The bittersweet taste of family business: exploring the dynamics gendering and racializing entrepreneurship

Pecis, Lara and Ge, Bingbing 2025. The bittersweet taste of family business: exploring the dynamics gendering and racializing entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship and Regional Development 10.1080/08985626.2025.2459232

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Abstract

Family businesses are rich in stories and narratives and offer a fertile ground to explore ‘everyday life of family businesses’ that ‘may be difficult to access through other forms of empirical material’ (Nordqvist and Gartner 2020, 122–123). In this paper, we use Helen (Tse’s 2007) biography Sweet Mandarin to explore the complex dynamics of gender, race, and entrepreneurship in a transnational migrant family business. We regard this biography as Helen’s attempt to make sense of her family’s entrepreneurial past, to give voice to the women in her family and gain legitimacy in their entrepreneurial practices. Adopting an intersectionality lens attentive towards Chinese feminism and cultural contextualities, we contribute to current entrepreneurship feminist works that aim at unveiling structures reproducing gender and racial inequalities. Our theoretical approach reveals how Helen understood and legitimized Lily’s entrepreneurial journey as a Chinese woman entrepreneur through three mechanisms: i) silently appropriating traditional assumptions of entrepreneurship; ii) associating family legacy to the entrepreneurial future; iii) anchoring on a hopeful future to overcome sacrifices. Our research demonstrates the power of biography as a unique genre of literature that offers in-depth insights into the intersection of gender and racial dynamics in family business that would go otherwise unnoticed.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Business (Including Economics)
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
ISSN:	0898-5626
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	29 January 2025
Date of Acceptance:	24 January 2025
Last Modified:	03 Mar 2025 11:07
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/175706

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