عوامل تعیین کننده عملکرد شرکت زنان کارآفرین در یک محیط خصمانه Determinants of women entrepreneurs’ firm performance in a hostile environment

1. Introduction Most research on women entrepreneurs focuses on developed countries, while limited knowledge exists on women entrepreneurs in emerging economies with inadequate regulations and inefficient systems (Kimosop, Korir, & White, 2016; Mas-Tur, Pinazo, Tur-Porcar, & Sánchez-Masferrer, 2015). Even less research exists on developing countries that have recently undergone dramatic political and sociocultural unrest, leading to hostile environments for business activity. This study shows that the current state of female entrepreneurship requires better definitions of new boundary conditions in cases of volatile and hostile dynamic environments. The extant approaches to female entrepreneurship typically invoke the family embeddedness perspective (Aldrich & Cliff, 2003), though this perspective is usually applied in mature and developed economic and socio-cultural settings, such as the United States or Canada. Furthermore, the family embeddedness perspective better explains new business start-ups and their access to resources during the launch phase of the venture rather than the entrepreneurial processes taking place throughout all stages of firm development. Finally, the perspective mainly applies to nuclear families, not to the idiosyncrasies of female entrepreneurship. In particular, the family embeddedness perspective applies, by definition and purpose, to family venture start-ups headed by either male or female entrepreneurs operating in a stable institutional environment. In response to this lack of gender focus within the family embeddedness perspective, Brush, de Bruin, and Welter (2009) propose a context-dependent 5 M (money, management, market, macro/meso environments, and motherhood) model to better account for the real nature and intricacies of the dynamics inherent in female entrepreneurship. However, the 5M model draws from the institutional-based view (IBV), which assumes that institutions are reliable and remain stable over time. As such, the IBV may not be appropriate for less stable contexts found in developing and/or emerging markets. Therefore, Welter and Smallbone (2011) extend the institutional approach and tailor it to the dynamics of emerging economies. In their extension, they focus on the impediments entrepreneurs encountered in the former Soviet Republics, though they do not exclude its usefulness in other challenging environments. Absent in the extant literature is a systemic approach to understanding entrepreneurial processes in hostile environments experiencing different forms of social unrest, the effects and aftermath of war, and other revolutionary movements prevalent in some countries. That is, no specific or sufficient approach or theory exists to address business operations in these hostile environments. Thus, Welter and Smallbone’s (2011) theory for understanding female entrepreneurship must be expanded still further to embrace hostile dynamics. The current study shows that the relationships between variables of interest typically found in the extant models, which are based on the data from mature, stable, or even challenging environments, are not valid in hostile settings. We show that what matters when operating in a hostile environment is human capital, not social capital. To examine women entrepreneurs in a hostile environment, we conduct our study in Egypt, where the Arab Spring, a revolutionary wave of demonstrations, took place in 2011–2012. The economic, political, and cultural environment that Egyptian women entrepreneurs face is unpredictable and constraining for launching and growing a business. In such volatile socio-political environments, the performance and sustainability of women-owned businesses face unique challenges that can negatively affect the business (Al-Dajani & Marlow, 2013).