Self-employment and field of education understood from current entrepreneurship research

The purpose of this paper is to look at how results from a large-scale study can be understood in the context of contemporary gender and entrepreneurship research.

This study is inspired by a mixed methods methodology. To gain a qualitative understanding of the general patterns in a large-scale study, research results in articles from the International Journal of Gender and Entrepreneurship (IJGE) were used. To make such a heterogeneous research field as appears in IJGE comparable, a model was created that helped us to focus our attention when reading the articles. The core of each article was identified.

The categorisation of the articles in IJGE resulted in three perspectives: liberal, functional and structural. The liberal and functional perspectives improved our understanding only partially because these perspectives usually focused on a certain aspect in the society. The structural perspective more readily lent itself for interpretation of our large-scale results.

The dissonance between our perspective and the perspective of others has been a challenge; it has been a delicate task.

This could be a way to improve communication of research not only within a perspective, but also between perspectives. It is important that scholarly journals provide the possibility to express different perspectives on, as in this example, gender and entrepreneurship.