Family Friendly Entrepreneurship: New Business Formation in Family Spaces

Abstract

Seventy three per cent of UK enterprises have no employees and seventeen per cent of these are managed solely by women (GEM UK Data 2005). UK female entrepreneurship is thus a significant economic phenomenon and it is increasing, especially in rural areas. Suggestions are that women's businesses are different to men's (Ahl 2006, Hanson 2003, Hanson and Blake 2004 in terms of their nature, location, type and the way that business is done. Limited empirical investigation has been undertaken, especially within geography (Hanson 2003). In addition, it has been argued that women's participation in selfemployment generally, is under-theorised (Blake, 2006;Ahl, 2006;Lewis 2006). Buzar et al (2005) identify the need to consider within this, the social construction of gender, time, space, economy and culture. This paper aims to advance knowledge and understanding of both the characteristics of female businesses and the coordinates and circumstances of female entrepreneurship. This paper will investigate the nature, dynamics, networks and locations of the new businesses (started up within the past five years) of thirty women entrepreneurs all of whom are mothers and most of whom work at home. Two different types of new work/economic space will be examined. The first, the work locations of this economic activity, are a key defining feature of these businesses -they are typically the kitchens, bedroom and garages of the entrepreneurs' family homes within the spaces of family life. An understanding of such enterprises is assisted by adopting a household-level, work-life reconciliation perspective (Jarvis 2005, Moen andSweet 2004). The second new economic space reported in this paper will be the typical spaces of networking and marketing which often take place in electronic space, particularly the social networking sites (and especially female social and business networking, and mothers' networking internet sites that have become so popular in the past five years or so. Thus this paper will focus on new spaces of work and new ways of doing business.

Craft and the Creative Economy

“…As I will explore in Chapter 4, much of the growth in this marketplace has been driven by women who have sought out craft self-employment via a (largely) online small business as a family-friendly way of maintaining a connection to the paid marketplace. Such 'mumpreneurialism' (Bryant 2013;Duberley and Carrigan 2012;Ekinsmyth 2011Ekinsmyth , 2012Ekinsmyth , 2013aEkinsmyth , 2013bNel et al 2010), as Ekinsmyth notes, 'would not have been possible fifteen years ago':…”

“…Rather it is precisely the kind of 'pro-am' creative entrepreneurialism enabled by the social and economic expansion of the internet. Interestingly too, this largely middle-class creative milieu of small business entrepreneurialism -'etsypreneurialism' or 'mumpreneurialism' as it also known (Bryant 2013;Duberley and Carrigan 2012;Ekinsmyth 2011Ekinsmyth , 2012Ekinsmyth , 2013aEkinsmyth , 2013bNel et al 2010) -furnishes us with a different picture of (mostly) women's home-based labour, one featuring more economically, socially, culturally and racially empowered women than those previously the focus of academic studies of home work practices. 2 The women featured on Etsy and similar sites, and also at maker's fairs, are running active small business operations.…”

“…Rather, I argue, it represents a new and relatively privileged negotiation of the post-Fordist social contract. In the service of their own aims to maximise national fiscal productivity, Western governments are increasingly acknowledging the loss of human capital that can arise when skilled women leave the paid workforce on account of parenting responsibilities rendered impossible to negotiate by the 'chrono-normativity' 8 of traditional paid work temporality (Grabham 2014, p. 73; see also Ekinsmyth 2011Ekinsmyth , 2012Ekinsmyth , 2013aEkinsmyth , 2013b. A key strategy being employed in Anglo-American nations to enable this is less the extension of quality, 'affordable childcare' 9 such as is available to women in a number of Nordic countries, but rather the encouragement of a more entrepreneurial privatised response in the form of home-based business enterprises (Ekinsmyth 2011(Ekinsmyth , 2013a2013b).…”

“…Nowhere are all the above movements clearer than in the recent rise of the figure of the so-called 'mumpreneur' (Bryant 2013;Duberley and Carrigan 2012;Ekinsmyth 2011Ekinsmyth , 2012Ekinsmyth , 2013aEkinsmyth , 2013bNel et al 2010). Ekinsmyth defines 'mumpreneurialism' thus: 'Embracing, rather than contesting, the role of "mother" it is a business practice that attempts to recast the boundaries between productive and reproductive work' (2011, p. 104).…”

Managing the business of everyday life: the roles of space and place in “mumpreneurship”

“…The local social networks of motherhood were found to provide both a rich business resource and a potentially restrictive one. Whilst online networking (social and business) was a strategy employed by mothers to overcome their time-space restrictions, another common strategy was to utilise everyday networks of contacts that had been, and were being, accrued through the mothering role (Ekinsmyth, 2012;Leung, 2011;Powell and Eddleston, 2013). It was clear that motherhood had provided these women with opportunities for local social embedding that would not be similarly available to non-mothers.…”