Managing the business of everyday life: the roles of space and place in “mumpreneurship”

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop 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 29 “mumpreneurs” and using a framework forwarded by Jarvis to understand the geographically embedded “infrastructure of everyday life”, this paper seeks to understand mumpreneurial decision making, 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: advances new understanding about how space and place enable or constra...