Online communities and entrepreneuring mothers: practices of building, being and belonging

Abstract

Informed by contributions of Professor Alistair Anderson to social perspective of entrepreneurship, rooted in the relations and social capital, this article examines how members of an online community collectively interpret and negotiate the challenges of pursuing entrepreneurship alongside parenthood. Article adopts a multi-staged research design, incorporating netnography, participant observation, and qualitative semi-structured interviews. The analysis reveals the critical role of networking in how entrepreneuring women construct and maintain community connections and distinguishes between three dimensions of community engagement: Building, Being and Belonging. Drawing on communities of practice as an analytical lens, we offer new insights into the form and function of communal entrepreneurial practices facilitated by the digital environment.

Identity Construction of Pakistani Female Entrepreneurs in Religious Framework: An Interplay of Sociocultural and Religious Factors

“…Such scholarly endeavours have highlighted the fact that societal expectations of women have an impact on the difficulties in balancing the conflicting identities of being a female and an entrepreneur with their associated masculine characteristics. This is significant because, for women who start their businesses, acceptance through identity reconciliation takes precedence over identity negotiation (Vershinina et al, 2022).…”

“…Female entrepreneurs tend to manage multiple social identities which might give rise to conflicts (Yamamura et al, 2022). Female entrepreneurs are frequently wives and mothers, roles that are intertwined with traditional feminine social identities, whereas entrepreneurial social identity is established by masculine social standards (Vershinina et al, 2022). By successfully running their enterprises, women can provide for their families (Leung et al, 2020).…”

Lurkers versus Contributors: An Empirical Investigation of Knowledge Contribution Behavior in Open Innovation Communities

“…Sun, Zhang [4] used a case study to divide the innovative knowledge reuse process into six stages, including redefining the problem and methods, searching, and evaluating other reusable ideas, and continuing the development of selected ideas. In investigating user motivations for knowledge search, Vershinina, Phillips [5] found that the main purpose of users searching from a knowledge base is to solve problems. Pirkkalainen, Pawlowski [40] studied knowledge reuse within the open design community and proposed a third type of reuse, different from replicative and innovative reuse, called custom reuse.…”

“…For example, companies are building OICs, such as IBM's crowdsourcing community, to gain employee knowledge of corporate policies and other issues [2,3], and to obtain incubator business ideas from their employees and other stakeholders. On the consumer side, branded communities enable companies to obtain customer preferences and ideas for new products or services [4,5]. For example, Microsoft's Power BI community collects customer intelligence and knowledge contributions to improve business intelligence and analytics products and solutions.…”

“…Low willingness of users to continue participating and high member attrition rates have been reported as prominent problems. For example, in their study of OICs, Vershinina, Phillips [5] estimated that the average monthly contributor attrition rate exceeded 50%. Therefore, promoting user knowledge contribution and community engagement to reduce active user attrition has attracted a lot of research in the field of open innovation and knowledge management.…”