How embeddedness enables women owner-managers of small tourism firms to operate in institutional voids

Empowerment has been shown to provide beneficial experiences for women micro/small entrepreneurs as it contributes to social transformation, wealth creation, and community developmentas well as providing access to essential goods and services in poor and marginalized communities (Datta & Gailey, 2012; Amine & Staub, 2009). It is also reflected in the notion of embeddedness and associated with social entrepreneurship. Embeddedness especially in developing countries triggers opportunities for networking and thereby enables women entrepreneurs to access resources for development (Le & Nguyen, 2009) which may facilitate subsequent business creation by women and thus their empowerment (Datta & Gailey, 2012;Amine & Staub, 2009). However, while embeddedness may empower women entrepreneurs, it may also lock them into a network (Mair & Marti, 2006) that disempowers their ability to maximize the value creation potential of their enterprises thereby reducing the societal impacts. The purpose of this paper is to empirically explore how social embeddedness empowers and/or disempowers women social entrepreneurs in the hospitality and tourism industry in an African country context. In particular, we seek to understand the correlation between embeddedness and women (dis)empowerment from the perspective of women micro and small entrepreneurs who have experienced it and to illuminate how and why embeddedness (dis)empowers women entrepreneurs in their actions and decisions. We thus address two research questions: 1) To what extent does social embeddedness facilitate the (dis)empowerment of women entrepreneurs? 2) In what ways does empowerment affect women entrepreneurs and shape their actions as they sought to create and operate tourism social enterprises? To answer these questions we integrate concepts from social entrepreneurship, women (dis)empowerment and social embeddedness literature (e.g. Duffy et al., 2015; Zahra et al., 2009) in the context of the role of women as owner-managers of tourism social enterprises in bottom-of-the-pyramid emerging markets (Datta & Gailey, 2012)