Dr Julia Rouse
Deputy Director of the Centre for Enterprise
Julia is a highly experienced researcher who has received awards from prestigious funding bodies including the Leverhulme Trust and Economic and Social Research Council. With Professor Lynn Martin, she leads research in the Centre for Enterprise.
Julia has also employed her research to inform local, regional and national policy. She has produced evidence reviews, conducted new research in local areas and developed a research-based model for developing enterprise in deprived communities. She grew up in a small business, became self-employed when she graduated and has been researching and working with small firms since 1997. Prior to that, she worked as a Market Analyst for a number of clients including Royal Mail.
Julia's Current Research Agenda
Julia is currently developing two research programmes which are as follows:
Mothers in Small Enterprise: Fulfilling Their Potential?
Research tells us that the most significant cause of gender differences in career progression is motherhood. Women are biologically constructed to give birth and socially constructed to take the lion's share of responsibility for organising and conducting childcare and by association domestic work. Meanwhile, the workplace is constructed as a place separate from the family. Workers particularly leaders are expected to be ever-available. The result? Most women work under their potential after becoming mothers. Julia is committed to exploring if and how small enterprise can create routes for mothers to fulfil their potential in work. Both as entrepreneurs and as employees in small businesses. This programme of work includes critiquing how regulation to support family friendly working affects entrepreneurs. This began with a comparison of the maternity rights of the employed and self-employed. This is now being expanded through a three year study of entrepreneurs going through the maternity process supported by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship. Julia is committed to extending this research, to explore the experiences of entrepreneur mothers with older children and to create practical outputs for policy makers, practitioners and women. In an allied piece of research, Julia also presented a research-based policy critique of the childcare support available to women under enterprise programmes. In relation to her interest in female employees in small firms, Julia has reviewed the support available to small employers to manage staff during the maternity process. This resulted in a research paper and an Action Plan to Support to Small Employers to Manager Maternity Fairly and Productively, which was presented to policy makers in Whitehall.
Enterprise as a Route of Opportunity
The Dragon's Den entrepreneur Doug Bannatyne entitled his autobiography Anyone Can Do It. This reflects the popular idea that anyone - regardless of their background and resources - can make it in small business. This notion is not supported by evidence. Julia and colleagues are committed to developing an evidence-based critiques of this discourse of enterprise as an open route of opportunity and to inspiring a new wave of innovation in creating evidence-based routes of opportunity to entrepreneurship. With colleague Dilani Jayawarna, Julia also has explored the relationship between resources and business success through a longitudinal study of the New Entrepreneur Scholarship programme. Julia and Dilani are currently extending this programme of work through lifecourse modelling that employs massive national datasets including the British Household Panel Survey and the National Child Development Study. This study is supported by the Economic and Social Research Council and will provide pivotal evidence about the opportunity structures that govern chances of making it entrepreneurship. This work is underpinned by a new conceptual model.
Publications
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