The Glass Is Half Full: A Gendered Model of Illegal Entrepreneurship

Abstract

Individuals in impoverished communities often face considerable adversity. Under such circumstances, they can turn to illegal entrepreneurship. However, from a gendered perspective, women are typically considered incongruent with the masculinity of crime and entrepreneurship and, thus, illegal entrepreneurship. In this study, we were interested in exploring how women navigate their society’s gender role expectations to engage in illegal entrepreneurship. We adopted a qualitative, inductive approach to explore the cognitive processes through which women entrepreneurs navigate these tensions to manufacture and sell illegal alcohol within their impoverished communities throughout India. Our resulting gendered model of the cognitive processes underlying illegal entrepreneurship in impoverished communities offers new insights into how women entrepreneurs use cognitive carve-outs to navigate potentially conflicting societal expectations regarding gender and entrepreneurial roles. Further, we explore how entrepreneurship is influenced by construals, particularly in contexts of resource scarcity and gendered constraints. Finally, in line with the dark side of entrepreneurship, we shed light on how women can justify to themselves and others entrepreneurial action that, while shielding themselves from immediate personal repercussions, imposes substantial costs on many members of their impoverished communities.