Relationally reflexive women: Household strategies of female entrepreneurs as social change

Feminist scholars have argued that entrepreneurship as a social phenomenon can lead to varieties of outcomes, which reveal aspects of social complexity not readily apparent in studies of economic man (Calas et al, 2009). Our purpose is to consider the actions of women confronting personal discontinuities as examples of entrepreneurship; we are most interested in how they meet these discontinuities in the context of the gendered structures shaping their lives, creating opportunities and starting new ventures, which, we argue, exposes the reflexive choices of women living at the family, occupational and household nexus (Alsos, Carter and Ljunggren, 2014, Wallace, 2002). Making the necessary choices and shaping these into a way of life are relationally reflexive endeavors, which depend on relational reflexivity (Donati and Archer, 2015: 126). In this paper we analyse the household strategies elaborated by women in order to set up a business that enables them to sustain the “relational goods” generated in the household.