Working as female entrepreneurs in the Global South. The gains, the losses and the future. Insights into the roles of culture, traditions, spirituality and relative geography

Focusing on Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Malaysia, this project explores how female entrepreneurs negotiate with their local contexts and creatively generate working practices that enable work to fit around their lives, influenced by their families, cultural context, and spiritual assumptions, and will be particularly concerned with how disadvantage interacts with this. Embedded in a qualitative exploratory approach, the project employs interviewing, diaries, and visual ethnography to reveal rich and insightful stories of the research subjects. Knowledge informing this proposal is guided by the research team’s expertise in entrepreneurship and emerging economies, socio-cultural and spiritual influences, workforce inequalities, and marginalised working experiences, including within geographically-isolated communities. This project will provide complex new learning around innovative working practices which can combat economic inequality and social marginalisation. More broadly, its findings will enable policymakers to apply this knowledge to improve individuals’ welfare in the Global South.

Principal Investigator: Dr Trang Vu, University of Southampton