Open Workshop: Constructing the Central and Eastern European Woman Entrepreneur
You are kindly invited to attend the workshop "Constructing the Central and Eastern European woman entrepreneur: A discourse analysis of 30 years of research on women’s entrepreneurship in the (post-) transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe" by Sanita Rugina.
The aim of the Open Workshop Series in Business and Management Studies is to promote top-quality academic and applied research in various fields of the social sciences. This is a unique opportunity for sharing knowledge and networking with local and international community members.
Speaker: PhD candidate Sanita Rugina, Maastricht University
Women’s entrepreneurship is now an established research field, with almost 3,000 research articles published on the subject (Cardella et al., 2020). The field has had its own specialized journal and has matured from basically descriptive studies in the 1980s comparing men and women against a male norm of entrepreneurship, identifying the shortcomings of women (Marlow, 2013), to contextual studies focusing on gendered structural constraints that explain why it is harder for women to undertake an entrepreneurial career (Cardella et al., 2020). At the same time, most of these studies are from Western, chiefly Anglo-Saxon countries with a long history of capitalism and free enterprise (Jennings and Brush, 2013); therefore, the findings may not adequately describe women’s entrepreneurship in contexts with a different history and/or economic systems (Aidis et al., 2007), or differently configured gender roles (Bluhm et al., 2021; Kaskla, 2003). This study aims to address the gap and analyse how research texts on women’s entrepreneurship produced in the post-transition countries of CEE construct and position women entrepreneurs.
Research on entrepreneurship, including women’s entrepreneurship, is a very recent phenomenon in the region. The analyses revealed that, despite different historical paths, normative premises existing in Western studies on women’s entrepreneurship also prevail in scholarship produced in CEE. These norms impose dominant constructs and methods, both on entrepreneurship policy and the scholarly community.
Sanita Rugina is a PhD candidate at Maastricht University. Her research (dissertation and publications) focuses on the specific context of the post-soviet countries in the Baltics and Easter Europe. She has been researching how the specific historical conditions and consequent informal institutions have influenced the development, nature, and scope of women’s entrepreneurship in the region. In general, her research interests include the post-soviet post- transition context of the region, and its influence on the evolution of formal and informal institutions related to the development of democratic processes, entrepreneurship, education, and others.
Sanita Rugina has been an entrepreneur for more than 20 years and has created and managed travel agency Kolumbs/Averoja which is one of the biggest travel agencies in Latvia. Additionally, she has created and managed an organisation that develops and distributes International Student Identity Cards (ISIC) in the territory of Latvia “ISIC.lv”. Presently she is a board member of the global ISIC Association and is also responsible for ISIC development in Uzbekistan and Turkey.
Discussion moderated by Prof. Arnis Sauka.
Attendance is free of charge.
Please sign up for the seminar, writing to arnis.sauka@sseriga.edu by October 12, 2022.
The aim of the SSE Riga Open Workshop Series is to:
- Foster cooperation between business and management researchers, practitioners and policy makers, as well as
- To promote academic and applied research in various fields of the social sciences, focusing on but not limited to entrepreneurship, marketing, management, public administration and strategy.
Organised by the Centre for Sustainable Business at SSE Riga.