Chapter 1: Introduction

This chapter introduces the study, its questions, and contributions and concludes with a model of the interdisciplinary approach taken. The study traverses from Japan to Colombia, exploring women’s entrepreneurship on five continents. The chapter defines entrepreneurship and argues for the study of women entrepreneurs as important contributors to business and economy. It outlines the unique challenges and opportunities women face in their local environments, focusing on how culture shapes their business models and activism. It identifies the three gaps in previous research and lists the attempts to fill these gaps by offering cross-cultural comparisons that are still lacking in the scholarship on women’s entrepreneurship: a heterogeneous rather than a homogeneous approach.

Much of the earlier research does not consider that gender roles may vary, within a society and over time. In this book, the case studies of women entrepreneurs derive from qualitative interviews and observations of entrepreneurship in context. The case studies are unique and provide in-depth cultural insights into business processes in various family and community settings, industries, and countries.

The chapter briefly presents the ethnographic method that enables unique insights into the experiences of a diverse group of women entrepreneurs, their team dynamics, business strategies, and work–life balance. The final section presents the interdisciplinary approach of cross-cultural management, international entrepreneurship, and organizational behavior and explains how these disciplines complement each other and overlap to form the basis for the framework of this study.