Postfeminism, femininities and organization studies: exploring a new agenda

The purpose of this article is to mobilize postfeminism as a critical concept for exploring women’s contemporary organizational experience. Specifically, it is argued that rather than interpreting women’s position in organizations solely in terms of exclusion connected to a dominant masculine norm, critically deploying the concept of postfeminism facilitates a critique of how women and a reconfigured femininity are now being included in the contemporary workplace. As the focus of the paper is the connection between postfeminism as a cultural phenomenon and the emergence of feminine organizational subjectivities, the construction of feminine subjectivities in the entrepreneurial arena (referred to as entrepreneurial femininities) is presented through a reading of the gender and entrepreneurship literature. Four entrepreneurial femininities are depicted—individualized, maternal, relational, excessive—with one key characteristic being the way in which they are all constituted through the doing of both masculinity and femininity via the integration and embodiment of conventional feminine and masculine aspirations and behaviours