Women entrepreneurs’ negotiation of the work-family balance in patriarchal society

Afreen Huq and Pia Arenius ()
Additional contact information
Afreen Huq: RMIT University - Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University
Pia Arenius: EM - EMLyon Business School

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: Through the lens of boundary theory, we explore how women entrepreneurs in patriarchal societies display bounded agency through their boundary management strategies when negotiating their roles as entrepreneurs and as wives/mothers. We selected 75 highly educated, urban women entrepreneurs from both traditionally female-dominated and nontraditional sectors who started their businesses at home to explore possible differences in their boundary management strategies. Contrary to the prominent view that the work–family interface is problematic and the work and family domains are incompatible, we find that any conflict arising from the work–family interface disappears when work and family are not understood as separate domains and entrepreneurial work is instead embedded within family life. Using interpretative phenomenological analysis, our findings demonstrate how in a patriarchal society women entrepreneurs' boundary management strategies, negotiated in a nonconfrontational way in congruence with cultural expectations, ensure that their work boundaries remain permeable while keeping their family role sacrosanct.

Keywords: Women entrepreneurs; home-based business; work-family boundary management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-11-21
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Journal of Small Business Management, 2024, FORTH, 32 p. ⟨10.1080/00472778.2024.2424813⟩

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04850399

DOI: 10.1080/00472778.2024.2424813

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().