What’s in a name? Women’s use of professional titles of entrepreneurial role.

Other conference contribution, 2023

This article critically analyses women’s identity formation processes as they transition from a corporate career into self-employment. During this transition their business is being formed in parallel with their new identity, and they subsequently need to find new ways of describing themselves and their role.  We use social positioning theory (Harre) to explore use of title when positioning in an entrepreneurial career . In doing so we position self-employment as a form of entrepreneurial career (Hytti, 2010) and address calls to explore the ‘possibility of adaptations’ in collective self-understandings of professions (Bayerl, Horton and Jacobs, 2018) and the gendered effects of explicitly claiming an entrepreneurial identify and the perceived outcomes of such claims (Ajay, Vough and Oliver, 2023). We also address calls to understand how entrepreneurial identity is linked to people’s personal career history, and how transitioning from a corporate role to an entrepreneurial one is a dialogic and interactional process (Madsen, 2008).