Women entrepreneurs’ negotiation of the work–family balance in patriarchal society
基于边界理论，研究父权社会中高学历城市女性企业家如何通过非对抗性的边界管理策略，将创业工作嵌入家庭生活，从而化解工作与家庭的冲突。
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.