Managing the business of everyday life: the roles of space and place in ‘mumpreneurship’

Purpose - This paper develops gendered entrepreneurship theory through a focus on the roles of space and place in the daily lives and businesses of mothers who have configured business around the daily routines of family work. Design/methodology/approach - Through a consideration of the accounts of twenty-nine ‘mumpreneurs’, and using a framework forwarded by Jarvis (2005) to understand the geographically embedded “infrastructure of everyday life”, this paper seeks to understand mumpreneurial decisionmaking, choice and constraint. Findings - Spatial factors, in their myriad forms, run through and affect mothers’ different levels of capability and constraint, and thus the (gender-role and entrepreneurial) ‘choices’ that individuals and families make. Placing families in the realities of specific, material locales helps to embed our understandings of these decision-making processes in real places. Originality/value - This discussion: a) advances new understanding about how space and place enable or constrain mumpreneurship (in particular) and entrepreneurship (more generally), and, b) provides a lens through which to examine the structure/agency dualism in relation to gendered entrepreneurship.