Socio-cultural motivation in women’s entrepreneurship: Exploring the handloom industry in Assam

ABSTRACT

This paper attempts to develop a few measures or scales of entrepreneurial motives of women, given the socio-cultural factors in developing economies. Within the push–pull theory of entrepreneurial motivation, we use exploratory factor analysis with an orthogonal varimax rotation technique to examine entrepreneurial motivation, integrating it with socio-cultural beliefs. We identify five entrepreneurial motives—self-dependence, preserving handloom culture, providing monetary support, formal job environment, and work-flexibility. Within socially constructed gender roles, generic desires of women are crucial for entrepreneurial behavior. Contrary to existing findings, we found that women with a higher desire to provide monetary support to their family were found to be less likely to become micro-entrepreneurs, which can be accounted for their poor economic conditions, a significant risk-averse attitude, and credit constraints. The scales constructed could be used across cultures, especially in developing economies. Their replication should provide an understanding of why women micro-entrepreneurs tend to be concentrated in specific sectors, resulting in gender segregation. Given the context specific measurement items, scholars interested in studying socio-cultural attributes in entrepreneurial motivation can further develop and validate the multi-item constructs that distinguish women’s motivations for specific activities.

ABSTRACT IN HINDI

KEYWORDS:

• Entrepreneurial motivations
• socio-cultural values
• women
• handloom industry
• Assam

KEYWORDS:

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Notes on contributors

Kishor GOSWAMI is a Professor of Economics in the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India. He received his doctoral degree from Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur in Economics. His research focuses on Development Economics (micro-entrepreneurship, credit risk, technology adoption, gender and trade, women empowerment, and poverty), Agricultural and Resource Economics (Organic agriculture, zero budget natural farming, medicinal crop, services demand in wetland), and Economics of Biofuels. Email: [email protected] or [email protected]

Bhabesh HAZARIKA is an Economist at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP), New Delhi. His research areas are Public Policy, Development Economics, Choice Decision, and Entrepreneurship. He received his doctoral degree from Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur in Economics. He has published his works in journals like Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, Journal of Small Business & Entrepreneurship, and International Journal of Social Economics. He is a member of professional associations including Southern Economic Association and Indian Society for Ecological Economics. Email: [email protected]

Kalpana HANDIQUE is a Research Scholar of Economics in the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India. Her research focuses on micro-entrepreneurship, financial risk attitude, and women empowerment. Email: [email protected]

ORCID

Kishor GoswamI http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9489-6826

Bhabesh Hazarika http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8659-4430

Notes

1. This refers to women’s involvement in making decisions regarding strategic life choices, to gain autonomy, control over resources, and freedom of movement (Kabeer, 1999; Kantor, 2003).

2. A scale is a construct, usually derived from a set of statements, designed to measure a person's socio-behavioral attributes (mostly qualitative). In the present study, we applied a 5 point Likert-scale to record each person’s response (numerical value 1–5 to indicate the extent of agreement with each statement) on a set of statements referring a construct (motivational scale).

3. The large proportion of the handloom households in Assam is mostly because of the nature of the handloom industry which is rural, informal, and home-based, unlike other states in India.

4. Using data from the Statistical Handbook of Assam 2010, all 27 districts were first distributed into three strata based on the proportion of full-time handloom households to the total number of handloom households in the state (DoES Assam, 2011)

5. 30 items were generated from the literature and the remaining 10 items through a quasi-ground approach.

6. Assam has the unique distinction of being the only state in India producing all four commercially known varieties of silk namely mulberry, tasar, eri and muga.

7. These are popular dresses that women from different tribes in North East India wear.

8. The incidence of unemployment, measured as a percentage of the workforce, is increasing and is higher in Assam than the rest of the country. The unemployment rate in Assam in 1983 was 2.2% as compared to 2.0% for the country. By 1999–2000, the country’s unemployment rate increased marginally to 2.3%, while Assam’s unemployment rate increased substantially to 4.6% (PDD Assam, 2012).

9. Individuals may have opted for handloom entrepreneurship by observing neighbors who were doing well in the business. Thus, the village specific fixed-effect model addressed the issue of multicollinearity and provides unbiased estimates of household and individual level factors by taking the differences (within it) into consideration.