Craftswomen entrepreneurs in flow: no boundaries between business and leisure

ABSTRACT

Although the high levels in Latin America, women’s necessity-driven entrepreneurship is a field that has been little explored. Contemporary research suggests that entrepreneurs may experience less work-life conflict than other workers, but that gender differences mean that women are at a disadvantage in terms of uses of time and the sexual division of labor. We explore how 20 Chilean craftswomen experience their (productive) work time. The content analysis of group interviews shows that these socially at-risk women entrepreneurs achieve wellbeing at work by entering a state of flow. They describe their experience as personal time, which resembles leisure more than it does actual work. This source of emotional wellbeing seems to be a personal strategy that helps them cope with their precarious situation. Their boundaries between work and personal time are blurred. Our findings illustrate how uses of time can be perceived differently in different contexts. We put particular emphasis on the restorative nature of personal time and the need for further research in this area from a gender approach.

KEYWORDS:

• Entrepreneurial time
• personal time
• state of flow
• women entrepreneurs
• uses of time

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Understanding work-life balance as having sufficient time to fulfil the commitments of both spheres (work, as paid work, and life, as all other activities). This is the definition that Guest (2002) refers to as elementary and limited, although it contains both objective and subjective dimensions.

2 Wellbeing is a multidimensional concept (Dodge et al., 2012; Ryff, 1995). Due to the relation between flow and emotional wellbeing, we will refer mainly to this latter dimension, which is related to satisfaction (Felce & Perry, 1995).

3 The GII (Gender Inequality Index) in Chile is 0.288. This is better than Latin America as a whole (0.383) but still 62nd in the world ranking (UNDP, 2019).

4 The head of the household is the main breadwinner, and the woman is in charge of reproductive and productive tasks.

5 According to the GEM classification (Acs et al., 2005), necessity-driven entrepreneurship is the only alternative for obtaining income, because devising a business tailored to market needs (opportunity-driven entrepreneurship) is not an option. The lack of a business opportunity means that the focus is on the product they offer, so profitability is compromised.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rocío Ruiz-Martínez

Rocío Ruiz-Martínez explores gender equality policies and she specializes in women entrepreneurs at social risk. She currently works on her doctoral dissertation in Gender Studies at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili – with a Martí i Franquès scholarship – about women in necessity-driven entrepreneurship. She has a master’s degree in Gender Studies with a specialization in Women, Work, and Public Policies, from Universitat de Barcelona; a master’s degree in Business Law from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and a master’s degree in Management and Accounting from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. She is a member of the Social & Business Research Laboratory in Tarragona city. She has extensive experience as a business consultant. In recent years she has worked as an adviser of innovation for a Chilean government foundation and as a lecturer of entrepreneurship at Universidad de Chile.

Katherina Kuschel

Katherina Kuschel explores women in technology ventures at CENTRUM Graduate Business School (Peru). She studied women’s innovation and entrepreneurship from an ecosystem perspective at Universidad Tecnológica Metropolitana (Chile, 2018–2019). In 2017, she participated in a comprehensive international study on the role of women entrepreneurs in the development of regional innovation ecosystems at Lazaridis School of Business and Economics (Canada). She was a Visiting Researcher at University of Siegen (Germany) where she led an international collaborative research project on entrepreneurial failure. She was Assistant Professor of Management at the School of Economics and Business – Universidad del Desarrollo in Chile. She holds a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Universitat Autònoma, Barcelona (Spain). Her main area of research is the identity of female founders in technology ventures. Besides leading a research group on work-life issues among entrepreneurs, she participated as guest editor at the International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal on Women Entrepreneurship within STEM fields and a Routledge edited book entitled The Wellbeing of Women in Entrepreneurship.

Inmaculada Pastor

Inmaculada Pastor is full Professor of the History and Art History Department of the Rovira i Virgili University (URV), PhD in Sociology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (2005) and a member of the consolidated Social & Business Research Laboratory of the URV. In 2006, she received the Prize of the Economic and Social Council of Spain for her doctoral thesis. She is currently the director of the Equality Observatory of the URV. She has led and participated in several research projects, both national and European; among others, she has led two projects of the National R & D Plan and two other projects of the Erasmus + program, all of them on gender and equality policies. She has also led a Jean Monnet module on European Integration and Gender and has just completed the G-NET Equality Training Network project within the Jean Monnet Networks program. She has also been a researcher at the Network of Excellence on Gender, Citizenship and Policies (GENCPOLIS) of the Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness between 2015 and 2017. She has published more than 40 articles and more than 60 book chapters or books. She has directed five doctoral theses and, at the moment is directing six others. The main lines of research are Gender and Science; Equality Policies; Labor Market and Gender; European Integration and Gender.