How women entrepreneurs manage the digitalisation of their business initiating a dialogue between the entrepreneurship as practice approach and the theory of bricolage

Abstract

The paper seeks to explain through the prism of bricolage and practices how women make their businesses digital. Based on the fact that women often create small ventures in service activities without much digital content, and find it difficult to make their business model and venture evolve and grow, we argue that these entrepreneurs are threatened by the pressure to become digital with their existing business models. In an attempt to understand how women entrepreneurs manage to make their ventures digital, the analysis of three extreme cases from the mentoring industry through two theoretical prismsthe theory of bricolage and entrepreneurship as practicereveals that women who "bricole" while making their business digital are mostly those who are not embedded in masculine norms of entrepreneurship. We note the signs of bricolage cognition during the digitalization. Data will allow us to establish a hypothesis according to which bricolage cognition might be gendered. We also note that the choice of a familiarity-based or conventional bricolage as expressed in the three cases are mostly achieved via practices of networking, and by the social beliefs women have inherited during past experience or from their exchanges with peers. This article provides a first dialogue between the emerging literature on EAP (entrepreneurship as practice) and the widely diffused theory of bricolage.