entrepreneurial Discourses Recent writings about working knowledge have emphasized the relations between learning processes and subjectivity (Forrester 1999, Usher and Solomon 1999). Subjectivity results from one’s positionality respective to the norms and knowledge of particular communities, one’s complex and changing understandings of ‘self’, one’s desires and intentions shaped from the cultural imaginary, and one’s moving location within cultural discourses. This movement is a process of negotiation, working out the meanings of various interactions, strategizing one’s position, and choosing particular images to take up or resist. But this process is neither autonomous nor rational: as negotiators we are shaped by cultural discourse and choose among its symbols in ways that we may not acknowledge. We learn to desire certain images, to become particular subjects, and to perceive our subjectivity in particular ways. Sometimes, when we become aware of conflicts in negotiating this subjectivity, we learn about resistance and voice, about positioning ourselves as different to the dominant. The workplace with its complex transactions for capital, identity, and power is a particularly difficult space for these negotiations and their entangled learning. In an era when so-called knowledge capital is presumed the key to corporate competitiveness, worker learning and subjectivity becomes an oft-contested site for developing this capital. As Garrick and Usher (1999:66) argue, worker subjectivities are being shaped by current post-Fordist workplace structures and practices to become ‘active learners and self-regulating subjects’, through a governmentality that ‘works through infiltrating regulation into the very interior of the experience of subjects’. In particular the discourses of flexibility (Edwards 1998, Usher and Solomon, 1999) and enterprise (du Gay 1996) have been characterized, by critics in adult education circles, as dominant in the new governmentality of post-Fordist work contexts. This article examines the constitution of worker subjectivities within the context of enterprise, drawing from a qualitative study2 of women who had left organizational employment to start their own businesses. These women were selected for study for two main reasons. First, they represent a fast-growing group of workers who are leaving jobs to seek self-employment, a trend that has attracted significant scholarly interest in terms of shifting career development and work organization patterns (Cohen and Mallon 1999). The learning of these workers is intensive, rapid, largely self-directed, and closely entwined with personal development and relationships (Brush 1992). Besides the obvious interest of this learning process for adult educators, the subjectivities being formed and the influences on this formation process deserve study as an important area of lifelong learning amidst the fast-changing nature of work and employment conditions. Second, women starting new businesses in particular are forming a significant pattern, doubling the rate of men’s start-up in North America (Catalyst 1998, Industry Canada, 1998).

2Data mentioned in this paper are drawn from a cross-Canada multi-year study ‘Canadian Women Entrepreneurs: A Study of Workplace Learning and Development’, conducted by a team involving the University of Alberta and the University of Calgary, and funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Tara Fenwick, Susan Hutton, Laurel McLean, Kathleen Anderson, and Jenny Wannas formed the research team. Study findings and various papers are available at http://www.ualberta.ca/~tfenwick/index.html

The focus here is entrepreneurial women’s learning through their discursive struggles for subjectivity. How do these women themselves participate in enterprise discourses? What directives, practices, meanings, pleasures, values and images do they choose to take up, ignore, or resist? Are there practices in which they participate unconsciously? What (possibly conflicting) subject positions do they occupy at various moments? A poststructural discursive analysis is used to approach these questions, particularly Foucault’s (1980) concept of pastoral discipline regulating subjectivity through discursive practices, and Grossberg’s (1992) approach to understanding how people participate in particular cultural texts and activities. Working from enterprising women’s stories, the present discussion will explore their participation in various cultural discourses affecting their work and identities as entrepreneurs. The ultimate purpose is to identify any cultural sites contributing to these individuals’ subjection to limiting identities, inequitable conditions or oppressive ways of living, as well as individuals’ forms of resistance to subjugation. Exploring subjectivities of women entrepreneurs: the study method The study employed a naturalistic, qualitative approach premised on the assumption that individuals construct their own meanings from their lived experiences (van Manen 1990). Potential participants were identified through a combination of snowball referrals, entrepreneur agency members’ lists, entrepreneur awards lists, and business and women’s organizations. Our criteria specified that a woman had left a job with an organization, had started her own business by herself or with partners, and was still running her business after four years of operation. Participants were selected for interviews if their life experiences matched these criteria and helped represent a range of situations: different types and sizes of business, different provincial locations, and different kinds of community in which the business operated. The study involved a total of 109 participants across Canada ranging in age from 29 to 72, with the majority between 38-55 years. Most were married with children (59%), and about one-third were single mothers. The majority (62%) of businesses were in the service sector (business services, education, and health care), and the most common size (43%) was very small: two to five staff. Few (12%) had any formal business training (for further demographic information refer to Fenwick, in press,a). In a personal open-ended reflective interview lasting between one and two hours, each participant was asked to narrate her work-life history through the transition from organizational employment to developing her business, up to the present. The interviews typically unfolded in two parts. In the first part, the telling of the ‘life story’, women described their experiences at various phases of leaving their jobs, starting and developing the business. At each phase, women were asked to explain specific challenges and their own reasons, as far as they understood them, for particular choices they made. Throughout their stories, women were also asked to describe the learning challenges they experienced and their approaches to meeting these challenges (including their learning processes and strategies, external and internal resources). In particular, women were probed to share what they identified as ‘critical incidents’ of learning, both positive and negative, embedded in the relationships, choices and experiences threaded through their histories in starting and building a business. In the second part of the interviews, women reflected on the stories they had narrated regarding their experiencing developing their business. Each described personal changes she perceived in herself since deciding to start a business, and overall processes of her learning that she could

identify in her own story. Finally, each woman was also invited to share her values, particularly the meanings of success that she felt had influenced her choices and learning at various points of her story. In this second part of the interview, we as interviewers often took the opportunity to review the meanings we as listeners were constructing from what we were hearing: ‘I thought I heard you emphasize that . . .’, ‘When you told the story about___ I found myself wondering . . .’, ‘Would a fair interpretation of that be . . . ?’ Of the 109 interviews, most were conducted face-to-face by one interviewer of a team including two faculty and four graduate students. All interviews were tape-recorded and fully transcribed. Data analysis began with an interpretive approach to examine participants’ learning and development processes. Each transcript was first analysed manually using qualitative coding methods described by Ely (1991) to identify categories and themes for individuals. Categories were allowed to emerge according to the topics emphasized by each woman related to her learning process and her perception of its outcomes. In a second stage of comparative data analysis, the categories derived from each individual transcript were compared across the 109 transcripts towards identifying shared themes and areas of difference among participants’ narratives. Working from these topics, a master matrix of categories and subcategories was constructed and refined to examine the nature of working knowledge, its process of development, and transitions in self evident in the participants’ experiences. The themes resulting from this interpretive analysis are reported in Fenwick (in press, a). 3. Following this interpretive analysis, a poststructural analysis was employed to address the question at issue in this paper: how do women participate in enterprise discourses, taking up or resisting particular images and meanings, in the ongoing constitution of their subjectivity? (Fenwick, in press, b). Thus the characteristics of human subjectivity (including their sense of identity, actions, vision, risk-taking, creativity, etc.) emerge through engagement within the practices, discourses, moralities and institutions that lend significance to the events in their worlds. This poststructural frame encourages discursive analysis of how subjectivities are regulated through positionality, knowledge construction, voice, and authority, and makes gender prominent in the analysis. As Tisdell (1998:146) explains, ‘the connections between one’s individual (constantly shifting) identity and social structures’ are the focus in poststructural feminism. In this study, each transcript was re-examined to explore how participants’ activities, learning and identities were negotiated among conditions and discourses surrounding them, especially those related to work learning and entrepreneurship. Poststructural notions elaborated in the following section informed this phase of analysis. The problems of foreclosing meaning in any inquiry, and the politics of fashioning apparently coherent thematic categories from living experience, are well documented (Lather, 1991). As researcher/interpreters we continually struggle to dislodge our own centres, those idiosyncratic ways of seeing which are invested with our particular social and political interests. In our ongoing formulation of ideas we continual to rediscover how our readings reveal our own investments of privilege and struggle, our resistances to particular meanings, and our inscription within particular discourses that define and constrain our perceptions. 3

This portion of the analysis, including themes from comparative analysis as well as individual life histories, has not been included here for space considerations, and because this article focuses on the results of the post structural analysis of the data.

Deconstructing discursive practices and struggles for subjectivity Discourse refers to the ways we talk and write situated within social practices and historical conditions of meaning, positions from which texts are both produced and received. To deconstruct is to examine not only the textual presences but also those absences implied by the present terms; that is, to read beyond and thus foreground the unsaid and unsayable within texts. Cultural analysts (i.e. Giroux 1992, Kellner 1995) acknowledge that activities and identities in a particular cultural space are influenced by the discourses and their semiotics (the signs, codes, and texts) that are most visible and accorded most authority by different groups. These discourses legitimate certain institutions and values and exclude others, by representing ‘norms’ and casting nonconformists as ‘other’ to these norms. Foucault (1980) taught us to ask, What discursive mechanisms render an individual subject to regulation? And how do individuals internalize the very disciplines that construct and regulate their own identities, thus complying in subverting the possibility of their own resistance to subjection? While Foucault’s analysis of power circulating through self-regulation and discursive practices is useful, it has been criticized for being mechanistic, overdeterministic and inflexible, failing to fully acknowledge the dynamics of human agency and its consequences in the systems and social networks in which power and discourse circulates. If we are to hope that resistance and transformation are possible, we must accept that individuals exercise some degree of agency in their own authorship. As Lather (1991:118) explains it, in our subjugation to regimes of meaning we may not be authors of the way we understand our lives, but we certainly take part in ‘discursive self-production where we attempt to produce some coherence and continuity’. Thus through discursive struggle for subjectivities people are active, if not sovereign. And in this struggle, they occupy conflicting subject positions; both received and created, investing in a complexity of contradictory meanings and pleasures. Especially in an age of semiotic glut, humans are ‘constantly figured and refigured within a context of bombardment by conflicting messages ‘ (Lather, 1991:113). Grossberg’s (1992) theory of ‘articulation’ has also been useful for analysing the intersection of discourses with the participants’ shifting subjectivity. Like others, Grossberg analyses how representations of people in cultural discourses contain, define, and control behaviour and relations, and generally limit the possibilities of their identities. However this control is not simply ideological domination, but a complex interplay of practices that are taken up by people in different ways and locations. In other words, one can’t assume that ‘discourses’ are structures separated from individuals that cause particular actions. Grossberg thus addresses the cultural context as a configuration of practices. He suggests looking at the effects of a practice, where it’s situated in the field, how it’s projected, and in what relations (distant or close) across the field. According to Grossberg, the task is to explore how practices, vectors, and effects are woven together, where the boundaries are located and where the fault lines lie. Grossberg suggests the analyst trace the ‘lines of articulation’ (which create centres and hierarchies), ‘lines of effectivity’ (which struggle against the centres, producing culture within their struggle) and ‘lines of flight’ (which cut across unity and identity, opening the centres to the outside, and disassembling lines of articulation).

This study is confined to discursive analysis of participants’ stories of practice. It treats these as useful, if limited demonstrations of women’s struggles against various cultural articulations, the centres of entrepreneurial models and gendered work expectations, as well as women’s ‘lines of effectivity’ and ‘lines of flight’ resisting certain workplace lines of articulation to open new spaces for learning and being. Subjectivity cannot be presumed to exist in a simple correspondence relationship to the existence of particular practices. There are complex relations between exposures and individual choices, not just what people do but the possibilities available to them. Kellner (1995) emphasizes that one must study the complex and sometimes contradictory interweaving of people’s shifting desires and identities, the texts and activities in which they participate, and their own representations and understandings of these relations. What follows is a discussion of these complex weavings undertaken by women negotiating subjectivity among enterprise discourses. The discussion has been divided into four sections delineated by discursive sites that appeared to be significant in women’s constitutions of their entrepreneurial lives, learning and subjectivity. These sites are meanings of success, gendered discourses of risk and competition, bootstrap images of self-determination, and ‘good mother’ messages. Meanings of success Success would be doing what you love to do and really feeling like its worthwhile and making a difference and you’re having an impact and you’re having fun. - owner of an Alberta counseling firm for women Traditional signifiers of business success are profit, size and growth rate, rooted in a capitalist discourse of enterprise viability, which aspires to continuing expansion to assure competitive position and thus survival. These are important lines of articulation, in Grossberg’s (1992) terms, defining the centres of enterprise. Women engage with these lines of articulation in various ways. Certainly the promise of capitalist wealth, often acknowledged and pursued matter-of-factly (‘I won’t argue, I like money, there’s nothing wrong with having money’), is just as often a source of deep conflict. Women described success in their work differently but almost all emphasized the secondary importance of money and material goods in their lives. Freedom from financial worry was desirable, but several women disparaged acquiring more income than necessary as irresponsible. This seemed true even for single women supporting dependents. Many described their work success in terms of finding satisfaction in their everyday work, having the freedom and control to choose daily activity, the quality of relationships comprising their work networks, the contributions they perceived themselves making to their communities, the reputations for doing good work that they built in those communities, and their overall perceived quality of life. Quality of life was more typically represented by examples of ‘right relationship’ -- doing the right thing for others in one’s network -- than by material markers. In fact many women seemed to intentionally confront, reject, and create alternates for dominant meanings of success. In Grossman’s (1992) terms, their enactments of enterprise appeared to produce ‘lines of flight’, disassembling hierarchies and opening centres to the outside. However, the micro-practices of negotiating spaces for pursuing insurgent values in work amidst the dominant profit discourse are complex. An Edmonton woman who ran a profitable catering business for ten years before she tired of it and started an event-planning business, articulated a pressure mentioned by other women of perceived financial expectations: ‘Society believes that if you make a million dollars [as a business-owner] you’re very successful. But my personal

satisfaction of doing a job is the most important to me . . .I don’t want to get up in the morning and think “I have to go to work today”’. Where do women develop, amidst a capitalist discourse emphasizing profit and material accumulation, a desire and even expectation for enjoying their work? The possibility must be present in the cultural imaginary, but they also must have material and psychological means to enact that possibility. A Calgary woman who left a position managing sales and marketing with a transnational telecom firm to open a herb farm, said: I became more and more unhappy and realized, I feel so trapped. I looked at other women at what they were doing and their income levels and thought I could do that but I’m just not into [making money], so what can I do to enjoy work? A Saskatchewan owner of an accounting firm explained how her conception of success, and her capacity to construct it resistantly, arose from discovering what type of work and client made her happy, and what business structure enabled it: I learned that no, I don’t need to be big in order to be successful. I’m finding out more and more that who I am counts a lot more than the size of my business. It’s that success needs to come from my beliefs, not someone else’s perception. I’m a lot more confident in accepting that now. Certain deliberate business practices resulted in less profit and growth than women could achieve if they wanted to. The owner of an Ontario advertising firm employing ten, for example, deliberately positioned her business to charge less than bigger advertising firms but focus more on specific needs of the client: There’s obviously ways to oversell services, get the money out of the client faster and get them out of the way. But we say to these people, we’re not going to act like that, you give us a bit of money and we’re going to help you and we hope to see you succeed. At what point do women insert themselves into these value-laden and hierarchical discourses of business success? Some women claimed they were happy doing what they loved, but they weren’t successful. Some talked of work as a more fluid set of relations that defied ‘success’ binaries of inside/outside, up/down, and winner/loser. However, for many women the success signifier was clearly part of their discursive field. For some the need to judge themselves against measures of profit and growth became urgent when the survival of their business was threatened. A fashion designer who owned a swimwear production company employing four asked herself ‘hard questions’ in her seventh year of business when she found herself still working long hours and taking home less income than she felt she could earn as an employee: That’s when I started to come to terms with, so where is my success? Do I measure my success with what I perceive other people are perceiving as success, or do I measure it from my own standards? And realizing . . . .I truly am doing what my passion is, designing fabric and being in control of things. This notion of work as passionate, creative, even spiritual expression is itself a discourse becoming increasingly prominent in popular writings about work (i.e. Brook 1997, Fox 1994). While such texts cannot be presumed to affect women’s practices, they can be argued to reflect certain changing expectations of work and workers’ subjectivities afloat in the cultural domain.

Gendered discourses of risk and competition When I first opened, men were very surprised when they would walk in the door. They would ask me where my boss was. I still have comments from people. ‘Why on earth would you be doing this? This isn’t a woman’s thing. -- owner of a Saskatchewan construction company contracting over 70 tradesmen An important ‘line of effectivity’, what Grossberg (1992) describes as resistance to centres and hierarchies, appeared to be many participants’ persistence to be recognized as legitimate enterprising subjects. These struggles developed at sites of gendered divisions of labor, such as the example above. But even more pervasive seems to be participants’ confrontation of discursive boundaries framing the capitalist arena as a risky, competitive (men’s) frontier. Many practices patrol these borders. For example, women’s difficulties securing equitable treatment by financial institutions in their start-up phases were documented in the early 1990’s (Canadian Women’s Advisory Council 1991). Critics have pointed out that some women’s failure to obtain start-up financing is related to their resistance to writing traditional business plans that prescribe the ‘right way’ to conceive an enterprise (Buttner and Rosen 1992). Yet some participants argued that this planning process required them to shape their dream according to categories of clear pre-determined goals, anticipated profit and growth, competitors and strategies for battling them to win a market share. For some women, these disciplines of prediction and control regulating a competitive profit-and-loss logic were incongruent with their own, more emergent processes (‘rear-view mirror planning . . .I figure out what my goals are after I see them happen’) and ethic of mutuality: Business planning [should be] fun, it’s a process. You need to know who’s out there not so you can steal market share from them, but to learn from them and work with them to better serve the customer. . . owner-manager of a business counseling service A related struggle is resisting women’s diminishment through representations depicting their enterprise as trivial or inconsequential: ‘These stereotypes [are] in the heads of bankers that women’s businesses don’t count or aren’t important or serious – like a gift basket business’ (a consultant to women entrepreneurs). These images are internalized by some women, who may unconsciously participate in their own diminishment. As the owner of an upholstery business stated, ‘We [women] have a tendency to undervalue what we do’. Thrasher and Smid (1998) claim one effect of this discursive dynamic is women’s tendency to undercharge for their services and ultimately to accept reduced quality of life because of their ambivalence about money. Participants also faced gendered categories of work. Across Canada at least 17% of women’s businesses have started in ‘non-traditional’ sectors such as manufacturing, construction, transportation and trades (Industry Canada 1998). Of the 109 women interviewed in this study, twenty-one chose to open a business in what they described as ‘male-dominated’ sectors. Many of these described struggles to legitimize their position as business-owners. Women reacted differently to their positionality as gendered ‘other’ depending partly on the type of business and

partly on their own determination and ways of framing this position. The advertising agency owner confronted domination by men’s practices: When I started going to the meetings in the States, I was the only woman. And considered quite a lightweight by the US men, oh my gosh. The advertising agency is all about tradition, it’s all about power, and the big accounts. Her reaction was to employ all women and develop a business that deliberately offered more intimate services and working environment than the ‘big agency’. The owner of an independent wine-making supply store was the only woman when she started in 1988, and saw opportunity: ‘Most wine-makers at that time were men . . . I wanted to make a place where women feel comfortable’. Most offered observations of how men and women do things differently in business, but did not indicate overbearing difficulty in thriving (of course, we only interviewed women whose businesses were still thriving after four years), and some declared they preferred working with mostly men. But in terms of resisting discursive gender barriers to entrepreneurship, women most frequently referred to fending off messages from family and friends that they were ‘crazy’ to go into business for themselves. Sometimes these were connected to the prospect of a woman ‘giving up’ the security of a job for the risk-filled hard-won uncertain income of entrepreneurship -- a message that cannot be presumed to be engendered, for men may also face such messages when contemplating a break from secure employment to business ownership. Sometimes reactionary messages from family and friends seemed related to a general sense that business is dirty work on a dangerous frontier -- no place for a woman. As the owner of a New Brunswick gift manufacturing plant employing 50 explained, ‘You don’t say you’re in business. The way I was brought up, it’s unladylike’. Some women stated reluctance to identify themselves with money-making activities, indicated by the owner of an independent English-as-Second Language school: ‘I am an educator, not an entrepreneur. It sounds too much like dollars is the first object’. And some perceived a general message that women just don’t belong in an unbridled world of competitive capitalist production. The resulting ambivalent identity as a woman business-owner, is captured by the owner of an independent Alberta bookstore: Women have had such a tough time culturally or even within themselves and say I’m not supposed to be doing this, this is not an accepted role and therefore I’m either being a buccaneer or I feel great guilt [about running my own business]. -- owner of an Alberta independent bookstore. Even with various sources of support (at least half credited their success to supportive husbands), several women referred to nagging feelings beneath their confidence that they were misplaced or doing the wrong thing by owning and running their own business. The owner of a Saskatchewan construction company described frustration at her sense of constraint by ‘societal rules’, despite accessible images of alternate identity possibilities, that she was functioning outside approved subject positions: I think it is out there, this information that you know you don’t have to be this way. But I think we need to make it more of a societal rule that these choices are there . . .as opposed to ‘this is what you should be doing’. . . .We need society to be saying things like, You’ve done a great job and you’re self-sufficient and you have wonderful ideas and you know you have balance. These are messages that need to be said and they’re not.

Bootstrap images of self-determination In contradiction to the messages that women are misplaced in a masculine entrepreneurial world of risk and competition, is a discourse urging women to enact their own liberation through the adventure of business start-up. Women’s businesses are celebrated frequently in national newspapers as well as trade magazines. These ‘glory-stories’ and big media events such as the Canadian Women Entrepreneur awards tend to celebrate businesses marked by high technology, high sales, high employment, international growth, and economic innovation. Studies are continually released praising entrepreneurial women’s profits, approaches to staff relations, and use of technology (Business Development Bank, 1999). Industry Canada (1998) hails women entrepreneurs as ‘shattering the glass box’ described by the Canadian Advisory Council for Women (1991). Women responded in ambiguous ways. Although they appeared to engage these ‘lines of articulation’ in both intentional and unintentional ways (described further on), there are ‘lines of effectivity’ (Grossberg 1992) discernible in their quiet resistance to these discourses. For example, participants often volunteered skeptical comment on this emerging discourse of the exoticized self-determining woman entrepreneur. Those constructing their business on smaller scales, or who placed high priority on their families and children, didn’t see themselves reflected: There’s been a lot of glory articles I guess about women and they can manage to do it all, but a lot of the company’s businesses that are being profiled are big, the take-home pay for those women in some industries is fairly significant. They can afford to hire the nanny or whatever it is they need. . . . it’s not the true picture. -- owner of an aircraft company in Saskatchewan Some participants also felt that breezy success stories erased the importance of trial-and-error failure, the constant fatigue, the real struggles to balance work and family, survival and ethics, and the nuanced relational negotiations that form a ‘truer’ picture of running a business. Instead what tends to be publicly celebrated, some felt, were conventional bootstrap tales of a woman overcoming apparently tremendous odds to ‘make it’, i.e. achieve legitimate position from which she may be allowed to speak. In fact, the romanticized world of exciting capitalist adventure framing this identity construction was often rejected or considered illusory by some women entrepreneurs. Instead they described small daily triumphs in negotiating identity, value and relationship, which several noted were not recognized in media stories. Thus once again women find themselves battling conflicting messages about ‘right ways’ to do business and be a woman. Participants often referred to ‘should’ messages forming networks of pressure governing their daily lives. Cultural gendered ideals were sometimes mentioned, and in two cases became consciously enacted by women although not without resistance: I was very clearly getting the message that ‘you don’t look the part’ . . . I fought that, tiraded against that. But after my makeover, it was nothing but beneficial, the opportunities that opened and the type of work I was invited to do. . I know for a fact that if I hadn’t changed my appearance that never would have happened. - owner of a British Columbia accounting firm

The glory-girl discourse also embeds conflicting messages about work. Long hours, hard focused work and high stress is no secret in small business ownership, especially on the scale that achieves success in conventional terms. But some women described societal pressure to also create more ‘balance’ and even spiritual meaning in their lives, and to spend time on themselves. Hard work and the naturalized work ethic, which many alluded to developing in their families of origin, was countered by their growing desires for more leisured lifestyle. Part of this desire was due to exhaustion, but part to a received sense that they should find balance, centre themselves, do inner work, and seek an authentic self. However, some women explained that such self-focused activity left them feeling guilty. Additional conflict came from being accused by family and friends of ‘workaholism’, which was for some a pejorative guilt-producing signifier. Several claimed that they ‘loved’ to work, that they’d rather work at any hour of the day, i.e. spend time in activity related to their business, than participate in conventional recreative activity. Yet ‘balance’ was commonly mentioned as some sort of utopian and elusive signifier. This discussion raises difficult questions about the contradictory meanings and investments of ‘work’. For individuals who exhibit such confidence and creative power in inventing and developing an enterprise without much assistance, their ambivalences about establishing clear positions amongst discursive conflicts respecting work and time are somewhat perplexing. Of interest here is the compliance exhibited by at least some women to participate simultaneously with what they understand to be conflicting norms, rendering themselves sites of continual contestation. ‘Good mother’ messages It’s a lot of pressure for you to do really well in your business and a lot of pressure that men don’t necessarily feel . . . the women I know anyway, we’re so concerned about, gee, did we miss the school play. -- owner of a Saskatchewan aircraft company Perhaps the most pervasive, familiar, and potentially repressive quandary for entrepreneurial women, as for any woman balancing paid employment with child raising, is the continual conflict with ambiguous societal messages about what it means to be a good mother. These messages are engaged almost daily with the need for enterprising women to make choices between conflicting domestic and business obligations. Because they are not compelled in these choices by any easily identifiable authority such as an organization or boss, and so feel a particular kind of personal responsibility for the choices they make. This phenomenon has been much studied as a work-family conflict, but will be examined here to explore how entrepreneurial women represent and engage this discursive conflict. Overall, participants appeared to uphold this ‘line of articulation’ (Grossberg 1992), this cultural discourse reinforcing a dominant image of ‘good mother’ always placing her children before herself and her other obligations, and accepting primary care-giving responsibility. There seemed to be three different modes of participation which different women took up at different times, sometimes simultaneously. The first was embodied in the statement opening this section: many women simply tried to meet all the demands, practicing a daily routine of constant running and juggling, often sacrificing their own well-being in the process. Some left organizational jobs to start a business precisely because they wanted more flexibility in juggling

work demands with their children’s needs. Some who conducted business at home were able to design work routines around their children’s comings-and-goings. They claimed to have found new freedom to be available when children were sick, volunteer at school, and chauffeur children’s activities. A second was resentment, which a tiny percentage of women volunteered to express. Although most seemed to accept what by now is a commonplace of inequitable labor division -- that primary responsibility for child-care falls to women even in double-parent families -- some were angry at the unfairness and lack of recognition they perceived being granted to this double round of work. The resentment emanated not from the actual tasks of childcare, but from a sense of being judged inadequate in how those tasks are fulfilled. An owner of herb production plant told of her husband being congratulated by two women for looking after his sons at the store. She complained that, ‘Nobody would be saying that to me if I had both boys’; in fact if the children were rambunctious, the message would be ‘What the heck are you doing dragging these kids around like that?’ She acknowledged that people (i.e. other women) probably wouldn’t actually express such a complaint, but nonetheless she felt her performance as a mother to be under continual surveillance and found in deficit. One business development consultant believed that women’s location of subjection to others’ critical judgment was common among the mothers she worked with: If you do say, okay, I’m going to be a one person multinational, well what a horrible person you are for ignoring your family and putting up with a nanny. And boy, if your kids get into trouble it’s the mother’s fault, not the father’s. It’s this constant Catch-22. This is related to a third mode of participation, of working through guilt. Guilt came from internalizing the critical judgment of one’s poor mothering, in what Foucault might call pastoral subjection through self-regulation. Evidence of this disciplinary gaze was women’s reference to guilt about leaving their children to go to work, which an accounting-firm owner said is universal: ‘guilt comes with the womb’. The question seemed to be not which mothers experience guilt, but how they all responded. For some women interviewed in this study, the ‘emotional overhead bogs you down’ in self-blame and doubt. For others, it was something to be confronted and set aside: Guilt seems to be something women have, it’s an inbred thing, it’s a cultural thing. Once you get over that you say hey, I’m doing the best I can do. -- owner of an independent Alberta bookstore Single mothers sometimes suffered the double whammy of succumbing to messages about making their business yield sufficient income to support their children well, while providing sole parenting support. Some found additional critique when they ventured to create a social life outside business and childcare: When the children were young that was tough because there were times I should have been [at the office] when maybe I was at home and 90% of the men that you dated thought you worked too much. -- owner of a software security firm Overall what appeared striking was some women’s apparent unconscious collusion in their subjugation to double duty bind and ‘catch 22’ messages related to mothering. For example, the

construction business owner-manager, whose busy firm contracted over 70 tradesmen, expressed gratitude towards her husband for his helpful role in childcare: Thank God I have two sons. My husband, you know, takes them on Saturday afternoons and does things with them . . . I just don’t know, if I had daughters, things would probably be a lot different. Beyond her expressed relief at her good fortune, struggles of subjectivity in this woman’s story indicate an engendered double work role. There appears a marital allegiance, an irony of struggling to establish her credibility and right to be treated like a man ‘in a man’s world’ (her description) while being torn by traditional role expectations at home, an apparent collusion in raising boys within gendered parental discourses while presenting a non-traditional gender working model. Ultimately her apparent acceptance of the conflict may represent some erasure of her own gendered subjectivity even as she is subjugated by its historical injustices. However, an important blind spot lurks beneath these and other analyses throughout this paper. In objectifying this woman’s statement as a signifier of identity for purposes of analysis, something contingent has been fixed and normalized, represented within particular kinds of intellectual knowledge and poststructural theories. This representation ultimately belies an analyst’s desire for pattern and meaning within this study of discourses related to entrepreneurial work and women, appropriating fragments of fluid experience as text excavated for cultural meaning. Implications for educators This paper has explored the learning processes through which different women perceive and engage cultural vectors to negotiate their movements, identities and spaces in enterprise. Women have been shown here to develop alternate positions to dominant meanings of entrepreneurial ‘success’, resistance to gendered discourses of risk/competition and to glorified images of entrepreneurial self-determination, and some ambiguous compliance with dominant messages about balancing enterprise with motherhood. The static representation of these as textual analysis is misleading, and overarching conclusions are impossible amidst such heterogeneity. All these engagements are fluid and contradictory, enacted through ongoing simultaneous articulation of multiple images and practices. On one hand individuals’ practices evidenced confidence, initiative and invention in their struggles against centres and hierarchies, in some cases constructing transgressive models of enterprise founded on reciprocal caring, community service or quality of life before profit and growth. On the other hand, individuals appeared vulnerable to regulation by particular norms that they eschewed. One owner of a business-consulting firm offered this explanation: I think women believe what they’re told. They’re told time and time again. The way to make things different is not to tell women that they need to do this and do that differently, but that . . . confidence comes when you see your reality reflected and that you are successful doing things the way you want to do them. Even training, some state emphatically, works to repress by deskilling and diminishing women. As Women are portrayed as the little sister kind of perspective, ‘Yeah, good girl -- see, you can do it!’ . . .So many resources have been applied to teaching, training, bringing the

girls up to speed kind of thing. . . We don’t need a class on how to put a business card together. So what are some legitimate pedagogical entry points for educators that do not collude with government training programmes to disempower women? First, a more helpful approach than training might be to support women’s own meanings of success: to help amplify these and make them more explicit, more available in the cultural texts and practices of the classroom where educators can exercise some degree of influence. Women themselves called for more recognition of the complex realities of their work, celebrating the small everyday relations rather than focusing on dramatic transformation and achievements. Second, educators can do much to help girls deconstruct prevailing discourses constructing women in business, and amplifying images and texts that support notions of self-crafted work, alternate ways of planning and developing a self-supporting livelihood. There is need to make explicit some discourses and cultural practices women struggle with, the sites for struggle and their conflicting ‘should’ messages and standards, and the nature of their own engagements at these sites. At the very least educators can help construct, in the classroom, a space of resistance to demeaning gendered subject positions: The women’s magazines are still full of articles about what’s the best mascara and what won’t clog your pores. . . I’m proud of my crow’s feet. I earned them. --owner of a Saskatchewan construction company Our practice should focus not only on educating girls. As some participants pointed out, the models they believed they provided of new ways of working

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