中国社交媒体环境下“宝妈创业者”的职业叙述：自我、孩子与生意

Abstract

In the past decades, women-owned businesses have increased significantly. A large portion of these entrepreneurs are mothers who combine entrepreneurship with raising their children and are also known as ‘mompreneurs’. Researchers have highlighted the impact of changes at critical life stages on mothers’ career decisions, and noted that the unique way that entrepreneurial mothers coordinate roles, relationships, and domain involvement has an important influence on their career patterns. Despite a growing interest in women’s career-life development and entrepreneurship, relatively few researches have been conducted on the entrepreneurial career of self-employed mothers with dependent children. This research seeks to understand how mompreneurs perceive the relationship between self, business, and children. Adopting a career narrative perspective, this study applies a qualitative interview research design, the data were collected through open-ended, semi-structured interviews by face to face or Skype, supplemented by questionnaire. The twelve mothers’ interviews were a small sample of the most ordinary mompreneurs in China, they were recruited by purposive sampling and snowball sampling method. The study proposes ‘six entrepreneurial career types’ to explain why mother mothers’ transit into entrepreneurship, and is dedicated to providing theoretical and practical references for researchers and practitioners engaged in female entrepreneurship and career counseling.