Alternative Entrepreneurship: A Semantic Understanding of the Experience of Entrepreneur Women regarding Economic Participation in Shiraz

Participation has often been considered as one of the main components and indicators of development by various thinkers and experts because social life is possible when people interact and cooperate with each other as members of one body. People's participation in the development process is so important that development is basically considered a participatory process because people's participation is the basis of social and economic development. Thematically, participation is divided into political, social, economic, and so on. Although their exact separation is difficult due to their entanglement, overlap, and complementarity, in the present study, economic participation is considered. . The benefits of participating in the development process should go to all individuals or groups involved. One of the groups participating in the development process that should have a fair share of development benefits is the category of women. Because in today's world, overcoming family, economic, cultural, and political crises and achieving sustainable development require the full participation of different groups and women are the first hope for the development of families and the growth and development of their society. Women's success not only benefits the country economically but alsoit creates social and cultural benefits.  

The present study seeks to investigate the semantic understanding of the experience of entrepreneur women regarding economic participation in Shiraz. The purpose of this study is to investigate what entrepreneur women understand about economic participation and what conditions, contexts, and strategies are considered important in this field. This research is based on a qualitative approach using the systematic ground theory method. The method of data collection is the semi-structured interview. The interviewees of the present study were entrepreneur women in Shiraz who were selected through purposive sampling for the interview. A total of 25 interviews were selected. In the interview processcare was taken to conduct the interviews with appropriate quality and  avoiding bias in order to maintain the validity of the research. To assess the reliability, the two experts also coded several interviews and the difference between their coding results was small and negligible.The research data have been analyzed based on Strauss and Corbin’s (2012) three-stage coding approach (open, axial, and selective). The related codes were obtained focusing on a major category of organization and the main categories of research. Discussion of Results and

After analyzing and interpreting the information extracted from the interviews regarding the entrepreneurial model of women in Shiraz, 69 sub-categories and 19 main categories were identified. The findings indicated that broken family interactions, the experience of multiple deprivations, favorable entrepreneurial spirit, and multiple sources of capital are categories that causally affect the economic participation of women entrepreneurs. The resilient femininity, integrated femininity, authoritarian parenting style and support, and lack of family support shaped the ground conditions for the economic participation of entrepreneur women. The institutional disorder, economic disorder, lack of applied skills, and a sexist work environment are interfering factors. Such factors  were effective for economic success and economic participation. Women's entrepreneurship and economic participation could have a variety of consequences including attitudinal changes, identity changes, lifestyle changes, and passive lifestyle changes. Finally, it can be said that women have presented alternative female entrepreneurship as a model of economic participation, as opposed to a model based on masculine structures.