Abstract
This study examines how Indian women entrepreneurs navigate the competing demands of their familial and entrepreneurial lives through boundary work. It draws upon in-depth interviews of 30 first-generation women entrepreneurs in India to examine their daily interactions and negotiations between spaces of home and workplace. The study finds that women focus on the material dimensions of boundary work by managing their physical space, including the location of their offices, home layouts, and work-related arrangements within their domestic settings. They use boundary work to simultaneously achieve two interdependent boundary goals: social boundaries that maintain familial inclusion and secure continued support, and functional boundaries that enable the operational conditions necessary for entrepreneurial work.
Further, the study reveals the use of configurational boundary work (Langley, 2019). By arranging, buffering, and coalescing their boundaries, women entrepreneurs transform the entire boundary landscape and alter the way in which their home and enterprise relate to one another. They modify the structures that hold power over them, thus enacting what Zietsma and Lawrence (2010) term the paradox of embedded agency. At the same time, operating in a society marked by unequal power relations, we find that through their boundary work, women engage in compensatory actions to maintain family equilibrium and retain family support for their entrepreneurial activities. The study also finds that systemic inequalities often require women to repair and uphold the same boundaries that reproduce patriarchal social order and accentuate the power imbalance.