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Bearing the Unbearable: Exploring Women Entrepreneurs Resilience Building in Times of Crises

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Abstract

Recently, women entrepreneurship has become of particular interest to corporate social responsibility (CSR) scholarship, however, little is known about the impact of crises on women’s business activities and how they adapt to the disruptions and new market realities caused by a crisis. To design CSR initiatives that genuinely cater to the needs of women entrepreneurs, it is imperative to acquire an in-depth understanding of their unique experiences during times of crisis. This study employed a qualitative methodology to investigate the development of resilience among women entrepreneurs amidst crisis. The study sample comprised Iranian women entrepreneurs who were operating health-related businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to challenges related to money, market, management, motherhood, macro and meso level factors, women entrepreneurs were found to face crisis related challenges such as emotional exhaustion, altruism, fear of failure and uncertainty. Additionally, the findings revealed the different problem-based and emotion-based coping strategies (e.g., bootstrapping and emotional regulation) that women entrepreneurs used to build entrepreneurial resilience as well as business resilience. The resultant findings offer a comprehensive understanding of women entrepreneurs’ resilience-building process and suggest that resilience-building is a contextual as well as a gendered phenomenon. Implications for entrepreneurship research as well as women entrepreneurship and ethics literature is discussed.

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Notes

  1. The Iranian market was already experiencing a lack of connection to the international market due to economic sanctions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

    Afsaneh Bagheri, Pardis Zakeri & Zahra Arasti

  2. Graves School of Business and Management, Morgan State University, 1700 East Cold Spring Ln, Baltimore, MD, 20142, USA

    Golshan Javadian

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  1. Afsaneh Bagheri
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  2. Golshan Javadian
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  3. Pardis Zakeri
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Correspondence to Golshan Javadian.

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Bagheri, A., Javadian, G., Zakeri, P. et al. Bearing the Unbearable: Exploring Women Entrepreneurs Resilience Building in Times of Crises. J Bus Ethics (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-023-05577-9

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