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Avant d’evaluer les resultats des politiques soutenant l’entrepreneuriat feminin, il est important d’en comprendre le fonctionnement interne, a savoir, l’appreciation qui est faite des opinions exprimees par les usageres de ces dispositifs. En nous appuyant sur la theorie neo-institutionnelle (North, 2005) et l’analyse de discours (Fairclough, 1992), nous observons que les entrepreneures novices ne sont plus uniquement considerees comme les cibles des politiques mais comme de potentielles participantes a la creation d’une dynamique d’innovation sociale et economique. Ceci rend compte d’un processus d’institutionnalisation effectif de ces structures qui favorisera leur perennite.

In a national culture, gender norms provide a framework defining what is possible for women in terms of organizational and entrepreneurial action. The study of the entrepreneurial intentions of Saudi women would make it possible to understand how the values either hindering or stimulating the passage to the entrepreneurial act are crystalized. According to Auty and Simmons, Saudi Arabia's economy experienced a turning point in its development in the early 2000s and has become a transitional economy. The Saudi government has started pushing for reforms to bring more women into the workforce—a push that is part of a larger campaign to increase the number of Saudi nationals employed in the private sector. Most studies in the field present entrepreneurship as the result of planned action guided by a certain degree of intentionality. Intentionality feeds into both the rational and personal aspects of the entrepreneur's decision-making process with regard to the emerging opportunity that he or she has created or discovered.

Authority is the confirmation of the control an individual has over norms and codes (Sennet, 1981). It stimulates the development of social capital. Gender shapes authority. Bourdieu (1994) stresses that in traditional societies men can interpret and produce norms whereas women reproduce them and consequently may experience difficulties in constructing their authority. Butler (1990) confirms that this dichotomy is still effective in post-modern contexts.In the literature on women entrepreneurs, scholars stress their lack of social capital as an impediment to growing the business and suggest that they should follow the male model (Aldrich et al., 1997; Ban et al., 1996). However, if one examines carefully the process of production of social capital, one would see that it is the result of a strict gender labor-division. In spite of their agentivity, female entrepreneurs fail to overcome this. Many of them may thus be tempted to adapt male patterns of authority.The present study examines how women entrepreneurs and minority business owners assimilate authority that is encapsulated in the traditional male entrepreneurial discourse. Then it analyses the perception of women entrepreneurs on authority and its impact on their style of internal management and their strategies of networking. The results reveal that either female entrepreneurs adopt authority as a repressive tool of management that helps them to develop their social capital in restricted circles of influence or they scorn authority as the display of norms that may endanger the reputation of their firms and their social influence without proposing a clear alternative. Apparently, women entrepreneurs deny the creative aspects of authority that Sennet and his Foucaldian followers have detected in managers' behaviors in the context of organizational sociology.

International audience; The purpose of this article is to assess the mentoring impact in an experiential learning entrepreneurship program. We did three-year participant observation in the major business school incubator of the Paris area with the aim to identify the interpersonal communicational strategies that mentors, which are confirmed entrepreneurs, use in order to influence nascent entrepreneurs' attitudes and behaviors in dyadic interaction. These communicational strategies are categorized as persuasion, engagement, criticism, and provocation. An additional two-year field research allowed us to assess the impact of these communicational strategies at the individual (commitment, compliance, resistance) and the enterprise levels (business launching and fund-raising).

As of 2010, six of the ten most innovative companies in the world were American, two were Japanese and one was Korean. None were European. Three years before, in 2007, the situation in the Old World had been hardly any brighter; according to the European Innovation Scoreboard, the innovation index stood at 0.73 in Sweden, 0.59 in Germany and 0.47 in France. In the same year, the World Intellectual Property Organization listed the number of patents lodged by country. Sweden’s 1,287, Germany’s 17,739 and France’s 12,112 were dwarfed by the USA’s 157,283 and Japan’s 164,954. It seems undeniable that many Western countries are still a long way behind and that closing the innovation gap remains a kind of quest for the Holy Grail in terms of competitiveness and employment. However, on closer inspection, the keys to Paradise are more like a safety device both for national economies and for the men and women who implement innovations on a day-to-day level.