Love as a Hidden Gender Resource in Chinese Immigrant Women’s Entrepreneurship

Abstract

Although there has been an increased research interest in recognizing entrepreneurship as an individual strategy, most literature disregards the interplays of human agency and social structure to entrepreneurship. Despite some recognition of emotion in making economic decisions among entrepreneurial discourses on human agency, aspects of emotional capital in explaining motivation to entrepreneurship has been overlooked. The application of the notion of love as an individual strategy for entering business is still unprecedented. To fill these gaps, we aim to bring “love” as a form of emotional capital to the centre of analysis by relating a number of “love stories” that illustrate the motivation for entrepreneurship in a group of 125 Chinese immigrant women in Sydney, Australia, and Richmond, Canada. Using these women’s own accounts of their experiences, this paper attempts to demonstrate that emotion is embedded in economic behaviour when love is used as a resource to enter entrepreneurship. In addition, we intend to explore the dynamics of motivation by intersecting love with the women’s biographical factors, connecting gender, race, ethnicity, class, immigration, and opportunity structures.BR How do Chinese immigrant women in our studies mobilize love as a form of emotional capital to enter entrepreneurship? First, we recognize that the love relation is the underpinning of family relations, which are based on normative giving. Second, we recognize that these women have taken patriarchy as natural, seeing the maintenance of family relationships and solidarity as wives and mothers overriding their own self-interests, to the extent of self-sacrifice for the good of the family. Failing to do so would result in self-blame, guilt, and shame. We therefore postulate that women are motivated by love as a gender resource that is grounded in culture to enter entrepreneurship for the purposes of marriage and family maintenance and economic survival. Further, we suggest that the mobilization of this form of emotional capital is a rational choice, given the adverse situations these immigrant women and their families face as they struggle against structural barriers and scarce opportunities resulting from immigration.BR Love as a gender resource for entering business can be manifested in different ways. Some women were driven into entrepreneurship out of “self-sacrifice” in terms of “giving” for the love of their husbands. Some did so to “give face” or “save face” for their husbands while others did so through contributing their “labour of love.” Others sacrificed their entrepreneurial ambition to “give time” to care for their husband and children. To these women, the business project is a project of love.BR The motivation for entry into entrepreneurship is a complex phenomenon as seen from the experience of this group of immigrant women. By allowing the delineation of the intersections of self, marriage and family, class, race/ethnicity, immigration and settlement process, labour market experience, and opportunity structures, this study opens up new space for future research to help fill the gaps and expand the horizon in our knowledge claims on entrepreneurship.