Gendered entrepreneurship in the Finnish students' narratives: a social semiotics approach

This study focuses on how the meanings linked to the concept of entrepreneurship are 'gendered' in our culture. According to Gherardi and Poggio (2002), gender may be viewed as a social practice, or rather as a set of practices which jointly help define to the relations between men and women. Here the meanings related to gender are analysed by using the social semiot - ics and narrativity approach and employing the theoretical concepts ' interpretative repertoire ' (Potter & Wetherell 1987) and the foucauldian concept of ' subject position ' (Willig 2001). In this study these 'gendered' meanings are collected from the Finnish students from local high schools, polytechnics and the University of Vaasa. The research question is: How female and male students construct the gender in their narratives related to entrepreneurship? In this study the theoretical construct ' interpretative repertoire ' is defined as a system of terms used for characterizing and evaluating actions, events, and other phenomena (Potter & Wetherell 1987). The main interest here is how gender is constructed with words out of various, possible resources (some are included, some omitted) related to entrepreneurship and how these constructs might have practical consequences in our daily lives, for instance, in the orientation towards entrepreneurship as a possible career option. The concept of subject position means that every discourse offers a subject a limited amount of positions of which he/she has to take his/her position. Positioning is not a matter of subject choosing his/her position but a way of 'seeing the world' or 'at beeing in the world' what the discourse offers as reality' (Willig 2001: 107).