Contextualizing the career success of Arab women entrepreneurs

Purpose – Few studies examine the career success of women in the Arab Middle East. With that in mind, the purpose of this paper is to explore the conceptualizations of the career success of women managers in Lebanon. Drawing on the individual, behavioral, and structural approaches, this study also investigates the women’s approaches to career success. Capitalizing on the institutional theory (IT), the current investigation accounts for the complexity of the local context by illustrating how a diverse set of socio-cultural values and norms, institutional constraints, and individual agency impact the overall experience of career success among Arab women. Design/methodology/approach – This study is exploratory in nature and draws on a qualitative approach. In-depth, face-to-face, open-ended interviews were conducted with women managers across the managerial hierarchy in a wide range of industries, sectors, and organizations. Findings – The findings suggest that the Lebanese women managers’ career success was not conceptualized exclusively using the objective or the subjective measures. Rather, it was conceptualized on a continuum between these measures, thus challenging the rigid objective/subjective dichotomy in the context of Lebanon. The results also suggest that the career success of these women managers is better predicted and explained by the individual and behavioral approaches than by the traditional, structural approach. This empirical work sheds light on the gendered working conditions that women experience and how they capitalize on their individual agency to survive the hegemonic masculinity embedded in their workplaces, along with the inequalities that it promotes. Originality/value – This study is the first to explore the conceptualizations and the determinants of the career success of women managers in Lebanon. However, the originality of this paper is not only limited to its contribution to the limited research on the careers of Arab women; it also extends to its usage of various approaches to predict career success as well as to adapt IT as a theoretical framework for capturing the myriad of factors that impact women’s careers and success. The originality of this study also lies in advancing the theoretical concept of hegemonic masculinity into studies looking at Arab women’s career experiences by shedding some light on how the reproduction of gender, gendered working practices, and agency impact their career success.

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TOWARD AN UNDERSTANDING OF ARAB WOMEN ENTREPRENEURS IN BAHRAIN AND OMAN

Journal of Developmental Entrepreneurship ◽

10.1142/s1084946705000100 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 10 (02) ◽

pp. 123-140 ◽

Cited By ~ 51

Author(s):

KATHLEEN DECHANT ◽

ASYA AL LAMKY

Keyword(s):

Women Entrepreneurs ◽

Arab Countries ◽

Business Trend ◽

Arab Women ◽

Family Balance ◽

Career Option ◽

Start Up ◽

Starting Point ◽

The World ◽

Work Family

Entrepreneurship has become a defining business trend in many countries throughout the world. The ranks of entrepreneurs contain a sizable contingent of women. As a result, research into the pathways of entrepreneurship as a general phenomenon as well as a career option for women has flourished in recent years. However, very little of this research has focused on women entrepreneurs in Arab countries, particularly those around the Gulf of Arabia, where private enterprise is viewed as a way for these nations to reduce their reliance on oil and their dependence on expatriate (foreign) workers. This study of the business start-up experiences of ten Arab women from Bahrain and Oman can serve as a starting point for such research. Although based on a non-representative sample, it suggests that the experiences of the Arab women entrepreneurs studied generally parallel those of their counterparts from other parts of the world with a few distinct differences. These differences relate to securing start-up capital and other resources, networking, and work/family balance. Infused with Arab and Islamic values, the unique cultural milieu played a major role in shaping the entrepreneurial experiences of the Bahraini and Omani business owners studied.

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Women entrepreneurs in South Korea: motivations, challenges and career success

European Journal of Training and Development ◽

10.1108/ejtd-03-2020-0039 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Yonjoo Cho ◽

Jiwon Park ◽

Soo Jeoung Han ◽

Moonju Sung ◽

ChanKyun Park

Keyword(s):

Chief Executive Officers ◽

Women Entrepreneurs ◽

Career Success ◽

Success Factors ◽

National Level ◽

Chief Executive ◽

Business Development ◽

Business Success ◽

Content Type ◽

Executive Officers

Purpose The purpose of this study was to investigate South Korean women entrepreneurs’ motivations to start a business, the challenges they faced in business development and key factors that contributed to their career success. Design/methodology/approach The authors conducted semi-structured interviews with 23 women entrepreneurs to gather qualitative details on their experiences and performed a survey with 125 women Chief Executive Officers who are affiliated with the Korean Venture Business Women’s Association. Findings The authors found necessity-driven push (e.g. economic necessity for family) and opportunity-based pull (e.g. a strong sense of self) motivational factors, challenges (e.g. gender stereotypes) and opportunities (e.g. creating a family-like organizational culture) and key success factors (e.g. personality and loyal employees) for their career success. Research limitations/implications There is a strong need to emphasize the import of culture at the national level that would impact women entrepreneurs’ careers and business success. A majority of the studies on HRD in small- and medium-sized enterprises shed light on individual owners’ perspectives only. Researchers need to take multiple-level (i.e. national, organizational and individual) factors into consideration in research on women’s entrepreneurship. Quantitative analysis in this study did not have any statistical significance and there were a few inconsistent findings (e.g. disadvantage as woman Chief Executive Officers) between quantitative and qualitative analysis. Future research is called for to investigate where and why different results occurred by using a mixed-methods research design and inferential statistical analysis for significance. Practical implications The increased support at the national level for entrepreneurship education before and after school that has not received sufficient attention in Korea will allow aspiring women to embark on entrepreneurial career paths from early on. At the organizational level, women entrepreneurs’ efforts to create a family-like organizational culture can be used as references for aspiring women who want to start and develop a business. At the individual level, HRD practitioners can develop leadership programs to share internal and external success factors so that aspiring women entrepreneurs can develop required individual (e.g. personality attributes) and social competencies (e.g. networking) in business development. Originality/value The two unique study findings that reflect the importance of cultural context include: our study showed how women entrepreneurs in Korea transformed the challenges they faced in business development into opportunities that can be used for entrepreneurship education for aspiring women entrepreneurs; and women entrepreneurs in Korea were humble enough to ascribe their career and business success to their loyal employees who have stayed in their companies with commitment, which has not been captured in research on women’s entrepreneurship in western contexts.

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