Women Entrepreneurship: Spiritual Bricolage, Family Well-being, and Escalation of Commitment
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Date
2025-12-01
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AAU
Abstract
The overarching aim of this dissertation is to understand how women entrepreneurs operating in the resource-constrained context of Ethiopia navigate the intertwined complexities of entrepreneurial life. This objective is addressed through three empirical research papers, all situated within the Ethiopian context. By examining the dynamic interplay between spiritual bricolage, family well-being, and escalation of commitment, the dissertation advances an integrated understanding of how women sustain entrepreneurial engagement under persistent structural and economic constraints. Drawing on life-story interviews and employing the Gioia method, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, and narrative inquiry, the research provides a rich, grounded account of women’s meaning-making, decision processes, and adaptive strategies. The dissertation contributes to the field of women’s entrepreneurship and to the theoretical lenses it adopts in several ways. First, it examines spiritual bricolage as a mechanism through which women mobilize spiritual practices and beliefs to reinterpret risk, respond to resource scarcity, and maintain legitimacy. Three strategies—adventurous sourcing, diligent embedding, and relational anchoring—are identified, demonstrating how spiritual resources shape entrepreneurial motivation, persistence, and everyday action in environments marked by uncertainty. Second, the dissertation explores how women construct family well-being as a collective and relational outcome of their entrepreneurial engagement. Rather than viewing well-being as an individual psychological state, women articulate it as a multidimensional process embedded in household needs and intergenerational aspirations. Four interconnected dimensions—family growth, family potential, family goals, and family commitment—show how entrepreneurship becomes a critical pathway for securing stability, enabling children’s futures, and advancing family continuity. Third, the dissertation extends Escalation of Commitment theory by examining commitment processes within contexts of resource scarcity. Contrary to traditional interpretations that emphasize persistence in failing ventures, the findings reveal that women often direct their commitment toward sustaining key resources—financial capital, social networks, legitimacy, and entrepreneurial knowledge—rather than toward any single enterprise. Strategic exits, reconfigurations, and re-entries reflect deliberate resource management and adaptive decision-making. The concept of resource-flow escalation is introduced to capture this resource-centered logic of persistence. Last but not least, this dissertation contributes to scholarship on entrepreneurial bricolage, well-being, and commitment by showing how women entrepreneurs actively mobilize spiritual grounding, family relationships, and resource configurations to maintain agency, meaning, and