Unlocking the “SHERO” within : an exploration of how female entrepreneurs in the Caribbean use digital technologies for business transformation

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Best, Beverly and Lasalle, Paul and Nicolopoulou, Katerina (2024) Unlocking the “SHERO” within : an exploration of how female entrepreneurs in the Caribbean use digital technologies for business transformation. International Journal of Gender and Entrepreneurship. ISSN 1756-6266 (https://doi.org/10.1108/ijge-03-2024-0093)

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Abstract

Purpose: We explore the role of digital technologies for enhanced sustainability, hope, empowerment, resilience and optimism (SHERO) among female entrepreneurs in the Caribbean and the importance of embeddedness and contextualisation as a premise to integrating gender as a socially constructed situational practice. Design/methodology/approach: The study presents qualitative data results of semi-structured interviews with 30 female digital entrepreneurs who own and operate their businesses in a range of sectors in three national contexts in the Caribbean. Narratives of the participants were used to develop the themes that emerged from the interviews. Findings : The Caribbean context is an overarching factor that influences every facet of the lived experiences of female digital entrepreneurs. From the different contextual dimensions, we gained insights on the nuances and paradoxes of dominant assumptions related to how digital technologies influence business transformation of female entrepreneurship as it relates to sustainability, hope, empowerment, resilience and optimism. Through contextual gendered lens, these five business areas are found to be overlapping and mutually overlapping features of the lived experiences of female digital entrepreneurs. Originality/value: The Caribbean region, comprising of small island developing states, epitomises a unique spatially fragmented entrepreneurial context described as islandness which also offers a “fresh” context within the Global South that captures novelty and heterogeneity of female entrepreneurs in the digital space.

ORCID iDs

Best, Beverly, Lasalle, Paul and Nicolopoulou, Katerina ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2634-5296;
  • Item type:Article
    ID code:91642
    Dates:
    Date
    Event
    19 December 2024
    Published
    19 December 2024
    Published Online
    27 August 2024
    Accepted
    12 March 2024
    Submitted
    Notes:For the purposes of open access, a CC BY 4.0 licence has been applied to the accepted manuscript
    Subjects:UNSPECIFIED
    Department:Strathclyde Business School > Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship, Strategy and Innovation
    Depositing user: Pure Administrator
    Date deposited:20 Dec 2024 13:49
    Last modified:21 Dec 2024 01:29
    URI:https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/id/eprint/91642
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