It takes a village: Women's entrepreneurship in Worcester, Massachusetts

This research concerns the way that locally established institutions, agents within these institutions, and women business owners shape women's participation in entrepreneurship. While women's business ownership is increasing, women are still concentrated in a few economic sectors and their businesses tend to remain smaller and are less profitable than similar man-owned businesses. Recent research on regional productive systems argues that shared norms and values help to define local institutions that create the conditions for entrepreneurship. Institutions also define the conditions for legitimacy within a productive system. While we understand a considerable amount about how institutions and the actors within these institutions shape women's position in the local labor market, there is little understanding of how women's self-employment is similarly shaped. This dissertation offers an understanding of how gender is linked to institutional arrangements concerning entrepreneurship and how these linkages enable and constrain women's access to resources for their enterprises.;A case study comparing the resources available to women-business owners in female-dominated sectors, gender-integrated sectors, and male-dominated sectors in urban and suburban areas of the Worcester Massachusetts MSA forms the empirical analysis. Primary data were gathered from local resource agents and women business owners using semi-structured interviews and a postal and telephone questionnaire.;Resource agents in Worcester operate within institutional structures that are defined according to masculine norms linked to locally understood notions of business ownership, skill, and market demand. These institutional structures vary across the metropolitan area and create an uneven pattern of advantage and disadvantage for women business owners. Women typically have a great deal of difficulty establishing legitimacy within these institutional structures, although this difficulty is spatially variable. Women, therefore, are less likely than are men to receive the advice and resources they need to start and grow their businesses from the resource agents who are embedded within these structures. Women do, however, find resources in their everyday lives that enable their business ownership. These resources are linked to gender norms that constrain women's access to resources from resource agents.