Elaine Porter

Successful Women Entrepreneurs as Pioneers: Results from a Study Conducted in Karaikudi, Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract This research sought to study women entrepreneurs’ experiences in terms of their motives and the obstacles they faced in establishing and growing their businesses. Nine women entrepreneurs in a small southern Indian town with entrepreneurial training and who had been running in their business for at least five years were part of a focus group. Gender-neutral and gendered motives guided their decision to enter into the business even if partnered with a male. Patriarchal norms within and outside family provided many challenges along the way. Work-family conflicts were among them. Women used gender-based strategies to manage interactions with governmental and bank officials and a professional demeanour to deal with male clients. Children sometimes participated in their businesses after school. By being successful entrepreneurs, these women proved to be pioneers in their milieu. Policy suggestions and research directions follow.

Beyond Caring Labour to Provisioning Work

Beyond Caring Labour to Provisioning Work is based on a four-year, multi-site study of women who are members of contemporary community organizations. the authors reveal the complex ways in which these women define and value their own work, investigating what supports and constrains their individual and collective efforts. Calling on the state to assist more with citizens’ provisioning responsibilities, Beyond Caring Labour to Provisioning Work provides an excellent basis for new discussions on equitable and sustainable public policies.

Five Residents Speak: The Meaning of Living with Dying in a Long-Term Care Home

Personal meanings given to the experience of living with nursing home death were shared by 5 nursing home residents. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews. Using M. van Manens (1990) hermeneutic phenomenology, the lived experience of residents emerged as a compilation of 5 dynamically occurring themes, including (a) mapping relations, (b) pacing oneself, (c) maintaining belongingness, (d) reconciling death as part of life, and (e) engaging in preparatory review. The overarching essence of the lived experienced was defined as reflection toward resolution of dying as a “resident” in a sea of life gains and losses. Residents’ expressions revealed that living with peers’ dying in a nursing home is closely entwined with how life is experienced during ones final days.

Women's provisioning work: counting the cost for women living on low income

This paper reports on a research project that uses the concept of provisioning as a starting place in understanding the activities women in marginalized communities undertake to provide for themselves and members of their households and neighborhoods. This project explores the household and collective provisioning undertaken by women who are all part of formal community organizations in Canada. The work women do is explored from the dimension of womens relationships of responsibility. This vantage point uncovers a complex web of activity including paid employment, voluntary work, care work, exchanges of goods and services, community work, and self-provisioning. In addition, the provisioning strategies that women use when public resources are scarce are explored. In the face of significant cutbacks in public provision of goods and services, women are engaging in a complex network of activities in order to compensate through private provisioning for resources that are no longer available through public provisioning. The policy context in which these strategies are pursued is explored as well as the way in which risky policies produce risky coping strategies.

Women's community work challenges market citizenship

This article examines the connection between womens community provisioning work and their participation in citizenship activities that seek to alter an inequitable distribution of rights and resources. As neo-liberal policy regimes restructure the collective work of women, we explore whether womens community work has become a substitute for public resources or whether it serves as a fundamental challenge to an individualization of citizenship by reconnecting citizenship and social rights. We draw on interview and focus group data from a multi-year year investigation of what supports and what limits the provisioning work women perform in six community organizations in Canada serving vulnerable populations and neighborhoods. Three connections between citizenship activities and community provisioning are discussed: how women challenge notions of the worthy citizen; how they bring privatized need back into the public arena; and how they move from solidarity to advocacy.