Women entrepreneurs and belonging in entrepreneurial resourcing practice

Abstract

Women’s entrepreneurship has been lauded as a potential key contributor towards social and economic development and well researched over the last three decades. Central to these studies is the acknowledgement of gendered and racialised patterns in the field and the consequent association of entrepreneurship with maleness and whiteness. This has resulted in unequal access to resources for women entrepreneurs and a sense of alienation and nonbelonging. Furthermore, black women entrepreneurs have been noted to experience the double-negative of race and gender thus experiencing disproportional alienation, being severely under resourced and resulting in their enterprises being smaller and less profitable than their white counterparts. Entrepreneurial resourcing is key to venture development and success, with belonging being found to influence resourcing practices. In this study, the entrepreneurship as practice (EaP) approach was employed to explore the belonging and resourcing practices of 26 black women entrepreneurs in South Africa utilising a narrative design, situated in the social constructionist paradigm. The study provides several contributions. Firstly, it contributes a new conceptual framework about the practices that black women entrepreneurs within certain contexts, employ to negotiate belonging and resourcing. Secondly, it extends the Occupational Perspective of Health theory (OPH) from Psychology, into entrepreneurship. Thirdly, by employing OPH, the study refines the existing theories of entrepreneurial belonging by revealing the interdependent nature of belonging with doing, being and becoming. The study then makes a methodological contribution by offering a systematic approach for the examination of practice interrelationships and complex entrepreneurial experiences. Additionally, it makes an empirical contribution with the unique dataset of life histories of black women entrepreneurs from across the African continent. Finally, it offers practical strategic guidelines for navigating, fasttracking and achieving belonging and resourcing for marginalised entrepreneurs.