Entrepreneur-mentality, gender and the study of women entrepreneurs Attila Bruni, Silvia Gherardi and Barbara Poggio Research Unit on Cognition and Organizational Learning and Aesthetics, Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento, Trento, Italy Keywords Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurialism, Women, Gender Abstract Uses the neologism “entrepreneur mentality” – paying implicit homage to Foucault’s govermentality – to highlight how an entrepreneurial discourse is mobilized as a system of thinking about women entrepreneurs which is able to make some form of that activity thinkable and practicable, namely: who can be an entrepreneur, what entrepreneurship is, what or who is managed by that form of governance of economic relations? Discourses on women entrepreneurs are linguistic practices that create truth effects. Argues that social studies of women entrepreneurs tend to reproduce an androcentric entrepreneur mentality that makes hegemonic masculinity invisible. They portray women’s organizations as “the other”, and sustain social expectations of their difference, thereby implicitly reproducing male experience as a preferred normative value. Taking a deconstructive gaze on how an entrepreneur-mentality discourse is gendered, reveals the gender sub-text underpinning the practices of the scientific community that study women entrepreneurs and, in so doing, open a space to question them. The post-modern assault on “metanarratives”, transcendental reason, and the possibility of objective knowledge interrogates the constitution of the “feminine” within modernity. French (Cixous and Cle ´ment, 1986) and Anglo-American feminism (Weedon, 1987) has questioned the claims of certain feminist theories that they articulate a privileged knowing subject, an essential feminine and a universal representation of woman. It is through language that researchers constitute the subject of their knowing, their subjectivities as knowers, and what counts as knowledge as different from what is “not knowledge”, i.e. the “other” in the discourse, the silenced term. However, the precarious position of any claim to knowledge opens space for a distinctive feminist politics of knowledge that points to the local operations of power and to the crucial role of discourse in sustaining hegemonic power. In this regard, poststructuralist analyses focus on language, subjectivity and discourse, highlighting three major issues: (1) The notion of linguistic differencing, which is central to deconstruction, situates knowledge as conditional upon language. Language, rather than reflecting an The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister www.emeraldinsight.com/0953-4814.htm The authors wish to thank two anonymous reviewers and the Editor of the special issue for their helpful comments on early drafts. The present paper is a totally collaborative effort by the three authors whose names appear in alphabetical order. If, however, for academic reasons individual responsibility is to be assigned, Attila Bruni wrote the second section; Silvia Gherardi wrote the conclusions and the introduction; and Barbara Poggio wrote the first section. JOCM 17,3 256 Journal of Organizational Change Management Vol. 17 No. 3, 2004 pp. 256-268 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0953-4814 DOI 10.1108/09534810410538315