Chapter 3: Entrepreneurship Education-Digital Entrepreneurship Intentions-Female Digital Entrepreneurship Nexus: Moderation of Sociocultural and Social-Technical Forces

This chapter explores the significance of female digital entrepreneurship in Africa. Specifically, the chapter demonstrates how scholarship on female digital entrepreneurship has created fissures by celebrating the significance of digital entrepreneurship intentions (DEIs) and entrepreneurship education (EE) in shaping digital entrepreneurship while downplaying social, technical and sociocultural forces that regulate these relationships. A conceptually grounded approach to reviewing secondary literature was deemed appropriate for overcoming the criticism of dependence on averages often levelled against positivist and purist framing of entrepreneurship and small business research. Drawing on an extensive literature review to map associative relationships, the chapter provides evidence of social-technical (i.e. technology overload, technology complexity and anxiety) forces’ moderation of the EE-DEIs-digital entrepreneurship linkage. Additionally, the interplay of these linkages was also partially conditioned by sociocultural forces (i.e. patriarchy, gender norms and religious convictions). Apart from stimulating more research into an under-researched niche of the forces that hinder digital entrepreneurship, the chapter inspires policy, legislative and social reforms inclined to reduce cultural and technical inhibitors to female digital entrepreneurship in resource poor contexts. In view of the infrequent literature on how social-technical and sociocultural factors impact digital entrepreneurship, the chapter’s novelty lies in its theoretical explanations of these forces that moderate the EE-DEIs-digital entrepreneurship interface. The chapter also elevates the interpretations of digital entrepreneurship by questioning the sufficiency of taken-for-granted assumptions that privilege EE and DEIs in accounting for digital entrepreneurship while downplaying contextual factors that regulate these business creation outcomes.