The aim of this paper is to advance our understanding of how women negotiate their business and family demands in a developing country context. The highest cited motivation for women's pursuit of entrepreneurship has been their need to attend to these demands. Yet, empirically we know little about the negotiating actions taken by, and the business satisfaction of women in the context of both livelihood challenges and patriarchal contexts, despite several scholarly calls for contextualized accounts of women's entrepreneurship. We explore these issues by employing a qualitative study of 90 women engaged in primarily informal entrepreneurial activities in three Nepalese regions. Our findings highlight three main and interrelated themesnegotiating consent, family resource access and gaining status. These themes allow us to contextualize the process of negotiating business and family demands by highlighting how women legitimize their business activities, respond to family/societal expectations and mobilize support for, and find satisfaction in their business. Overall, our study contributes towards accounts of business-family interface that incorporate the everyday practices of entrepreneurial activities amongst those less privileged in terms of resource access in particular sociocultural contexts.

Formalization is constantly being proposed as being of great benefit to business expansion and success. This claim, however, has not been previously tested through a review of the empirical evidence, especially in relation to the large number of women in the developing world that operate in the informal economy. Therefore, the aim of this review is to systematize the current empirical evidence on gender, the informal economy and formalization, using a narrative synthesis of 76 papers. The papers were analysed along three main analytical themes -identity, institutions, and constraints and preferences -highlighting their conceptualization in studies of different academic disciplines -economics, sociology, entrepreneurship and development. The review calls for more accurate accounts of formalization decisions by widening the lens through which formalization decisions are conceptualized. These should take account of the rich contextual and temporal dimensions central to these decisions, and recognize that gender alone is not a sufficient factor in explaining women's choices in the informal economy. The review also highlights limitations in relation to the limited conceptual and empirical evidence on which development priorities such as formalization are set. The authors propose a research agenda centred on the need for conceptual frameworks that are more sensitive towards the multidimensional contexts of women's choices.

Research Summary: This article advances our understanding of entrepreneurial resourcefulness in unstable institutional contexts, which are characterized by resource constraints and institutional changes but are rich in intangible resources of a sociocultural nature. Drawing on qualitative data of individuals engaged in informal cross‐border activities in EU borderlands, we theorize resourcefulness along two core dimensions: continuity and change in relation to sociocultural, spatial, and institutional conditions and development and coping as outcomes. We identify six configurations of resourcefulness patterns and outcomes that extend current understandings of the variations in how individuals interact with their contexts, offering a nuanced view of resourcefulness. Managerial Summary: This article aims to understand entrepreneurial resourceful behavior in contexts characterized by difficult economic conditions and institutional changes. We use qualitative data of individuals involved in informal cross‐border activities in EU borderlands that have undergone the collapse of communism and EU enlargement rounds. The data shows that resourcefulness relies on continuity, reflected in previous skills and networks, family and friends, or common cultural understandings and change, as resourcefulness where individuals implicitly or explicitly challenge the new border regulations. Individuals' resourcefulness translates into “coping” outcomes, as in achieving a minimal income to maintain the current way of life and/or to sustain social relationships and “development” outcomes, whereby individuals earn more income and improve their business activities.

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -This paper aims to investigate business growth in post-communist Albania using an institutional perspective. Design/methodology/approach -The paper takes an institutional perspective, which emphasises the role of institutional change in enabling/constraining business growth whilst allowing for entrepreneurial objectives and motivations to be taken into account. The analysis is based on firm-level data collected through a survey questionnaire in April-July 2004. The paper uses principal components analysis and a regression model to explain the factors that determine the pace of business growth of small firms. Findings -The analysis offers important insights into the nature of entrepreneurship in a post-communist setting. The age of the firm, the age, education, qualifications and work orientation of the entrepreneur, insufficient information and corruption, explain the differential growth of firms. Older entrepreneurs grow faster suggesting unfulfilled aspirations during communism as well as their access to wider professional, social and possibly also political connections. The positive effect of corruption on business growth suggests that an ability to cope with a corrupt environment has been a necessary entrepreneurial skill during a period of chaotic change in social and formal institutions that has characterized transition in Albania. Originality/value -This research can be of special interest to studies of entrepreneurship in institutional transformation contexts, and it contributes especially to the accumulation of knowledge on transition economies by looking at the little researched case of post communist Albania.

The aim of this paper is to advance our understanding of how women negotiate their business and family demands in a developing country context. The highest cited motivation for women's pursuit of entrepreneurship has been their need to attend to these demands. Yet, empirically we know little about the negotiating actions taken by, and the business satisfaction of women in the context of both livelihood challenges and patriarchal contexts, despite several scholarly calls for contextualized accounts of women's entrepreneurship. We explore these issues by employing a qualitative study of 90 women engaged in primarily informal entrepreneurial activities in three Nepalese regions. Our findings highlight three main and interrelated themesnegotiating consent, family resource access and gaining status. These themes allow us to contextualize the process of negotiating business and family demands by highlighting how women legitimize their business activities, respond to family/societal expectations and mobilize support for, and find satisfaction in their business. Overall, our study contributes towards accounts of business-family interface that incorporate the everyday practices of entrepreneurial activities amongst those less privileged in terms of resource access in particular sociocultural contexts.

Despite the depiction of decisions to formalize informal firms as rational and ethical, many entrepreneurs in developing countries continue to operate informally regardless of its perceived illicit status. While existing research on why entrepreneurs choose informality emphasizes the economic costs and benefits of such decisions, this often overlooks the realities of the informal economy and the constraints which marginal populations-particularly women-face. In this paper, we use institutional theory and sensemaking to understand the experiences of women in the informal economy and what formalization means to them. We use a qualitative approach to collect data from 90 women entrepreneurs in three different cities in Nepal. In our findings we identify three groups of women with distinctive understandings of formalization-business sustainability, livelihood sufficiency and strategic alignment. Their interpretation of formalization reveals the complex, dynamic, and cyclical nature of formalization decisions. Decisions are also guided by the optimization of social and emotional logics, whereby formalization is conceived differently depending on different life stages, experiences within the informal economy and wider socio-cultural contexts. Our findings highlight the ethical implications of formalization where being a 'good citizen', rather than complying with formal rules and regulations, is about attuning to and fitting in with socially prescribed roles. Our research provides a nuanced view of formalization decisions, challenging idealized and ethical notions of formalization as a desired end state.

Borderlands, as spaces of various forms of entrepreneurial activities, offer rich examples of informal entrepreneurial activities that depend on the border location to be developed and sustained. Although the socioeconomic contributions of informal activities have been widely acknowledged, little research has been conducted on the ways that enlargement of the European Union (EU), by affecting the openness/closedness of borders, affected the nature and extent of cross-border informal entrepreneurial activities (IEAs). Recognizing the heterogeneity of border regions, in terms of formal and social institutional structures, linguistics and ethnicity, the paper offers a nuanced and extended understanding of the difference the geography of borders, broadly defined, makes to the diversity and persistence/disappearance of cross-border IEAs since EU enlargement. Using qualitative data from interviews collected with households involved in cross-border IEAs in several EU border regions, the paper indicates that cross-border IEAs have a time dimension, reflected in the pre- and post-enlargement changes to the intensity of these activities, as well as a regional dimension, reflected in various dichotomies such as impoverished/affluent, socioculturally proximate/distant and hard/soft borders, reflected in the forms, enablers and constraints of such activities. The paper illustrates how the spatial, economic, institutional and sociocultural characteristics of a context overlap, dominate or recede at different points in time to facilitate/inhibit different forms of entrepreneurial behaviour and to encourage the involvement of, or empower, different groups of people. Thus, context, in all its dimensions, remains an important factor for spatial and temporal explanations of cross-border IEAs as particular forms of entrepreneurial activity.

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