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In this paper, women entrepreneurs are seen as leaders and women leaders as entrepreneurial, making both groups an easy target of postfeminist expectations, governed by calls to embody the entrepreneurial self. Acknowledging that the entrepreneurial self has its roots in the universal, rational and autonomous subject, which was shaped in a male form during the Enlightenment, the purpose of this study is to conceptualise feminist resistance as a process through which the autonomous subject can be de-stabilised.

Empirically, this study draws on an extensive research project on women’s rural entrepreneurship that includes 32 in-depth interviews with women entrepreneurs in rural Sweden. This study interpreted expressions of resistance from the women by using an analytical framework the authors developed based on Jonna Bornemark’s philosophical treatise.

Feminist resistance unfolds as an interactive and iterative learning process where the subject recognises their voice, strengthens their voice and beliefs in a relational process and finally sees themselves as a fully fledged actor who finds ways to overcome obstacles that get in their way. Conceptualising resistance as a learning process stands in sharp contrast to the idea of resistance as enacted by the autonomous self.

This study helps researchers to understand that what they may have seen as a sign of weakness among women, is instead a sign of strength: it is a first step in learning resistance that may help women create a life different from that prescribed by the postfeminist discourse. In this way, researchers can avoid reproducing women as “weak and inadequate”.

Through the re-writing of feminist resistance, the masculine entrepreneurship discourse including the notion of the autonomous self is challenged, and a counternarrative to the postfeminist entrepreneurial woman is developed. Theorising resistance as a learning practice enables a more transforming research agenda, making it possible to see women as resisting postfeminist expectations of endless competition with themselves and others.

What happens when we limit our understanding of reason to a calculating competence? In this chapter, I will approach the contemporary introduction of New Public Management (NPM) in the Swedish public sector from the point of view of the fifteenth century philosopher Nicholas of Cusa and his critical analysis of reason and not-knowing. Cusa emphasises not-knowing as something which we cannot and should not avoid. As such it is central to every creation of knowledge. Reason, as the process to gaining knowledge also includes the capacity to relate to not-knowing. In modernity, the understanding of not-knowing has decreased and accordingly changed our understanding of reason. Reason became a calculating capacity, what Cusa calls ratio, rather than a reflecting capacity, what Cusa calls intellectus. The introduction of NPM in the Swedish public sector can, from this point of view, be seen as a kind of ratio-organisation, and I will point out three characteristics of this ratiofication: First, it includes a ‘concept imperialism’, as concepts from outside of the public service-activities displaces concepts that come from within. In this displacement, easily measurable concepts and concepts that frame a measurement-culture displace concepts that belong to the intellect. Second, we can see an ‘empaperment’ when every act has to be documented in order to be counted as complete, and where the empapered world of ratio becomes more central than the lived world with its constant presence of not-knowing. Third, this also results in a ‘remote controlling’ of activities when the acts of the staff are governed from the outside, and the competence to listen to the not-knowing of each situation is not valued.