17739 FER0010.

1177/0141778918817739feminist reviewKatherine Allison, Catia Gregoratti and Sofie Tornhill

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DOI: 10.1177/0141778918817739
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methodological
challenges and insights
on transnational business
feminism
Katherine Allison
Catia Gregoratti
Sofie Tornhill

abstract
Increasingly, corporations are championing the cause of gender equality and women’s empowerment in the Global
South. Tapping into notions about women’s role as caregivers, empowerment promotion is simultaneously meant to
lead to family and community development, profitability for those who invest in women and girls and economic growth.
While emerging feminist scholarship on this kind of ‘transnational business feminism’ (TBF) (Roberts, 2012, 2015) has
largely scrutinised gender governance based on visual and textual materials produced by corporations themselves,
this article expands the methodological engagement with TBF by reflecting on how we translated the concept into two
distinct field-based research projects. The article compares and contrasts our situated fieldwork experiences, focusing
in particular on accessing corporate elites and development partners and the epistemological rifts that emerged in
conversations with them. It documents how our experiences of blockages, hostile relations and miscommunications
have shaped our critical feminist research, and points to some of the power relations at work within TBF.

keywords
feminism; corporations; methodology; development; access; knowledge

introduction
Something rather puzzling is happening in today’s global political economy. In various ‘halls of power’—from the
World Economic Forum annual events in Davos to shareholders’ meetings—corporations are championing the cause
of gender equality and women’s empowerment as intrinsic aspects of economic efficiency and growth. Indeed, what
appears historically unique is the sheer number of corporations that are tapping into the notion of the efficiency of
investing in women, as influentially advocated for instance by the Women in Development approach of the 1980s or
54    121  from the academy to the boardroom

by the World Bank’s promotion of women’s empowerment as ‘smart economics’ since the mid-2000s.1 Feminist
scholarship from fields such as feminist political theory, geography, sociology, anthropology, development studies
and business studies attests to the growing significance of an entanglement between corporate interests and the
mobilisation of notions of gender equality and women’s empowerment compatible with economic gains. From critical
departures, these developments have been analysed in terms of neo-liberalisation, co-optation, seduction and
depoliticisation of more far-reaching feminist demands (Batliwala, 2007; Eisenstein, 2009; Fraser, 2009; Rottenberg,
2014; Prügl, 2015). The transnationality and multi-scalarity of corporate-led initiatives purporting to advance
gender equality and women’s empowerment are captured by Adrienne Roberts’ (2012) term ‘transnational business
feminism’ (TBF). TBF points to the increased power exercised by corporate actors and partners in defining what
gender inequality entails and how it should be resolved. Roberts’ concept of TBF, we maintain, overlaps with Chandra
Talpade Mohanty’s (2017) insight that feminist engagements with the ‘transnational’ necessitate acknowledging,
fracturing and decolonising powerful corporate cultures and ‘lean-in and glass-ceiling feminism’. As an immanent
feminist critique, TBF sheds light on the silences and multiple inequalities reproduced through corporate discourses
and practices of gender and development. It is a conceptual lens pointing to power relations crossing borders and
operating across multiple scales—while simultaneously inviting critical scrutiny of them. However, it is also a critique
that is largely silent on issues of methodology.

Against this background, calls have been made for more field-based research on how corporations engage in gender
and development (Prügl and True, 2014; Roberts, 2015; Grosser McCarthy and Kilgour, 2016; Prügl and Tickner, 2018).
In this article, we seek to expand the methodological discussion of TBF by reflecting on how we translated the concept
into two distinct field-based research projects. These projects brought us into contact with the corporate initiators,
implementing partners and, in Sofie Tornhill’s case, participants of two flagship corporate-led women’s empowerment
programmes. The Coca-Cola Company’s 5by20 programme (studied by Tornhill) aims to economically empower five
million women who are self-employed across the company’s global supply chain (but mainly active within the retail
sector) by the year 2020. Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Women initiative (studied by Catia Gregoratti and Katherine Allison),
offers business education, mentoring and access to capital to small business owners and aspiring women entrepreneurs
in fifty-six countries. While both of these research projects had the aim of engaging with the ‘transnational’ across
multiple sites and varying configurations of power relations, in this article we focus more closely on our encounters
with corporate elites and implementing partners of empowerment programmes in the Global South. We chose this
distinct focus to reflect how we, from our positions in the Global North, attempted to find entry points into programmes
that are both highly visible but also deeply safeguarded. It also reflects our aim to critically examine why such
programmes were initiated by corporate actors in the first place, the meanings assigned to gender equality and
empowerment and the programmes’ potential to govern the lives of women in the Global South. We argue that a
retrospective, deep and situated analysis of the multiple virtual and material challenges to gaining access to the
actors funding, motivating and implementing the programmes and the epistemological rifts we experienced in our
engagements with corporate elites and development partners has allowed us to hone our understanding of some of the
power relations and practices of knowledge production of TBF. Such power relations have shaped the opportunities
that we had to conduct critical feminist research and may also need to be taken into account in future studies.

We develop the arguments in the article as follows: first, we outline the emergence and development of corporate
concerns with gender issues, as captured by TBF, by tracing their contours across various disciplines. We further the
theorisation of TBF by addressing discussions of methodology, and specifically the call and justifications for more
field-based research. This subsequently underlines our approach of entering into a dialogue with feminist

1 The Women in Development (WID) approach maintained that the integration of women into paid labour would simultaneously lead

to economic growth and reduce gender inequality. This approach was widely criticised for its focus on production in isolation from
reproduction and women rather than gender relations. A new approach, gender and development (GAD), was broadly adopted by
development institutions (Smyth, 2007; Bedford, 2009). However, the WID approach clearly echoes the notion that investments in
women equals ‘smart economics’.
 Katherine Allison, Catia Gregoratti and Sofie Tornhill    121  55

methodological debates on corporate and elite interviewing to develop distinct insights on how the power of TBF
manifested itself throughout the research process. We then illustrate these premises via empirical reflections on
two conjoined micro-political moments of the research process: access to TBF programmes, and our attempts at
communicating with powerful TBF actors as we brought critical feminist commitments into spaces where issues of
gender equality and empowerment were understood in very different ways to our own. Writing about our critical
feminist fieldwork on TBF and the difficulties we encountered enables us to shed light on how we experienced and
came to understand TBF as operating through the management of visibility and shifting accessibility, legal
protection and ‘in-house’ production of specific forms of knowledge premised largely upon quantitative data.
Barriers and epistemological conflicts thus not only impeded the generation of critical feminist knowledge on TBF
but also contributed to its production.

transnational business feminism: from theory to field research

Throughout the past decade, a number of feminist scholars have drawn attention to the proliferation of public–
private partnerships created to empower women, particularly girls and women in the Global South. An expansive,
deeply interdisciplinary and increasingly intertextual body of knowledge (Grosser, McCarthy and Kilgour, 2016;
Grosser, Moon and Nelson, 2017; Ozkazanc-Pan, 2018) has offered significant theoretical and political understandings
as to how some progressive feminist concepts have been mobilised to discursively construct a ‘win–win’ business case
for gender equality, and how women are constituted as ‘perfect’ entrepreneurial, neo-liberal subjects (Bedford, 2009;
Wilson, 2011; Elias, 2013; Prügl and True, 2014; Calkin, 2015; Prügl, 2015; Roberts, 2015; McCarthy, 2017; Gregoratti,
Roberts and Tornhill, 2018). While often speaking to different disciplinary debates and scholarly communities,
feminist interventions have pierced pristine corporate rhetorics and practices, revealing how the business case for
gender equality is sustained by understandings of social responsibility that are impervious to the gendered nature of
socially reproductive work (Pearson, 2007; Johnstone-Louis, 2017), the epistemic erasures of histories and experiences
of women’s organising (Ozkazanc-Pan, 2018), as well as past and present practices of capital accumulation that
produce and profit from inequalities in terms of class, gender and race (Roberts and Soederberg, 2012).

From a feminist historical materialist perspective, Adrienne Roberts (2012, 2015) has termed the confluence of
particular feminist claims with the agenda of corporations and global governance actors and institutions as
‘transnational business feminism’ (TBF). The power of this theoretical construct lies in its ability to apprehend the rise
of attention to gender equality and women’s empowerment as part of a broader reconfiguration of hegemonic
relations ascending in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis—a time when women were commonly cast as the cure
to the hypermasculinity that brought the financial system into disarray (Prügl, 2012; Roberts, 2012; Elias, 2013). Far
from a wholly coherent and integrated politico-economic project, TBF is conceptualised as displaying some broad
characteristics. It is driven by transnational social forces, such as corporations, international organisations and
non-governmental organisations (NGOs), working together through alliances and partnerships; it operates across
multiple scales, linking transnational forces to regional and national partners; it articulates an ideology hinging on
a business-orientated logic whereby gender inequality and investments in women are regularly framed in terms of
economic costs and benefits; moreover, it identifies global corporations as central in defining its epistemic
foundations and practices. This new mode of governing gender and reshaping women’s lives is exposed not just for its
instrumental appropriation of gender equality but also because it leaves unperturbed the feminisation/precarisation
of global labour markets, the ongoing privatisation of social provisioning and the neo-liberal macroeconomic
framework to which most states are subject (Roberts, 2012, 2015).

Existing research has developed rich insights centred upon the application and development of feminist theory in relation
to how corporations are shaping women’s subjectivities and livelihoods in the name of ‘profits and gender equality’
(Calkin, 2015; Prügl, 2015; Roberts, 2015; Sato, 2016). However, save a few exceptions (Hayhurst, 2014; Moeller, 2014;
Tornhill, 2016; Moeller, 2018), these studies have largely analysed visual and textual materials produced by corporations,
international organisations or NGOs themselves. Reservations have been voiced as to the nature and extent of
56    121  from the academy to the boardroom

understanding that can be gained based on the analysis of texts alone (Bedford, 2009, p. 171). As corporations claim
legitimacy via their women’s empowerment programmes and as modalities of feminism amenable to neo-liberalism come
increasingly to the fore, it becomes vital to have a full array of research tools available to scrutinise their ‘big claims’
(Tornhill, 2016). David Mosse (2005) reminds us of the time and expertise that go into producing the texts encapsulating
the implementation and outcomes of development programmes. Thus, we need to be cognisant that the materials
available for textual analysis are the ones that corporations and powerful economic institutions want us to see: the
graphs and success stories in sustainability reports and on webpages that supposedly affirm efficient outcomes. The
possibilities that field methods offer act not as a dismissal of the text but as a crucial step in understanding how texts
need to be ‘interpreted backwards to reveal the social relations that produced them’ (Mosse, 2005, p. 15).

Departing from these premises, we turned to interviews and participant-observation to understand corporate
motivations; the particular notions of gender equality and empowerment that are mobilised by different actors across
different scales; how these programmes work on the ground; and how they are received, negotiated and contested by
women at their receiving end. Tornhill’s project set out to examine the Coca-Cola Company’s high-profile empowerment
programme 5by20 which, in collaboration with partners such as UN Women, the International Finance Corporation, the
Inter-American Development Bank, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and local NGOs, has the stated aim to
create jobs, economically empower five million women as micro-entrepreneurs and strengthen their families and
communities in one hundred countries. Framed as a core business strategy, 5by20 primarily focuses on self-employed
women in the retail sector, who through training in business skills are expected to improve their economic situation
and contribute to the aim of doubling the company’s sales by 2020. Tornhill’s latest round of ethnographic research
took place in 2015 and 2016 in South Africa, one of four pilot countries where the programme was first initiated in
2010, and it is this part of the project that is referred to throughout the article. Gregoratti and Allison were, through
their research, interested in examining how different configurations of transnational, international and local public
and private actors seek to empower women in Rwanda, a country that has gained international recognition for having
placed gender equality and women’s empowerment at the centre of its development strategies. Goldman Sachs’
10,000 Women initiative—a global programme aiming to offer small business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs in the
Global South business training, networking opportunities and access to capital—was one of the partnerships that the
researchers included in a project that was carried out between 2014 and 2015. In contrast to the 5by20 programme,
Goldman Sachs’ main implementing partners are business schools primarily located in the USA and Europe (Prügl and
True, 2014) that are paired with local partners such as business schools or NGOs.

Our chosen TBF programmes were comprised of ‘underserved female entrepreneurs’,2 corporations, business schools,
international organisations and NGOs located in the Global North and South. In setting out to access the programmes,
we found it necessary to approach elites, such as corporations and programme partners, to ensure our entry points
into the TBF constellations. While we are aware that the concept of elites runs the risk of concealing variances and
complexities as particular groups or individuals are categorised as either powerful or not, we opted to establish
relationships with actors who we could identify as playing active roles in financing, managing and implementing
empowerment programmes—actors who, in the context of their own programmes, had the capacity to define what
empowerment means and how it should be achieved. Their ways of legitimating the emergence of specific programmes,
chosen programme routes and the meanings they ascribed to gender equality and empowerment constituted crucial
dimensions of the issues that we aimed to research. Through contacts with members of global elites such as
corporations, glocal elites such international civil servants in South Africa and Rwanda and local elites such as
academics, we thus attempted to establish dialogues in which we would ourselves, through our questions and input,
play interactive roles. Furthermore, we recognised these elite actors as the keepers of names and contact details
concerning the women at the receiving end of empowerment programmes—data into which we, from our positions in
the Global North, had no insights.

2 This formulation is commonly used in Goldman Sachs’ programme documentation.

 Katherine Allison, Catia Gregoratti and Sofie Tornhill    121  57

Feminist methodological debates on fieldwork involving elites converge around open-ended demands for a rigorous
analysis of the role and positionality of the researcher in the production of knowledge, a reflexive analysis of the
micropolitics of the research process (McDowell, 1998; Conti and O’Neil, 2007; Becker and Aiello, 2013; Johnson, 2014)
and a nuanced understanding of the operations and fluid dynamics of power in elite interviews (Smith, 2006; Faria and
Mollett, 2016; Williams, 2017; Sohl, 2018). In laying bare relations and experiences of power during the research
process, feminists can reflexively account for how knowledge is created and what knowledge is disseminated (Conti
and O’Neil, 2007; Becker and Aiello, 2013). With these methodological insights in mind, in the remainder of this article
we focus on difficult and hostile fieldwork experiences with both corporate elites and programme partners as a lens to
apprehend the inner workings and power relations at work within TBF programmes. Positioned as critical academic
outsiders, our attempts to locate, engage with and communicate with the global initiators and (g)local implementers
of the empowerment programmes allow us to trace how the power of TBF manifested itself through the management of
visibility, shifting accessibility, legal protection and control of distinct forms of knowledge production.

feminist fieldwork on TBF programmes

locating, accessing (and interviewing) elites of TBF programmes
Feminist researchers have acknowledged that there are distinct difficulties in accessing corporate elites and international
civil servants (McDowell, 1998; England, 2002; Conti and O’Neill, 2007; Johnson, 2014), and that such difficulties are
magnified by a lack of established contacts within elite networks. In the context of debates on TBF, Kathryn Moeller (2014,
2018) has suggested establishing contacts by participating at conferences and events where corporations, international
civil servants and NGOs meet and exchange best practices. However, we were not successful in pursuing this. When we
started our research projects, these events seemed to occur most prevalently in global cities—often far away from the
places where we live and work—and, on top of travelling and lodging expenses, gaining access to such events also required
the payment of a hefty participation fee. For example, every three years Women Deliver—one of the most prominent
advocates of investing in girls and women and catalysts of gender and development partnerships—convenes global multi-
stakeholder conferences priced at US$700 per participant. When attempting to participate at events organised by the
World Bank or the United Nations, our attendance was ruled out altogether because they were either closed events or
because we were not identified and could not identify ourselves as the ‘right stakeholders’ (Gregoratti, 2018).

Corporate websites became an indispensable gateway into our TBF case studies. Through online publications, we
examined, for example, how Coca-Cola and Goldman Sachs diagnosed gender ‘problems’ and their solutions, the
countries in which they intervened, what they identified as best practices and what methodologies (if any) they used to
measure impact. These websites became sources where we could learn the language of TBF programmes (Schoenberger,
1991) and commence drafting feminist questions. Yet corporate publications alone were not sufficient in helping us to
identify, name and emplace the actors constituting these dense networks (cf. Johnson, 2014, p. 6). When our projects
began, the webpages of 5by20 and 10,000 Women did not contain a staff directory, direct telephone numbers or email
addresses. The (hyper)visible official documentation presented for public consumption, such as the companies’
sustainability reports, generally contains bright pictures and diagrams to illustrate the success of the programme but
contains little information about concrete actions and few leads for those who may be interested in finding out more.

To break through this opacity, we used the internet to perform what we, together, came to label as ‘detective work’.
This essentially entailed looking for traces of the programmes where we could find them (cf. England, 2002, p. 206): in
newspaper articles, PowerPoint presentations, videos and conference programmes. It was here that we could start to
identify the names of those funding, motivating and implementing the programmes and, in Tornhill’s case, also the
participants. However, having the corporations open their physical doors to us proved to be incredibly difficult and
time-consuming. The tasks of locating possible contacts, emailing and making phone calls across time zones came to
occupy much of our time. Even though we sought to establish contacts with recognisably ‘feminised’ branches of the
corporation (e.g., corporate social responsibility departments and philanthropic arms) with whom we thought we
58    121  from the academy to the boardroom

could relate by virtue of our mutual interests in gender relations, the corporate representatives we sought to contact
belong to a mobile, time-pressed managerial class (England, 2002). This meant not being able to reach them on their
office telephone lines, not receiving answers to multiple emails or having our requests for interviews rerouted to public
relations departments—a problem that was particularly acute for Gregoratti and Allison. Moreover, our position as
outsiders—outsiders to corporate networks and to the networks of development ‘experts’ orchestrated by Coca-Cola
and Goldman Sachs (Prügl and True, 2014)—meant that we had to carefully consider our strategies to access them and
how we could motivate these powerful TBF actors to offer us their time.

In the case of Goldman Sachs, persistence and a thorough knowledge of the 10,000 Women initiative played a big part
in being permitted an interview. Once the right contacts were found, Gregoratti took the decision to email Goldman
Sachs a mildly critical published academic article on TBF. Gregoratti felt that such an article could help to provide a
clearer understanding of their location as researchers and a potentially fruitful starting point for a genuine dialogue.
This approach was arguably very successful in unlocking the secure doors of Goldman Sachs’ headquarters in
Manhattan, as Gregoratti and Allison were quickly invited to send a complete list of questions and to meet employees
at the Goldman Sachs Foundation’s team responsible for the programme. While the foundation could offer no
assistance in identifying the women entrepreneurs in Rwanda, power manifested itself most glaringly as the group
interview could not be recorded and took place under the strict promise of non-disclosure.

In the case of 5by20 in South Africa, the doors to Coca-Cola and its two programme partners were eventually shut after
months of communication. When first approached, representatives of both Coca-Cola and the NGO implementing the
programme in South Africa were cautiously positive towards the idea of participating in interviews, and meetings were
scheduled. UN Women referred the request to relevant officials and their legal department. Finally, when Tornhill was
already in South Africa, UN Women declined to participate. As a result, the scheduled interviews with Coca-Cola and the
NGO were also cancelled, with reference to a common communication strategy in relation to external stakeholders.
According to UN Women, after four years in operation the 5by20 programme was in the phase of consolidating results, and
an ‘external evaluation’ was deemed to be untimely. While it is only possible to speculate about further motives behind
UN Women’s decision, this research experience can be seen to reflect both tensions and conformity within the partnership.
Although UN Women has championed its partnership with Coca-Cola, it seems reasonable to assume that it also entails
the risk of decreased credibility, considering decades of critique against the company in relation to issues such as health,
labour rights, land and water use. Thus, maintaining control over processes of knowledge production may be a way to
navigate possible controversies entailed in their partnership with the soda giant. Indeed, one of the objectives of our
research projects was to get a sense of the complexities, contradictions and lived experiences of TBF initiatives, which is
why we not only attempted to access the elites but also women who were participating in these programmes.

locating, accessing (and interviewing) the beneficiaries of TBF programmes

In corporate publications and rhetoric, empowerment programme participants tend to figure either as abstract
numbers or as narrators of success stories; individual women who give witness to changes brought to their lives, such
as improved business skills, larger incomes and more resources to care for their families. In these representations
there appear to be no grey zones or possibilities for failure. The numbers and stories are always presented positively.
Interviewing participants seemed essential in order to disrupt conceptualisations of empowerment as easily defined
and measured. However, establishing contact with women who had participated in the two programmes also entailed
difficulties. As was the case with gaining access to corporate actors and programme partners, our experiences of
locating these groups of women diverged.

Gregoratti and Allison continued to navigate through the network of Goldman Sachs partners in the Global North, and
eventually received considerable assistance from a lecturer at the William David Institute at the University of Michigan
who was involved with the 10,000 Women initiative in Kigali; thereby, a connection with the Goldman Sachs’ implementing
partner in Rwanda—the teaching staff at the College of Business and Economics at the University of Rwanda—was
 Katherine Allison, Catia Gregoratti and Sofie Tornhill    121  59

facilitated. During interviews with teaching staff at the college, Gregoratti and Allison learnt not only about the
administration, selection process and pedagogical components of the empowerment programme, but also that
participants in the programme were bound by a two-year confidentiality agreement. Thus, only the first and second
cohorts of women who participated in the programme could be interviewed. While the college staff proved to be
enormously generous in sharing their knowledge and time, a list of women who could speak with Gregoratti and Allison
was sent only a few weeks before they left Rwanda, leaving no time to follow up on it. This did not jeopardise the
research project as a whole, but it meant that the Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Women initiative was dropped as a ‘case’.

Tornhill pursued a different strategy altogether. When both the corporation and their partners declined to participate,
the future of the South African part of the research project was at risk. Instead of abandoning it altogether, she opted
to proceed in the ‘wake’ of the programme by locating former participants. Given the highly uncertain outcome of this
strategy, it would not have been an option to sidestep the implementing partners from the outset. This improvised
alternative did generate insights in the end but also produced tensions and anxieties along several lines. Articles and
online videos gave leads as to where some of the programme participants lived and worked, and once contact was
established with a few of them, they helped to put Tornhill in contact with others as well. Through engagements with
former participants, experiences that disrupted the overwhelmingly positive narrative of the programme became
visible. Resisting the description of themselves as ‘empowered’, many former participants described continuous
struggles to overcome precarious conditions and saw the representation of them as ‘success stories’ as programme
marketing (Tornhill, 2016, forthcoming). While participants had not signed confidentiality agreements and had
already graduated from business training, this approach still required careful consideration of the consequences that
the interviews could have in a context shaped by profound inequalities between TBF actors and the supposed
beneficiaries. Some of the women still hoped that they would be eligible for additional support within the 5by20
framework and, given that the programme implementers were against ‘external evaluations’, there was a risk that
former participants could be subjected to pressure or castigation for having agreed to interviews.

The challenges to access both programme partners and participants described here, although inherently partial and
situated, can be read as reflections on what the calls for fieldwork on TBF may entail in practice. Not only is it (extremely)
time-consuming to locate elite actors and convince them to agree to an interview, but the course of such research projects
is also very hard to predict. Because of the impediments and uncertainties around access up, down or somewhere
‘in-between’, there is an inherent danger that such research projects might fail altogether. But irrespective of these risks,
our attempts to enter TBF programmes generated valuable knowledge about the corporate-led empowerment programmes
and their protective walls. These corporate-marked territories revealed themselves as hypervisible through the volume of
material made available online, yet thoroughly opaque in the lack of availability of contacts and concrete details about
their practices. Furthermore, shifting accessibility, interviews protected by secrecy and non-disclosure agreements that
women participating in these programmes may be asked to sign signalled how TBF programmes may maintain a tight grip
not only on beneficiaries but also on others who could potentially unsettle their narratives—narratives that are bound up
with corporate branding and competition strategies, and hence with strong economic interests.

what and whose research counts?

Moeller (2014, 2018) speaks of a distinct anxiety that becomes manifest when corporations and corporate foundations
have to deal with activists, academics or journalists. In part, the barriers we identified above reflect such anxieties,
resulting in attempts on the part of corporations and at least some of their partners to maintain control over the
representations of their practices. Our research encounters with members of global and local elites revealed
themselves not only as processes concerned with access to the specific knowledge held by interviewees but also as a
relational space where power was negotiated across a plain of competing knowledges.

Methodological literature offers some guidance as to how academics can engage with elites across what may often be
conflicted terrains. One component when attempting to engage with elites can involve proving one’s professional
60    121  from the academy to the boardroom

credibility (Conti and O’Neil, 2007). Elite informants, who are often skilled communicators by profession, may try to
dominate and control the different communicative stages in the research project—from emails to interviews—
questioning the views, methods and knowledge of the researcher (Becker and Aiello, 2013, p. 64). One of the
recommendations we found in the business studies methodological literature was to adopt a ‘business-like or
“insider” approach’ (Welch et al., 2002, p. 624) and to prepare ourselves to present the pay-off and immediate
relevance of the research project for the corporation in ‘very concrete terms’. While a research project on, for instance,
business networks or management internationalisation might be of direct corporate interest, in our cases matters
were quite different. Although, as stated before, we carefully prepared ourselves for potential and actual interviews
by learning as much as we could about the corporations and their programmes, our starting point of ‘expertise’—
critical feminism—is not easily translated into an ‘insider’ perspective; neither were the objectives of our projects
necessarily formulated with their usefulness for the corporations in mind.3

The playing out of this disjuncture informed the subsequent research encounters and interview spaces. Gregoratti and
Allison sought to be as honest as possible about their particular feminist positions and looked for an open dialogue with
their interviewees. They recognised that the possibilities open to those working in corporate social responsibility or
corporate philanthropy can be extremely constrained due to particular corporate demands for ‘effective’ outcomes and
good PR stories or the generally marginalised position of one’s role within the corporation, and they wanted to extend
this potential for dialogue into the interviews (Smith, 2006). However, space to build trust and rapport with the
interviewees was seriously limited by the announcement at the start that nothing that was revealed could be used in
their research. This starting point of mistrust proved impossible to overcome, and Gregoratti and Allison felt that the
invitation stemmed from a suspicion of them and a desire to control rather than to engage. The rifts between them and
the interviewees became clear throughout the discussion and evident in, for example, their differing understandings of
‘gender’, ‘equality’ and ‘empowerment’. Rather than a dialogue, knowledge was largely imparted from the interviewees
to the researchers, and at no point were they invited to share their particular understandings of the issues at stake.

This ‘clash’ of knowledges not only manifested itself in relation to the particular theoretical understandings
underpinning the approaches of both research projects; it also extended into the forms of knowledge production that
Goldman Sachs and the Coca-Cola Company deemed valid and appropriate. Following the interview at Goldman Sachs,
emails were exchanged about the forthcoming publication of a progress evaluation of the 10,000 Women programme.
Published a few months after the visit, the evaluation was produced by Babson College, a private, US-based leader in
entrepreneurship education and long-standing partner of the Goldman Sachs’s initiative. This was a large-scale
statistical study compiled with survey data commissioned by the Goldman Sachs Foundation and collected from
eleven programme countries at different time intervals. Much of the evidence presented in the report as well as many
of its key measurements of empowerment are expressed numerically, scoring positive impacts across dimensions such
as revenue increase, employee growth, mentoring, ability to obtain access to finance, leadership in the community
and skills development (Brush et al., 2014).

In the case of 5by20, the programme implementers in South Africa made clear that they would conduct their own
evaluations, apparently not ascribing any value to research not necessarily designed in conformity with their own
intents. As with Goldman Sachs, Tornhill felt that the 5by20 partners regarded her with suspicion, and she felt
increasingly under surveillance as she attempted to approach former participants. For instance, she found out that
representatives of the implementing organisation were asking other NGOs in the area about her undertakings and
motives. When Tornhill approached the programme partners with a few questions that had arisen during interviews
with former participants, the implementing NGO threatened to sue her. UN Women asked for proof that the women who
had contributed with their experiences had indeed participated in the programme and questioned the methods used:

3 Our intended audiences were activists, fellow academics, students, local grassroots organisations and community groups, who
we thought and hoped may find an interest in engaging in dialogues about the emergence and implications of new powerful actors
in the field of gender and development and approaches to empowerment heavily centred on entrepreneurship.
 Katherine Allison, Catia Gregoratti and Sofie Tornhill    121  61

how could a limited number of in-depth interviews be taken to produce knowledge about a programme that, they
maintained, had empowered thousands of women? A familiar hierarchy of knowledge production was discerned when
the validity of qualitative methods was dismissed as irrelevant to the ‘how many and how much’ goals of corporate-
led solutions to gender inequality. A couple of months later, a few results were released from a pilot evaluation
conducted by the market research and consulting firm Ipsos and Coca-Cola. Based on a survey, the study claimed
remarkably positive results in a context where the failure rate among microbusinesses is extremely high (Prediger and
Gut, 2014). When Tornhill emailed the contact person at Ipsos to ask if the full report was publicly available, she
received a reply not from the person she had contacted but instead from Coca-Cola’s communications department
declaring that the full report was intended for internal use only. Reports on the advances of 5by20 also have been
conducted by Harvard Kennedy School (Jenkins, Valikai and Baptista, 2013) and, as in the case of 10,000 Women, by
Babson College (Greene and Perkins, 2016), both in close cooperation with the Coca-Cola Company.

Apart from reflecting an uneasiness about potentially critical examinations, our discussions with key TBF actors
revealed that when large-scale quantitative evaluations can be conducted ‘in-house’, or with other academic partners
or consultants, there may not be much value ascribed to engagement with researchers who are not interested in
collecting hard, quantitative data or in measuring empowerment in numeric terms. The fact that external evaluations
are often planned at the initiation of corporate-led empowerment programmes provides the possibility of controlling
how the programmes are to be evaluated, while simultaneously subscribing to the values of transparency and
accountability (cf. Brush et al., 2014, p. 17). Furthermore, if quantitative methods are privileged and qualitative
research is dismissed as less reliable, more multifaceted, complex and perhaps contradictory results are foreclosed
from the start. The reliance on quantitative methods implies that the leeway for participating women to voice their
experiences and views is indeed confined. Arguably, corporations have an interest in producing and communicating
quantitative and unequivocal results, in line with what Lamia Karim (2011) defines as ‘poverty research’. This research,
produced mainly by and for influential development actors, works both to legitimise their practices and to yield data
sets about impoverished populations that can be used to motivate programmes and investments. In this transnational
landscape, corporations and their partners emerge as tightly knit networks of funders, designers, implementers and
evaluators of social policies, working to offer one authoritative interpretation of events.

conclusions
In today’s global political economy, corporations have de facto become significant development actors with
substantial and ever-growing stakes in the politics of gender equality. Their presence is felt not only within the
constellation of private, public and civil society actors initiating development programmes with a pronounced gender
dimension but also as the generators of discourses of gender equality and women’s empowerment. This emerging
modality of feminism has become transnational in reach, spanning the Global North and South and uniting around
neo-liberalised notions of entrepreneurship and empowerment via the market (Rottenberg, 2014; Prügl, 2015). Thus,
to study issues of gender and development may entail having to enter into negotiations or interviews, or even to work
closely, with corporations and their development partners.

In our attempts to scrutinise the discourses and practises of two flagship corporate-led empowerment programmes, we
turned to the emerging critical research field on TBF. Yet, as we wanted to move beyond the analysis of corporate texts
that arguably dominate this field of research, we found few methodological discussions within TBF scholarship on the
particular challenges that involvement with corporations, their partners and programme participants may pose. Now
seems an opportune moment to reflect: first, upon what increasing corporate presence within the fields of gender and
development may imply for the possibility of conducting critical feminist research; and, second, how feminist researchers
may productively address these complex development networks in which corporations play a central role.

Traditionally, feminists have been more focused on understanding and interacting with research subjects deemed to
enjoy less structural power than the researchers themselves (Oakley, 1981; Reinharz, 1992; Gatrell, 2006). Issues of
62    121  from the academy to the boardroom

building trust and empathy within the research setting and creating knowledge that is beneficial to the participants
have been brought to the fore. To enter into dialogues with some of the more powerful TBF elite actors may, however,
entail having to break through walls of corporate opacity and protectiveness and the researcher turning into a
‘supplicant’ (Johnson, 2014). At the same time, we are aware of fellow feminist researchers who have secured access
to TBF programmes through internships, while others have accepted funding to do research with and for various
corporate gender programmes. For others, their feminist stance may prevent them from entering into close
relationships or collaborations with corporations, either as a result of them not being considered a ‘correct’ fit or as
the result of deliberate ethical and political choices not to engage. There are no immediate answers to dilemmas
around ethical and critical commitments. Individual choices must be considered carefully, and in doing so, it is
important to connect TBF research with other areas of feminist scholarship that have addressed the often fraught
relationships that have emerged when feminists have travelled to complex and less obviously welcoming locations
(e.g., McDowell, 1998; England, 2002; Conti and O’Neill, 2007; Johnson, 2014). Moreover, we would like to underscore
the importance of building and supporting critical transnational feminist networks of scholars and activists. It is only
through collective knowledge-sharing and collaborations that critical research projects may materialise and
corporate solutions to intersectional inequalities be challenged and reformulated. Indeed, if Gregoratti and Allison
were able to continue with their project in Rwanda despite the 10,000 Women initiative being dropped as a ‘case’, it
was precisely because of the bonds forged with other feminist researchers while in Rwanda.

In the course of our respective research projects, TBF programmes revealed themselves as hypervisible yet largely
inaccessible and also as deeply protective of their practices and of the knowledge produced about them. In the
absence of support from the corporation or their partners, based on our experiences and joint reflections, our advice
to feminist researchers who wish to embark on similar projects would also be to pay close attention to access blockages
and knowledge clashes, as these can be as revealing of some of the power relations comprising TBF as an open door to
corporate boardrooms or the spaces where women learn about ‘empowerment’. While key junctures in our research
projects may be characterised by processes of silencing, obstruction and the absence of meaningful dialogue, we
contend that these moments can be understood not only as research ‘failures’ but as potentially rich sites of possibility
for understanding the concrete workings of power relations within TBF programmes. As we attempted to approach the
gaps between corporate claims of success on the one hand, and the concrete practices and lived experiences of
empowerment initiatives in precarious contexts on the other hand, Tornhill was unable to access the elites of Coca-
Cola’s 5by20 programme in South Africa while Gregoratti and Allison could not get in contact with the participants of
Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Women in Rwanda. Both research experiences, however, generated insights about the direct
and indirect silencing of voices that potentially disrupt the brandable version of women’s empowerment congruent
with corporate interests. Writing about why some interviews never materialised or could never be used, about legal
shields and threats, and about the epistemic rifts we experienced in conversation with corporate elites and some of
their development partners affords the possibility of shedding light on some of the concrete social relations and
mechanisms that propel TBF programmes, while also recapturing the possibility to critique them.

acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge the editors and reviewers of Feminist Review, as well as Adrienne Roberts, Sydney Calkin,
Elisabeth Prügl and Özlem Altan-Olcay, for their constructive and extremely helpful comments. We would also like to
extend our gratitude to all those who took part in our respective research projects. Any mistakes naturally remain the
sole responsibility of the authors.

funding
Katherine Allison and Catia Gregoratti’s research was funded by a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research
Grant. Sofie Tornhill’s research was funded by Anna Ahlström’s and Ellen Terserus’ Foundation and the Lars
Hierta Memorial Foundation.
 Katherine Allison, Catia Gregoratti and Sofie Tornhill    121  63

author biographies
Katherine Allison is Lecturer in Politics at the University of Glasgow, UK. Her research addresses feminist co-options
and the intersections of feminist security studies and feminist political economy.

Catia Gregoratti is Lecturer in Politics and Development at Lund University, Sweden. Her research is situated in the
field of international political economy. She has written and published on UN-business partnerships, corporate social
responsibility and, more recently, on the corporatisation of feminism and its contestation.

Sofie Tornhill is Lecturer in Gender Studies at Linnaeus University, Sweden. She has published in the areas of socialist
feminist theory, international political economy and class relations. She is currently working on a book manuscript
about corporate gender politics in Mexico and South Africa.

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