Deinstitutionalization through Business Model Evolution: Women Entrepreneurs in the Middle East and North Africa

Abstract

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter "The first day I sold my perfumes was the best day of my life. Customers loved them. No one had ever bought such a good product at such a low price. I was overjoyed with the success, even though I worried about getting caught running my own business…In the early years, I couldn't even open my own Abstract This chapter is among the first to examine the interplay between deinstitutionalization and the rollout of novel business models by women entrepreneurs in developing countries. Much of the existing literature has examined the ways in which policy directives by formal institutions are the key drivers of entrepreneurial activity among women. Implicitly, this orientation suggests that the fate of women entrepreneurs is tied to, and cascades from, macro-level deinstitutionalization efforts, arising through changes in policies, laws and regulations championed at the highest levels. While this top-down view may intuitively be attractive, there are empirical reasons to doubt that the "institutional cascading" model accurately captures the underlying mechanisms of entrepreneurial activity among women. Taking a radically different tack, we develop and test an alternative, market-based perspective in which novel business models developed by women drive deinstitutionalization in bottom-up fashion. The context for our study involves detailed case histories of 95 women who started new businesses in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), 1960-2012. Using a question-driven research design, our findings indicate that deinstitutionalization is strongly associated with the timing and substance of entrepreneurial action taken by MENA women.

Action! Moving beyond the intendedly-rational logics of entrepreneurship

“…The final context involves Fatima Azoulay, a middle-aged serial entrepreneur from Morocco. Her story came to light as one of 95 detailed case studies of women entrepreneurs in seven Middle East and North African (MENA) countries (Hunt & Ortiz-Hunt, 2017).…”

Immersed in Coleman's bathtub: multilevel dynamics driving new venture survival in emerging markets

“…Coleman's theory explicates three interrelated mechanisms, including: (1) situational mechanisms in which entrepreneurs and their ventures are embedded (e.g. nations, markets), (2) action-formation mechanisms that explain how opportunities, goals and beliefs influence an entrepreneur's behavior and (3) transformation mechanisms that account for how the behavior of entrepreneurs brings about macro-level outcomes (Hunt and Ortiz-Hunt, 2017; Kim et al. , 2016).…”

“…In turn, this influences how individuals act and those behaviors influence the organization at the aggregate level (Distel, 2019). Recently, entrepreneurship scholars suggested that Coleman's theory of multilevel dynamics (a.k.a., Coleman's Bathtub model) can be a powerful framework for understanding the processes of entrepreneurship in developing countries (Cowen et al, 2022;Hunt and Ortiz-Hunt, 2017). Coleman's theory explicates three interrelated mechanisms, including: (1) situational mechanisms in which entrepreneurs and their ventures are embedded (e.g.…”

“…Coleman's theory explicates three interrelated mechanisms, including: (1) situational mechanisms in which entrepreneurs and their ventures are embedded (e.g. nations, markets), (2) action-formation mechanisms that explain how opportunities, goals and beliefs influence an entrepreneur's behavior and (3) transformation mechanisms that account for how the behavior of entrepreneurs brings about macro-level outcomes (Hunt and Ortiz-Hunt, 2017;Kim et al, 2016). Examining these interactions from a multilevel perspective helps intertwine the macro context of the environment and the interactions between the micro individual factors that decide an individual's engagement in entrepreneurial activity (Autio and Acs, 2010;Shane and Venkataraman, 2000).…”

Urban Farmers and Cowboy Coders: Reimagining Rural Venturing in the 21st Century

“…For example, advances in research on business models (e.g. Zott, Amit, & Massa, 2010) and opportunity development (Ardichvili, Cardozo & Ray, 2003) have not made their way into the rural entrepreneurship literature despite the rich set of tools both perspectives offer for identifying, describing, and predicting entrepreneurial action and outcomes, including those occurring among marginalized populations (Hunt & Ortiz-Hunt, 2018) and in developing economies (Webb et al, 2010).…”