Crafting gender into meaningful work: experiences of women engaging in social entrepreneurship in China
Abstract
Purpose
Social entrepreneurship, leveraging economic activities to achieve social benefits, offers women the opportunity to freely and actively shape the contours of their work in meaningful ways. This study aims to examine how Chinese women use job crafting in social entrepreneurship to align their gender identity, forge meaningful work and new relationships and navigate mixed gender expectations.
Design/methodology/approach
The study is based on 19 in-depth interviews with young women engaging in social entrepreneurship in China. Using a grounded theory approach, the study explores how women craft their gender identity into the unconventional career path of creating their social venture, focusing on the creative combination of task, relational and cognitive crafting in shaping social entrepreneurship.
Findings
The findings suggest that women make social entrepreneurship meaningful by actively aligning their gender experiences to delineate a relational and cognitive causal path between their social enterprise, their identity as women and their moral values. By working for a larger social cause, women may cognitively reframe their gender identity to compromise financial performance for social impact.
Originality/value
Current studies on social entrepreneurship in China have yet to examine its development through a gender lens. This study uses job crafting to highlight the distinctive gender meaning-making process for Chinese women to enhance their work identity and to challenge normative gender expectations. The study shows that job crafting enables women to view their social ventures as a means of gender empowerment, helping them to reconcile the paradoxical pressures of normative gender expectations and scaling up their businesses.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The research was funded by the research seed fund from The Chinese University of Hong Kong and partially supported by the Early Career Scheme Grant Award from the Research Grants Council (RGC Ref. No. CUHK 24612423), Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China. The author is grateful for the research assistance from Eva Yue Liu and the generous sharing from the research informants.
Citation
Han, L. (2024), "Crafting gender into meaningful work: experiences of women engaging in social entrepreneurship in China", Gender in Management, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/GM-03-2023-0079
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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