Creating space, place and legitimacy: the use of social media by Saudi women entrepreneurs in micro and small enterprises

Abstract

There is research interest internationally in the field of women’s entrepreneurship, including in the Arab world. The use of social media by Arab women entrepreneurs occurs in a unique socio-cultural context. Using 5M (market, money, management, meso and macro environments and motherhood), a gender-based framework drawn from institutional theory, this study explores Saudi women entrepreneurs’ use of social media to create a sense of space, place and legitimacy for their entrepreneurial activities. The study adopted an exploratory qualitative research design. Using face-to-face, in-depth interviews, primary data were collected from Saudi women entrepreneurs to determine their entrepreneurial activities on social media, and from senior personnel of support institutions to explore the meso and macro environment. Secondary data sources, including public records and reports, were used to enrich and validate the data. A systematic inductive analysis based on Gioia, Corley and Hamilton’s (2013) approach was followed by thematic analysis techniques. This research expands on the body of knowledge on women’s entrepreneurship by examining why and how women entrepreneurs use social media to facilitate the creation of space, place and legitimacy in the Arabic sociocultural environment. The research contributes theoretically through extending the 5M framework by adding a sixth dimension of the micro-level factors and studying ongoing businesses. Adding the sixth M enables a better understanding of how key factors, such as women’s personality traits, education and motivations, are shaped by women’s meso and macro environment which created an openness to innovation through digital technologies. This study confirms that, even with the recent, more favourable sociocultural, economic, and policy shifts, Saudi women entrepreneurs must grapple with an array of hurdles to success. A Saudi woman’ primary place and space to which she is still largely restricted is the home, and her legitimacy is still grounded in her role as mother and wife – from her own perspective as well as society’s. Like many other Saudi women entrepreneurs, however, this study’s participants have used social media to work around constraints on their space to create a virtual business space, more or less successfully. Particularly in the start-up phase, the women entrepreneurs capitalised on their place (in the home and society), using digital technologies to facilitate market development through their extended families and networks. While not without costs and risks, social media has helped them to tap markets that were closed to them only a decade or two ago, including in some traditionally masculine sectors and beyond Saudi Arabia’s borders. Encouraged by the Saudi government, with better access to education and support services, driven by strong personal traits, enabled by social media, and using various cooperative strategies, they are beginning to reshape social norms: legitimising the idea that a Saudi woman can be both an entrepreneur and a good mother and wife. Nevertheless, the ongoing practical and ethical tensions in fulfilling both roles can limit, if not prohibit, starting and growing a business.