'The secret of my success': women and self-employment in Britain (1970-2000)

《我成功的秘密》将探讨1970年至2000年间女性自主创业的历史。这一时期与英国“后女权主义”和新自由主义的出现一致，从而使我们能够探索塑造更广泛的社会和政治规范的“创业”商业文化的出现。通过对小规模特许经营、直销和自由职业的案例研究，该项目将探讨20世纪末妇女自营职业的发展在多大程度上对21世纪不稳定、低薪、高度性别化的零工经济的兴起至关重要。该项目要求：1；盛行的性别和阶级等级制度是如何塑造人们对自主创业和商业成功的看法的？2. 企业家的“成功故事”如何塑造女性对自己生活的理解？3. 为什么女性会选择“单干”去创业？她们创业时的生活是怎样的？在20世纪和21世纪的英国，社会和文化方法能给我们对商业和自营职业的理解增加什么？该项目将通过两方面的研究来解决这些问题。总之，它们代表了一种跨学科的商业史研究方法，它借鉴了性别研究、商业管理文献和文化史。第一个将需要研究从机构和公司档案中提取的文本和视觉档案材料。具体而言，该项目将侧重于针对女性的商业机会的两个关键案例研究：美体小铺和雅芳。这项研究的这一方面将用于确定妇女收到的关于自营职业机会的信息，以及在21世纪初，企业所有权的性别话语如何发生变化。第二个研究方向将包括一个口述历史项目，该项目将比较档案资料中发现的自主创业的“销售说辞”与1970年至2000年期间自主创业的15名工人阶级女性的生活经历。参与者将在全国范围内招募，根据他们是否从事自由职业、特许经营和直销。这项工作将在项目的前12个月完成，重点是数据收集和分析。该项目的12-24个月将致力于将研究成果转化为一系列面向学术和政策的产出。这将包括建立一个由对“当代资本主义下的生活”各个方面感兴趣的经济人文学科学者组成的国际网络；在国际会议上由pi协调的一系列小组；以及两篇探讨20世纪英国自主创业和新自由主义改革的性别本质的期刊文章。该项目的影响工作将在影响协调员Policy Bristol、项目合作伙伴南方女权主义档案馆和黑树皮电影公司（后者是一家由女性领导的公司，与弱势群体合作，将边缘化的声音带到银幕上）的支持下完成。确定个体经营和自由职业妇女需求的政策简报将以当地决策者为目标，布里斯托尔市议会和当地倡导团体对建立包容性经济有浓厚兴趣，布里斯托尔正在寻求重建能力，以应对一场“暴露并加剧……”的全球流行病。（布里斯托尔妇女委员会，2020年）。简报会附有一部纪录片，展示过去50年来“单干”的女性的多样性。她们的生活将与仍然普遍存在的一种说法相反，即女性的经济保障意味着成为类似于创业女超人的东西。相反，该项目将构建自力更生成功的另一种愿景，提供的不仅仅是一个无法实现的童话，而且让通常被排除在政策辩论之外的女性发出自己的声音。

The Secret of My Success will explore the history of women's self-employment between 1970 and 2000. This period aligns with the emergence of 'post feminism' and neoliberalism in Britain, and thus enables us to explore the emergence of an 'entrepreneurial' business culture that shaped wider social and political norms. Through case studies of small-scale franchising, direct sales, and freelancing the project will explore the extent to which developments in women's self-employment at the end of the twentieth century were fundamental to the rise of a precarious, low-paid, and highly gendered gig-economy in the twenty-first century.The project asks:1. How did prevailing gender and class hierarchies shape ideas about self-employment and business success? 2. How did entrepreneurial 'success stories' shape women's understanding of their own lives? 3. Why did women choose to 'go it alone' by setting up business ventures, and what was life like when they did?4. What can social and cultural methodologies add to our understanding of business and self-employment in twentieth and twenty-first century Britain?The project will address these questions via two research strands. Taken together they represent an interdisciplinary approach to business history that draws on gender studies, business management literature, and cultural history. The first will entail the study of textual and visual archival materials drawn from institutional and company archives. Specifically, the project will focus on two key case studies of business opportunities targeted at women: The Body Shop and Avon. This aspect of the research will be used to identify the messages that women received about the opportunities of self-employment, and how gendered discourses of business ownership changed at the turn of the twenty-first century. The second research strand will consist of an oral history project, which will compare the 'sales pitch' of self-employment found in archival sources with the lived experiences of 15 working-class women who were self-employed in the period 1970-2000. Participants will be recruited nationally, based on their involvement with freelance work, franchising, and direct sales. This work will be completed during the first 12 months of the project and will focus on data collection and analysis.Months 12-24 of the project will be dedicated to transforming research findings into a series of academic and policy-facing outputs. This will include the creation of an international network of scholars from across the economic humanities interested in aspects of 'life under contemporary capitalism'; a series of PI-coordinated panels at international conferences; and two journal articles that tackle the gendered nature of self-employment and neoliberal reform in twentieth century Britain.The project's impact work will be completed with the support of an Impact Coordinator, Policy Bristol, and project partners, Feminist Archive South and Black Bark Films (the latter being a women-led company that works with vulnerable groups to bring marginalized voice to the screen). Policy briefings that identify the needs of self-employed and freelance women will be targeted at local policy-makers Bristol City Council and local advocacy groups with a keen interest in generating an inclusive economy as Bristol seeks to rebuild capacity in the aftermath of a global pandemic that has 'exposed and exacerbated...pre-existing inequalities' (Bristol Women's Commission, 2020). Briefings will be accompanied by a documentary film that showcases the diversity of women who have 'gone it alone' over the past 50 years. Their lives will counter the still-pervasive narrative that economic security for women means becoming something akin to an entrepreneurial superwoman. Instead, the project will build alternative visions of self-made success that offer more than an unachievable fairy tale, and which give a voice to women usually excluded from policy debates.