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Abstract

This thesis is founded on an interest in critically exploring entrepreneurship’s broader role in society. Here, I particularly investigate how entrepreneurship may, potentially reproduce experiences of inequalities among marginalised women in Global South contexts. While entrepreneurship in the Global South is not a new phenomenon, with increasing entrepreneurship initiatives in these regions and the rising inequalities between the rich and poor, the focus on unfolding why and how inequalities are reinforced, reproduced, and perpetuated, is a growing scholarly and policy concern. Entrepreneurship, being a socially embedded phenomenon, can be a complex experience for marginalised groups, particularly in patriarchal, rural societies, distinctive of different structures of power interplaying to create constraints and shape entrepreneurial experiences. The objective of this thesis is to enhance our understanding of the intersecting processes, mechanisms, and dynamics through which entrepreneurship may reproduce experiences of inequalities among marginalised women in rural societies. It aims at unfolding the different tensions and constraints that women navigate in their everyday entrepreneurial lives and making explicit the caste and gendered structural interplays that come in their way of engaging with entrepreneurship and how tensions between different actors of power shape women’s experiences further.

I investigated this phenomenon using a feminist theory lens to make explicit the complex, intersecting realities of these women’s experiences. Empirically, I engaged with the phenomenon through a two-year ethnographic account across 12 remote villages in the Mayurbhanj district in Odisha, India. The thesis is organised in a three-paper format and comprises one systematic literature review and two empirical papers. The first paper provides a foundational understanding of how entrepreneurship relates to inequalities, and I analyse the existing literature through an intersectionality lens (Crenshaw, 1990; Collins, 2000) with caste and gender as the two-intersecting axis. Based on existing literature, this paper makes explicit who the gatekeepers are and how caste and gendered structures of power interplay through visible and invisible mechanisms across different entrepreneurship activities, reproducing intersecting inequalities at individual and enterprise levels for these women entrepreneurs in rural patriarchal societies. The second paper empirically explores how caste and gendered structures of power shape the everyday entrepreneurship experiences of poor, rural women entrepreneurs and reveals the specific intersecting constraints that women face in their everyday entrepreneurial lives, providing a ground-up view of entrepreneurship. The third paper extends the conversation about entrepreneurship and inequalities in relation to intermediaries’ role in society and explores how intermediaries in impoverished contexts can create (un)intended experiences of inequalities among marginalised entrepreneurs. I draw upon ethnographic insights and reveal the complex tensions, dynamics, and mechanisms through which different actors of power within women’s entrepreneurship contexts interact, how intermediaries navigate those tensions, and how this translates to women’s everyday experiences of entrepreneurship. I show how multi-level interactions between different actors of power shape intermediaries’ and women’s experiences in ways that (un)intendedly reinforce and reproduce experiences of inequalities among rural women of caste-oppressed groups in impoverished regions in India. Together, the three papers advance the conversation on broader aspects of entrepreneurship in society; they add to the recent scholarship on caste in management and organisation studies and contribute to the theorisation of inequalities from the perspectives of rural women’s experiences of entrepreneurship.

Publication Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman H Social Sciences > HT Communities. Classes. Races
Departments:	Bayes Business School > Bayes Business School Doctoral Theses Bayes Business School > Management Doctoral Theses

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