NEGOTIATING MOTHERHOOD AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP THROUGH THE LENS OF TEMPORALITY

Abstract

Scholarship on women’s negotiation of the work-life interface predominantly adopts a quantitative clock time perspective to understand the competing demands of work and family. In making sense of the phenomenon “mumpreneurship”, scholars likewise conceive the conflicting temporal demands of entrepreneurship and motherhood quantitatively. Yet, the “clock time perspective” is limited and fails to thoroughly account for women’s complex experiences in negotiating motherhood and entrepreneurship. My thesis therefore seeks to expand this conception of temporality by exploring the multiplicities and nuances of time that shape mumpreneurs’ everyday experiences, and the “time work” they undertake to negotiate these experiences. In doing so, I attend to the various meanings, qualities and forms of time that exist alongside quantitative notions of time. Using women’s narratives, I demonstrate how “time” and women’s “temporal” experiences may at once be intimately linked to identity, yet also embedded in social relations and institutions. I also show how women cope with their troubling everyday realities and identities through an expansion of their maternal and entrepreneurial time-frames. Given the complexity of temporal experiences and the time work undertaken by mumpreneurs, I argue for diverse conceptions of time to theorise the intricacies in mumpreneurs’ negotiation of the work-life interface.