Material precarity, performative imperative, and burnout from resilience: surfacing the dark side of resilience laboring in women’s entrepreneurial stories

ABSTRACT

Drawing from U.S. women entrepreneurs’ narratives of how they enacted resilience, the current study focuses on the dark side of resilience laboring – when individual resilience efforts and expectations become exploitative, unsustainable, and complicit to maintaining inequitable power structures. Women entrepreneurs’ narratives revealed that their resilience laboring, while contributing to the survival of their businesses, also led to continued struggles in precarious work conditions, well-being crises, and burnout from prolonged resilience practices. To challenge the patriarchal neoliberal values that contribute to the dark side of resilience and advocate for alternative framings and collective praxes, we propose three interconnected lenses to study resilience: a material lens to acknowledge accesses and resources requisite of resilience laboring; a tensional lens that exposes the constant negotiations of unrealistic and paradoxical resilience scripts anchored to identities; and a temporal lens to call out the hegemonic temporal norms prescribed to the ‘successful’ performance of resilience.

KEYWORDS:

• Resilience labor
• neoliberalism
• women’s entrepreneurship
• dark side of organizational communication
• critical perspective

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank the editor Dr. Heather M. Zoller and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and support as we move this manuscript into publication. We are also grateful to all participants who generously volunteered their time and expertise for this study.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 We recognize the history of the word ‘females' being used to exclude transgender people. We have maintained the exact wording from our participants and have used trans-inclusive language in our analysis.

2 BIPOC refers to Black, Indigenous, and People of color, ‘LGBTIQA+' stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer/questioning, asexual, and all of the other identities not encompassed in the short acronym.