Understanding household entrepreneurship through intersectionality: A Total Social Organisation of Labour perspective

Underpinned by gender, work and critical feminist entrepreneurship studies, this study contends that household entrepreneurship is deeply embedded in the social world but is still yet to be fully explored. The interconnection of entrepreneurship and households are central to resource access for venture creation and growth, which contradicts the popularized assumption of dualism and separation of the entrepreneur as a ‘lone hero’. Despite the suggestions given to entrepreneurial households as a ‘neutral unified’ space, however, powerful cultures of structural gendered hierarchy and patriarchy positioned men and women unequally regardless of their significant influence and contributions in both realms. Informed by entrepreneurial household embeddedness perspective this qualitative study explores household entrepreneurship through Acker’s (2006) ‘Intersectional Inequality Regimes’ and Glucksmann’s (2000) ‘Total Social Organisations of Labour’ perspective. This thesis investigates the paradox of household entrepreneurship by asking: How does intersectionality and resource engagement affect the experiences of household entrepreneurship? And vice versa, how does entrepreneurship contribute and affect the experiences of the household? The novel approach of this thesis contributes to entrepreneurship literature by adopting a holistic primacy to entrepreneurial households as the unit of analysis. The empirical example offered here explored these issues by adopting a critical realist view of household entrepreneurship as a multiple case study research. A retroductive process of analysis was undertaken and critical analysis of the household-business nexus exposed how household members accommodated the dilemmas they encountered within household entrepreneurship. Findings from this study yields four assertions: first, it demonstrates that venture creation and growth are simultaneously embedded upon the interconnection of household entrepreneurship nexus and their structural socio-economic conditions. Second, it provides interdisciplinary evidence for the paradox of household entrepreneurship and the enduring dominance of the normative entrepreneurship discourse. Third, it contends that ideologies are embedded within household entrepreneurship mechanisms which (re)produced existing gendered, racialized and classed norms but, at the same time, privileges the ‘visible’ and ‘masculine’ prototypical entrepreneur. Lastly, the study’s holistic perspective fortifies that the context of entrepreneurial household is a gendered hierarchical and an unequal platform, countering entrepreneurship discourse that portrays household entrepreneurship as an ‘egalitarian neutral’ space