Home is where the business is: Incidents in everyday life and the formation of home-based businesses

Abstract

Home-based businesses (HBBs) represent an increasingly important form of entrepreneurial activity, yet often remain overlooked within academic literature and largely invisible within official statistics. Set against the background of the home becoming a more common place of business, this article unpacks owner-entrepreneurs' experiences in forming their HBB. By employing Lefebvre's concept of everyday life and drawing on de Certeau's work, it examines the trajectories and tactics of HBB owner-entrepreneurs in the Sheffield City Region in the UK. Focusing on the creative industries sector, the article problematises the push/pull, opportunity/ necessity based binary to elucidate how incidents experienced by HBB owner-entrepreneurs affect the formation of HBBs. The motivations for creating HBBs are shown to be complex, comprising personal and work-related incidents which are related to the lived practices of owner-entrepreneurs. Finally, the article broadens the discussion to reflect on implications for public policy and outlines directions for further research into HBBs as an increasingly pertinent field of entrepreneurship.

The Importance of Housing for Self-employment

“…The HBB literature argues that motivations for running a business from home are primarily related to cost minimization from low overheads (Loscocco and Smith-Hunter 2004;Mason, Carter, and Tagg 2011;Vorley and Rodgers 2014;Daniel, Di Domenico, and Sharma 2015). Business start-ups outside people's homes cluster in industries that are likely to require more start-up capital than an HBB (cf.…”

Passionately yours: Managing emotional and spatial boundaries in lifestyle-based hospitality businesses

“…A person may be contracting for a bigger enterprise or working on their own business at home. Many freelancers, craftspeople selling their crafts on the web, graphic designers and other types of creative workers are good examples of this type of work (Conor, Gill and Taylor 2015;Luckman 2015;Taylor 2015;Vorley and Rodgers 2014). Also, new forms of working from home -or from cafes, buses or any other location where a mobile device can be used -emerge, as do new conceptions of what is actually considered work (e.g.…”

The Role of Entrepreneur-Venture Fit in Online Home-Based Entrepreneurship: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Micro businesses formation also provides opportunities those who have had to leave paid employment (i.e. a push motivation) and the number of micro businesses is often counter cyclic with economic and paid employment growth (Vorley and Rodgers, 2014). The social and economic opportunities provided by micro businesses have been highlighted for developing economies, where supporting institutional developments such as micro financing and micro payments are seen as important to providing opportunities to those referred to as 'bottom of the pyramid' entrepreneurs (e.g.…”

“…The need for risk avoidance has been found to be important to many home-based entrepreneurs and the opportunity to reduce financial risk is often a major contributor to the decision to base the business at home (Vorley and Rodgers, 2014). Following the theory of effectuation (Sarasvathy, 2001), adopt the notion of low affordable loss to explore the notion of risk appetite in online home-based entrepreneurs.…”