Entrepreneurial identity in the care sector: navigating the contradictions
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore how the business and research context influences how female entrepreneurs construct their identities.
Design/methodology/approach
Focussing specifically on the care work sector, the analysis of interview transcripts explores how participants struggle to establish a positive identity through reconciling the contradictory subject positions produced at the intersection of entrepreneurialism and caring.
Findings
The accounts reveal a silencing of the participants entrepreneurial identity and an embracing of their female identity, reflected in the mobilisation of a number of highly gendered “selves”. This is explained in terms of the participants' desire for legitimacy and integrity, principally in the eyes of their employees, something which is itself prompted by the precariousness of their position as female business owners in this sector.
Research limitations/implications
The identity work is theorised at a structural level, reinforcing the need for future accounts of identity work to consider how this is always embedded in broader material conditions.
Practical implications
Presents an alternative way of enacting entrepreneurship and thus broadens normative notions of what it is to be an entrepreneur.
Originality/value
The paper complements existing post‐structuralist accounts of entrepreneurship and also illustrates the role of both broader structural and local contextual factors which both constrain and enable the identity work enacted.
Keywords
Citation
Nadin, S. (2007), "Entrepreneurial identity in the care sector: navigating the contradictions", Women in Management Review, Vol. 22 No. 6, pp. 456-467. https://doi.org/10.1108/09649420710778691
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2007, Emerald Group Publishing Limited