Summary 

What does it take to be a woman entrepreneur—not just in terms of business skills, but in navigating everyday spaces, emotions, and social expectations? In our article published in the Journal of Management Studies (JMS), we introduce the idea of ‘embodied territories’ to shed light on how women’s entrepreneurial journeys are deeply shaped by their bodily experiences and socio-spatial realities. Based on interviews with 58 women entrepreneurs from diverse socio-economic backgrounds, our study uncovers how gendered norms, safety concerns, and class-based expectations impact women’s ability to grow and sustain their businesses. These insights offer critical implications for policies and programs that aim to support inclusive and equitable entrepreneurship in India and beyond.  

Why and how did we study women entrepreneurs in India? 

Women’s entrepreneurship makes a significant contribution to the Indian economy, yet research around the challenges and experience of women entrepreneurs is mainly focused on  western and affluent societies. Our study, therefore, focused on the expereinces of women entrepreneurs in India from different socio-economic classes. Our aim was to understand the everyday challenges faced by women entrepreneurs in India, recognising that deeply rooted historical, political and cultural dynamics that have a significant impact on who, how and the ways entrepreneurship is enacted in society.  

In many ways we set out with a deceptively simple question: What does it mean to be a woman entrepreneur in India?  From early on in our fieldwork and in-depth interviews, participants’ accounts centered on the bodily and spatial constraints in their daily lives as women entrepreneurs, which led us to take a more phenomenological lens. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work, through her account of affective economies allows us to illuminate the contextual and cultural complexity of India, and understand how this was impregnated into everyday experiences of entrepreneurship for women across difference biographical and socioeconomic groups.   

Embodied territories of entrepreneurship 

To provide a new way of thinking about our participants lived experiences of entrepreneurs, we introduced the concept of ‘embodied territories’. This sought to echo their lived experience of how their experiences were both enabled and constraint by gendered, classed, and spatial aspects they encountered in their work and lives more broadly. For example, for middle-class women entrepreneurs, embodied cues carried both alerts around safety and reproduced the ‘affective trappings’ of positive and normative success around independence, autonomy and recognition, and for working-class entrepreneurs, embodied cues provided a means to maximize material safety and survival. 

For us, thinking about how women negotiated the embodied territories of entrepreneurship really emphasized how their daily work was saturated with rich affective experiences that are shaped by how an entrepreneur feels about her own body and other bodies, as they navigate commercial spaces in ways that patterned across broader cultural and place-based politics in contemporary India. For example, being outside the home after it is dark, even for work, arouses anxiety of being unsafe. Likewise, meeting strangers comes with an unease that places particular bodily demands on women entrepreneurs that can compromise both economic opportunities and cultural lines of credibility and decency. Orientating their body to different people, locations and activities in time and space are not only forms of relationship decision-making but integral to feelings of bodily discomfort. 

In turn, negotiating these successfully in ways that felt comfortable or safe often had direct consequences for women’s businesses in terms of ‘scaling-up’ or reaching a milestone where she is recognized as a ‘successful’ entrepreneur. 

Embodied territories 

‘Embodied territories’ challenges the dominant idea in the cognition-based affect literature that encourages cultivating positive affect (and suppressing negative affect) for better entrepreneurial performance. Our article presents how dealing with negative affect (anxiety, fear, nervousness, confusion, and so on) was very much a part of women entrepreneurs’ everyday experiences. Further, ‘embodied territories’ remind us that while affect is felt inside the body, it is through the bodily orientation and spatial negotiations that affective experiences come about. We join the affective turn in management studies that provides a relatively new lens to understand experiences as relational and felt through exchanges between bodies and spaces. 

Significance 

Our focus on embodied territories of entrepreneurship invites us to rethink how entrepreneurship is not simply about an individual pursuing a particular commercial venture. Rather, it is about the coming together of bodies, spaces, and commercial practices as configured in historically, culturally, and politically situated contexts that profoundly shape entrepreneurial possibilities or limitations. While individuals can draw on these embodied experiences to enable new ways of being and doing entrepreneurship, they also run the risk of alienation and further subjugation, and in some cases, explicit violent retribution. 

Our study also highlights the importance of the unequal landscape of affective labour in work. We found that affective labour is clustered around intersectional modes of oppression that play out through a need to attend to the bodily experience predicated on marginalised or unequal relations. Affective labour places extra pressure and demands on some worker, especially those whose bodies and identities—shaped by gender and class—make them feel they must carefully manage how they act and appear. 

Takeaways 

For scholars 

Our findings highlight the importance of understanding the simmering bodily experiences of entrepreneurship as central, rather than incidental to the practice and expectations of everyday commercial exchanges. While particular poignant in contexts where deeply entrenched inequalities exist, it also points to how unequal levels of affective labour may also have disproportionate impacts in other professional setting.  

For policy makers and economic agencies 

Supporting equal participation in entrepreneurship across genders could boost the global economy by $2.5-$5 trillion¹. Attention to embodied territories must be considered by those supporting or promoting women’s entrepreneurship given it highlights how practice is not simply about promoting empowerment or individual sponsorship of women. Rather, support and economic infrastructure to promote entrepreneurship must attend to the deeply entrenched contextual biases and perceptions that present significant barriers to women and manifest in their everyday ubiquitous relations and exchanges. 

For workers 

While ‘gut instinct’ is often associated with the masculine assertive archetype of an entrepreneur; all too often, the other emotional, affective and bodily experiences of women entrepreneurs are sequestered, dismissed or underplayed as important to the ‘real’ work of business. Contrary to this, our study highlights how attention to these is central both to an individual’s safety overall and a vital tool for negotiating and navigating complex or gendered commercial exchanges.