Negotiating business and family demands within a patriarchal society – the case of women entrepreneurs in the Nepalese context
通过对尼泊尔三个地区90名从事非正规创业活动的女性进行质性研究，揭示了她们如何通过协商同意、获取家庭资源和提升地位来平衡商业与家庭需求，并从中获得满足感。
The aim of this paper is to advance our understanding of how women negotiate their business and family demands in a developing country context. The highest cited motivation for women’s pursuit of entrepreneurship has been their need to attend to these demands. Yet, empirically we know little about the negotiating actions taken by, and the business satisfaction of women in the context of both livelihood challenges and patriarchal contexts, despite several scholarly calls for contextualized accounts of women’s entrepreneurship. We explore these issues by employing a qualitative study of 90 women engaged in primarily informal entrepreneurial activities in three Nepalese regions. Our findings highlight three main and interrelated themes – negotiating consent, family resource access and gaining status. These themes allow us to contextualize the process of negotiating business and family demands by highlighting how women legitimize their business activities, respond to family/societal expectations and mobilize support for, and find satisfaction in their business. Overall, our study contributes towards accounts of business–family interface that incorporate the everyday practices of entrepreneurial activities amongst those less privileged in terms of resource access in particular sociocultural contexts.