Micro entrepreneurship and female homework in developing countries: On the limited capacity of micro entrepreneurship as analytical term

Abstract

Changes in global economic relations and production processes along with many other dynamic forces have brought many challenges and opportunities to the forefront in developing economies. Due to decentralization of global production processes, the economic geography of work has changed and new forms of work have been generated, albeit mostly in the informal sector, and homework has become an endpoint for most of the global and local supply chains. One important discussion that is surfacing in the literature on homework is that the dualistic construction of work as an employee or self-employed person has a limited capacity to capture the complexity of women’s insertion in the labor market. Homeworkers with diverse employment and social biographies within the division of work test the limits of employment and self-employment. While the significance of the historical, temporal, institutional, spatial and social context in understanding economic behavior is widely acknowledged in entrepreneurship research now, this paper is an attempt to contribute to these discussions by investigating to what extent female homework in the developing world corresponds to the idea of employment and self-employment that is often used as a proxy for entrepreneurship? It is argued that female homeworkers who are usually seen as lacking in entrepreneurial spirit are perhaps more enterprising and entrepreneurial than recognized at present. Therefore, critical engagement with conceptualizing homework and female micro-entrepreneurship in the context of developing economies could not only open up new avenues of inquiry about the nature of work and production process, but also help to fully actualize the entrepreneurial "dynamism" of female informal micro-enterprises.