From Heroine to Team: Entrepreneurial Groups and Female Entrepreneurship

Business historians have widely discussed the role of gender in the evolution of capitalism, highlighting the relevance and distinctiveness of women’s experiences in business and entrepreneurship (Kwolek-Folland & Walsh, 2007; Yeager, 2020). However, the myth of the lone visionary entrepreneur—perpetuated in popular and academic accounts—continues to twist our understanding of entrepreneurship, male and female. This panel engages with the existing literature on female entrepreneurship critiquing the hero myth and instead foregrounding the importance of entrepreneurial teams and their deep embedding in the culture that surrounds them.
Based on archival evidence, all three papers highlight the ability and need of entrepreneurs to skillfully compose entrepreneurial groups and manage collaborations within and between organizations. In addition to understanding team building as a particular entrepreneurial challenge and tracing how entrepreneurs developed this skill, the papers also unearth processes of bargaining about entrepreneurship and femininity, which, we posit, simultaneously reflect and challenge women’s changing roles in society.
Each of the three papers takes an interdisciplinary approach, launching a dialogue between business history and, respectively, sociology, international business and entrepreneurship: Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz shows how Julia Child built a diverse entrepreneurial team to develop a commercially valuable product. Her findings contribute to the sociological literature on entrepreneurial team building (Ruef, 2010). Paula de la Cruz-Fernández engages with the financial and cultural strategies that women used to advance their sewing businesses and asks how the multinational Singer fostered and exploited such practices, calling on international business scholars to pay closer attention to the multinational enterprise as a culturally embedded organization. And, Valeria Giacomin and Christina Lubinski use historical evidence about Ruth Handler to challenge a staple of the entrepreneurship literature – the Stanford Invention Cycle (Seelig, 2015) – and propose a more historical and gender-sensitive revision of this framework.