Course Schedule

Course Schedule

Veranstaltungen von Rebecca Namatovu

Lehrveranstaltungen

Gender and Inequality Matter for Entrepreneurship (Seminar)

Termin:
wöchentlich | Mittwoch | 12:15 - 13:45 | 20.10.2025 - 30.01.2026 | C 14.103 Seminarraum

Inhalt: Entrepreneurship is increasingly recognized as playing a key role in economic growth and poverty alleviation. The rapidly growing markets of developing countries are often seen as full of untapped opportunities for entrepreneurs. However, entrepreneurs in developing countries face various challenges such as difficult business environments with conflicting institutional demands, resource constraints, inequality, and widespread poverty. Despite these challenges acting as barriers to business start-up and growth, resource scarcity and uncertain institutional contexts also create opportunities for entrepreneurship. As a result, new forms of entrepreneurship are emerging, aiming to address gender opportunity gaps, inequality, poverty, and institutional voids. These initiatives, which can be for-profit, non-profit, or hybrid organizations, all utilize business principles to drive social, environmental, and/or institutional change. The course "Gender and Inequality Matter for Entrepreneurship" explores the opportunities and challenges for entrepreneurship in developing countries. It delves into the significance of gender, inequality, and their intersectionality in entrepreneurship for development. The course covers various theoretical approaches to entrepreneurship and examines different forms of entrepreneurship, including entrepreneurship in the informal economy, social entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship with the Base of the Pyramid (BoP), sustainability entrepreneurship, and digital and institutional entrepreneurship. It also evaluates how unequal practices and gender biases impact entrepreneurship for development and critically assesses the potential contributions of entrepreneurship to sustainable development. The course emphasizes the influence of the institutional, economic, and cultural environment on entrepreneurship opportunities and strategies, and evaluates how business models, such as social entrepreneurship and community-based enterprises, are either inclusive or help to improve gender disparities and other inequalities within the specific contexts of their operation.

Inclusive Entrepreneurship Research Methods (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Rebecca Namatovu

Inhalt: This course provides students with the opportunity to apply theoretical knowledge and research methods to practical situations addressing grand challenges. The focus is on exploring entrepreneurship related to sustainable development goals, particularly inclusive entrepreneurship. The course covers theoretical foundations that help formulate good research questions and appropriate research designs to investigate these questions. It emphasizes the importance of conducting meaningful research in unconventional entrepreneurial contexts or as initiated by unconventional actors, such as refugees, immigrants, and the disabled. Both quantitative and qualitative methodologies contribute to understanding complex entrepreneurial contexts and processes. Quantitative methods utilize big data and AI as new sources of inspiration, while qualitative methods find innovation from other fields of social science. In general, qualitative approaches enhance knowledge of entrepreneurship and are well-suited to the study of entrepreneurial processes and mechanisms. They reveal the situated nature of entrepreneurial practices, deal with complexity, engage in sensemaking, and develop socially constructed theory. Mixed methods are also seen as a creative way to gain a deeper understanding of a phenomenon. However, methods alone do not guarantee good research. The purpose of the course is to sensitize students by alerting them to the challenges of conducting inclusive entrepreneurship research and guiding them to formulate methodologically and theoretically sound questions. In so doing, the course helps students refrain from promoting misleading narratives about entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship research contributions. The course is divided into three themes: theoretical foundations, designing appropriate research projects, and becoming a responsible researcher. By the end of the course, students should be able to outline and critically reflect on a variety of methodologies and theories relevant to inclusive entrepreneurship, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of empirical results in light of research questions, methodologies, and theories, and plan a social scientific research project addressing a research question in an inclusive entrepreneurship context.