Professional women’s entrepreneurship in Amman City, Jordan: Drivers and impacts

Women entrepreneurs took more than 30 years to be identified as an individual group. Yet, early work on women’s entrepreneurship can be branded as mostly descriptive, examining. Women’s entrepreneurship has been used as a means to alleviate extreme poverty, accepting a gender as a variable method and, for the most part, missing in information about feminist theory and gender. This research seeks to counteract the dearth of women entrepreneurship literature, that much of the empirical and theoretical research on women entrepreneurship does not have the sense of feminist grounding. Development theory brings a robust and rigorous gender and analysis to the subject of economic development that entrepreneurship field do not clearly focus on, whereas biological difference was looked as variable, but it is not located in the social political cultural context. A notable gap in the current literature is exploration of women’s entrepreneurship among those who are not ‘at the margin’ and understanding the implications of their economic participation for gender relations/equality. This research aims to investigate how gender power dynamics mediate professional women entrepreneur’s voices. In order to do this, a theoretical understanding of the motivations and outcomes for them is a required. The analysis for this study integrates the social relation framework by Kabeer (1994), the empowerment framework by Kabeer (1999), and Theory of Gender and Power by Connell (1987) to provide a complex understanding of how gender power dynamics shape the motivations and outcomes of entrepreneurship for professional women entrepreneurs in Jordan.

Funder

University of Jordan

Publisher

NUI Galway

Collections

University of Galway Theses (PhD Theses)