Managing the business of everyday life: the roles of space and place in “mumpreneurship”

Abstract

Purpose –

The purpose of this paper is to develop gendered entrepreneurship theory through a focus on the roles of space and place in the daily lives and businesses of mothers who have configured business around the daily routines of family work.

Design/methodology/approach –

Through a consideration of the accounts of 29 “mumpreneurs” and using a framework forwarded by Jarvis to understand the geographically embedded “infrastructure of everyday life”, this paper seeks to understand mumpreneurial decision making, choice and constraint.

Findings –

Spatial factors, in their myriad forms, run through and affect mothers’ different levels of capability and constraint, and thus the (gender-role and entrepreneurial) “choices” that individuals and families make. Placing families in the realities of specific, material locales helps to embed our understandings of these decision-making processes in real places.

Originality/value –

This discussion: advances new understanding about how space and place enable or constrain mumpreneurship (in particular) and entrepreneurship (more generally); and provides a lens through which to examine the structure/agency dualism in relation to gendered entrepreneurship.

Citation

Ekinsmyth, C. (2013), "Managing the business of everyday life: the roles of space and place in “mumpreneurship”", International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, Vol. 19 No. 5, pp. 525-546. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJEBR-10-2011-0139