Beyond the happy promise of entrepreneurship—women entrepreneurs in enterprise culture in Australia

<p dir="ltr">This thesis presents a feminist sociological examination of women's pathways into entrepreneurship in Australia. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 20 women business owners and digital ethnography of women's networks, this thesis explores how women's entrepreneurial journeys emerge not as autonomous choices but as constrained negotiations with hostile corporate environments, gendered expectations of care, and rigid employment structures that render traditional work trajectories professionally untenable. This analysis thus problematises the inadequacy of frameworks that fail to account for the structural and affective conditions that circumscribe women's ostensible choices. The research provides a sociological examination of women's entrepreneurial entry points. The discursive, structural, and affective conditions that shape their lived experiences, the emergent feminised entrepreneurial subjectivities and gendered patterns manifest in entrepreneurial practices, and the complex negotiation of entrepreneurial activities within interpersonal and familial contexts. Methodologically anchored in feminist poststructuralism, this research deliberately disrupts the entrenched epistemological binary between reason and emotion, deploying the integration of digital ethnography within women entrepreneurs' networks alongside semi-structured interviews. This methodological approach enables the tracing of affective flows within the feminine entrepreneurial ecosystems, while foregrounding situated knowledge and reflexivity not as methodological limitations but as epistemological strengths that enhance analytical depth and interpretive nuance. The theoretical framework of this study synthesises Foucauldian analysis of biopolitical governmentality with feminist affect theory, conceptualising entrepreneurship, following Ahmed's (2010) concept a 'happy object'—an aspirational, affectively charged construct that promises women future well-being, autonomy, and fulfilment. Within this framework, women become affectively tethered to promises of a happy future and a good life through continuous practices of self-governance. This affective attachment extends the theoretical analysis to what Berlant (2011) identifies as 'cruel optimism'—a condition wherein entrepreneurial aspirations simultaneously sustain women's sense of possibility while constraining their agency, perpetually deferring the promised future they ostensibly offer.</p><p dir="ltr">Empirical findings reveal how online entrepreneurial networks function as sophisticated sites of affective governance, where women's entrepreneurial subjectivities are constituted through mechanisms of self-regulation and collective identification, while structural and gendered inequalities are discursively reconfigured as individualised challenges amenable to personal transformation. Further analysis demonstrates how therapeutic culture and business coaching practices produce entrepreneurial feminised subjectivities through a rhetoric of deficit narratives and empowerment discourses, effectively recasting entrepreneurial and economic competencies into psychological impediments to be transcended through entrepreneurial self-work. Additionally, the research identifies how women entrepreneurs form ambivalent attachments to work-life balance as a regulatory ideal that remains structurally unattainable within the very postfeminist logic that sustains it as an object of desire. This feminist sociological intervention makes a substantive theoretical contribution by integrating affect theory with a Foucauldian governmentality to reconceptualise entrepreneurship not merely as an economic activity but as a profoundly affective, socially embodied practice. By theorising entrepreneurship as a 'happy object', this study reveals how women's normative and affective attachments to entrepreneurial promises operate as multifaceted techniques of governance—shaping aspirations, behaviours, and self-perception in ways that often reproduce, rather than disrupt, intersecting systems of power structured along classed, racialised, and gendered hierarchies. Ultimately, it captures the ambivalence that characterises women's entrepreneurial lives—where agency and constraint, hope and disillusionment, coexist in complex, often contradictory ways.</p>