Mothering and Entrepreneurship: Global perspectives, Identities and Complexities

This book examines the complexities of mothers who are entrepreneurs in different parts of the world. This uniqueness and contribution to the area of women’s entrepreneurship presents many challenges. One must historicize context; focus on socio-political realms and on lived realities. All challenging endeavours, when focusing on mothering and entrepreneurship, in different global contexts. What of the workers in these contexts? More specifically what of female workers within these contexts? How have women negotiated gendered roles within old and new structures? What complexities have preconfigured the diverse realities and positionalities of maternal-workers? How have these intricacies shifted the boundaries of work-family interface? This book focuses on a specific subset of work and the economy for mothers who are entrepreneurs in different parts of the world. In this edited collection, we examine how mothers are negotiating their entrepreneurial endeavors within the contexts of local and global economic shifts. We explore how the socio-cultural, economic and national contexts that (re)structure and (re)frame multiple nodes of power, difference, and realities for mothers as workers across diverse contexts. This type of contextual analysis allows for new lines of inquiry and questions that move beyond the descriptive profiling and gendered assessment of women entrepreneurs. Lastly, the mother-entrepreneur-worker-life balance frames our discussion. We particularly set the work-family discourse within many points of contentions related to how the researchers have conceptualized work-life interface, the specific assumptions embedded within these investigations, and the implications of these for how we (re)present the dynamics related to mothering and entrepreneurship. The participation of mothers within entrepreneurial space offers a rich site for analyzing the contextual nature of maternal identity, work life relationships and entrepreneurial identities. In so doing, the chapters addressed the different histories of oppression, movement of people, socio-economic conditions that underpin that experience, the various axes of power that affect the precariousness of work and citizenship on a global scale. Where existing examinations also center on the concerns for work-life interface, such scrutiny also brings to bear the complexities and ambiguities of working within these two boundaries. This is presented as a way of reframing not just work life interface, but also, that of how these affect the specific practices, choices, and responses of entrepreneurial mothers within specific localities and positionalities. No doubt, these insights provide important foundations for advancing theorizations on entrepreneurial mothers.