The tripartite intersection of entrepreneurship, gender, and digitalization through an integrated lens of the FIT-5M framework

Women’s entrepreneurship is increasingly positioned as central to inclusive economic development, yet scholarship continues to under-theorize how gendered institutional structures shape women’s digital entrepreneurial trajectories in conservative contexts such as the Gulf region (Yadav et al., 2022; Thompson-Whiteside, Turnbull, and Fletcher-Brown, 2021). Empirical work documents capability gaps, legitimacy struggles and the enabling potential of digital platforms, but rarely integrates these mechanisms into a coherent explanation of why many women-led digital ventures remain small, precarious and growth-constrained in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) (Hashim, 2023; Alhajri and Aloud, 2024). The central problem addressed in this paper is the absence of an integrated theoretical account that explains how gendered institutional logics and resource conditions jointly configure Emirati women entrepreneurs’ bounded agency in digital food and beverage (F&B) entrepreneurship.

Existing research reveals three interrelated gaps. First, while Feminist Institutional Theory (FIT) and the 5M framework are frequently used to examine women’s entrepreneurship, they are rarely integrated to explain how institutional norms shape the functioning of Money, Market, Management, Motherhood and Macro/Meso mechanisms in platformised environments (Brush et al., 2010; Krook and Mackay, 2011). Second, limited attention has been given to how Emirati women negotiate digital legitimacy and bounded visibility while remaining embedded within family authority structures and moral expectations (Thompson-Whiteside, Turnbull, and Fletcher-Brown, 2021; Hashim, 2023). Third, prior studies tend to examine institutional supports, digital affordances and capability formation separately, overlooking how macro-level policies, meso-level intermediaries such as platforms, councils and universities and informal gender norms interact to shape women’s entrepreneurial agency and venture trajectories (Paul et al., 2023; Olan et al., 2024; Nigam and Shatila, 2024). Addressing these theoretical and empirical limitations requires moving beyond accounts that treat digitalization, institutional support and family influence as separate explanatory domains. What remains under-theorized is how these forces operate together to structure women’s entrepreneurial agency in practice.

In the UAE context, formal policy reforms and digital infrastructure signal inclusion, yet women’s ventures frequently stabilize at the micro-enterprise scale. This paradox suggests that the critical question is not whether opportunities exist, but how institutional logics condition the legitimate enactment of those opportunities. To address this problem, this study integrates FIT with the 5M framework to develop a multilevel explanation of Emirati women’s digital entrepreneurship in the F&B sector. Rather than cataloging barriers or success factors, the study examines how institutional norms shape resource mobilization, visibility practices, capability development and growth pacing. In doing so, it conceptualizes entrepreneurial agency as institutionally negotiated rather than institutionally unconstrained. Empirically, the study draws on in-depth interviews with 20 Emirati women founders operating digitally enabled F&B ventures across the UAE. This context provides a revealing case for examining how digital platforms intersect with gendered norms of modesty, family governance and reputational legitimacy. By situating digital entrepreneurship within a layered institutional environment comprising formal, meso, informal and cognitive domains, the study seeks to explain why digital participation does not automatically translate into scalable autonomy.

Guided by this integrated lens, the study addresses three research questions:

Together, these questions enable the development of a contextually grounded explanation of how women convert institutional constraint into patterned entrepreneurial strategies. The study advances a theory of bounded digital agency, demonstrating how agency is enacted within, rather than outside, gendered institutional logics in platformised markets. It extends FIT by showing that digital environments do not simply reflect institutional logics but actively mediate their enactment through platform-based visibility, interaction and legitimacy practices. In parallel, the study advances the 5M framework by theorizing how the Motherhood and Macro/Meso dimensions operate as regulatory mechanisms that structure the activation and limits of Money, Market and Management within digital contexts. Rather than treating the 5M dimensions as static categories, the framework is reconceptualized as dynamically conditioned by institutional logics, offering a processual and context-sensitive extension.

Each subsection focuses on a distinct dimension of the 5M framework, avoiding duplication by linking specific institutional mechanisms to their corresponding resource domains. Building on the introduction, this section critically reviews scholarship on women’s digital entrepreneurship within the Gulf, with a particular focus on the UAE’s evolving institutional and digital landscape. The aim is to situate Emirati women’s F&B ventures within wider theoretical and empirical debates on gendered entrepreneurship, institutional change and digital transformation. The review integrates insights from FIT and the 5M framework, drawing on regional and comparative studies to unpack how formal reforms, informal norms and digital affordances jointly shape women’s entrepreneurial legitimacy, capability development and strategic visibility. This synthesis provides the conceptual grounding for the study’s qualitative design and theoretical contribution.

Recent Gulf scholarship moves beyond the “add-women-and-stir” approach toward theoretically grounded, multilevel analyses that explain how gendered institutions shape entrepreneurial behavior (Yadav et al., 2022). FIT, originally advanced by Krook and Mackay (2011), provides a powerful lens for understanding how gendered power relations are embedded within institutional rules, norms and practices. FIT extends new institutionalism by showing how institutions reproduce gender hierarchies, while also creating sites for negotiation and transformation. Subsequent developments by Bogaards (2022) highlight that institutions are not static entities but dynamic arenas in which actors actively negotiate and reshape gendered arrangements, maintaining, critiquing or transforming them through everyday practices. In the UAE context, FIT is particularly salient because it disaggregates formal (laws, regulations, financial schemes), informal (social norms, family authority, reputational logics) and cognitive (belief systems and gender scripts) dimensions of the institutional environment. This multilevel perspective clarifies how cultural and policy infrastructures jointly configure gendered opportunity structures, shaping women’s entrepreneurial participation and growth.

In parallel, the 5M framework Money, Market, Management, Motherhood and Macro/Meso provides a complementary analytical scaffold that captures both resource access and contextual embeddedness (Brush et al., 2010). Integrating FIT with the 5M model enables this study to connect individual-level resource mobilization to the broader institutional logics that condition women’s entrepreneurial agency. Evidence from Gulf contexts shows that Motherhood and Macro/Meso dimensions strongly shape how Money, Market and Management resources translate into entrepreneurial outcomes, even where formal support exists (Thompson-Whiteside, Turnbull, and Fletcher-Brown, 2021; Hashim, 2023). Taken together, FIT explains why the 5M resource domains operate differently for women in the region, as informal and cognitive norms traverse both online and offline entrepreneurial arenas, shaping credibility, modesty and legitimacy.

The UAE combines an ambitious entrepreneurship agenda with extensive physical and digital infrastructure, yet outcomes remain mediated by gendered informal institutions. Recent reviews conclude that women’s outcomes remain filtered through gendered informal institutions, family endorsement, modest self-presentation and reputation management despite supportive policy (Hashim, 2023). In the UAE specifically, women entrepreneurs engage in legitimacy work to reconcile professional credibility with expectations of propriety and community service; these identity strategies secure acceptance from customers, relatives, financiers and officials (Thompson-Whiteside, Turnbull, and Fletcher-Brown, 2021). A FIT reading highlights the co-evolution of rules and norms: reforms enable entry, but meso-level routines in banks, investor circles and associations can reproduce gendered gatekeeping if not explicitly redesigned (Yadav et al., 2022). The implication for digital micro-ventures in F&B is that macro-level support must be translated through meso-actors (platforms, councils, incubators) that recognize and mitigate the reputational and social-approval frictions women face.

Recent systematic reviews indicate that digitalization reduces start-up costs, expands reach and diversifies monetization pathways, but outcomes depend on the ecosystem, where coherence across skills, finance, governance and market access must be aligned (Sharma and Yadav, 2020; Paul et al., 2023). In the Gulf, digital channels enable home-based transactions and flexible scheduling. However, visibility dilemmas persist, as appearing on camera, interacting publicly with unknown men or courting virality can trigger reputational risk under modesty norms (Thompson-Whiteside, Turnbull, and Fletcher-Brown, 2021; Yadav et al., 2022; Hashim, 2023). UAE evidence shows how founders adopt bounded-visibility tactics (logo-led branding, women-first customer targeting, moderated comment spaces) to balance growth with respectability (Thompson-Whiteside, Turnbull, and Fletcher-Brown, 2021).

From a FIT perspective, digital platforms operate as sites where institutional logics are enacted through practices of presentation, audience curation and interaction. Thus, digitalization enables participation but can also reproduce hierarchy unless meso-level supports (trusted marketplaces, anti-harassment policies, women-centered mentorship) are in place (Yadav et al., 2022).

Across Gulf studies, family financing and grants remain common for early-stage women-led ventures. In contrast, equity and venture capital participation are limited and shaped by investor perceptions of risk and growth potential (Hashim, 2023). Evidence from the region shows that self-efficacy and social support are stronger proximal predictors of women’s entrepreneurial intention than technology access alone; dynamic capabilities, such as content agility and analytics-led iteration, mediate the link from opportunity to action (Nigam and Shatila, 2024). For F&B micro-ventures, digital market entry is comparatively accessible (Instagram, WhatsApp, delivery platforms). However, scaling continues to hinge on public-facing legitimacy, including supplier partnerships, events and mixed-gender collaborations, which some women cautiously limit, trading reach for reputational safety (Hashim, 2023; Thompson-Whiteside, Turnbull, and Fletcher-Brown, 2021). As discussed earlier, legitimacy serves as a key mechanism shaping market participation, in which financial and exchange relationships are governed by trust and respectability as much as by price and competence. These dynamics reflect how normative and cognitive institutional pillar’s structure market access and financial engagement.

Studies position identity work as an ongoing managerial practice in which Gulf women entrepreneurs foreground expertise, community contributions and quality while curating modest online personae to build legitimacy (Thompson-Whiteside, Turnbull, and Fletcher-Brown, 2021). Comparative work shows similar mechanisms in other scrutinized or masculinized domains, where legitimacy is constructed through ongoing discursive and presentational labor (Essers, McAdam, and Ossenkop, 2025). In the UAE’s digital economy, capability pipelines remain critical. Recent evidence from higher education indicates that curriculum–market mismatches in digital entrepreneurship education programs remain theoretical and fail to expose students to real-world storefronts, payments, data analytics and creator-economy monetization (Syed, Alzahmi, and Tariq, 2024). From a FIT perspective, these gaps reflect meso-level institutional constraints, where the availability and accessibility of training, mentorship and validation mechanisms shape capability formation. The remedy lies not only in additional coursework but in mentoring architectures and assessment routines that support culturally compatible entrepreneurial performance (e.g. women-first mentoring circles, safe co-working, verified “women-led seller” badges on platforms).

The Motherhood dimension, understood as gendered care roles and family authority, rather than biological status, remains a decisive influence on venture form (home-based or flexible-hours) and growth pacing (Thompson-Whiteside, Turnbull, and Fletcher-Brown, 2021; Yadav et al., 2022; Hashim, 2023). Gulf studies show women often frame entrepreneurship as an extension of caregiving and community contribution to secure family endorsement (Hashim, 2023). In the UAE, these narratives are strategically mobilized in legitimacy work, enabling founders to access family labor, informal capital and reputational cover even as they commercialize domestic F&B expertise (Thompson-Whiteside, Turnbull, and Fletcher-Brown, 2021). From a FIT perspective, such narration functions as an institutional bridge that enables women to work through, rather than against, prevailing norms. This implies that policies aimed at scaling must address time poverty (e.g. childcare, logistics partnerships) and reputational risk management, not just financing and training.

Across the reviewed literature, three conclusions are robust for the UAE F&B context. First, digitalization functions as a conditional enabler, expanding market channels while interacting with informal gendered logics, as legitimacy work increasingly migrates online through bounded-visibility practices (Thompson-Whiteside, Turnbull, and Fletcher-Brown, 2021; Paul et al., 2023).

Second, key frictions concentrate at the meso level, where capability pipelines, platform governance, finance routines and mentoring architectures mediate the extent to which macro policy translates into sustained entrepreneurial growth (Olan et al., 2024; Hashim, 2023). Third, the Motherhood and Macro/meso dimensions shape Money, Market and Management outcomes through the normative and cognitive institutional environment.

Two gaps motivate the present study. First, we lack fine-grained accounts of how Emirati founders translate family-based legitimacy into digital-market legitimacy in F&B entrepreneurship, including the specific actors, spaces and practices involved. Second, qualitative evidence remains limited on how dynamic capabilities such as content agility, analytics and multiplatform orchestration mediate the relationship between institutional constraint and entrepreneurial outcomes in micro-ventures (Nigam and Shatila, 2024). By centering these mechanisms, the study directly addresses the need for a context-specific, theoretically integrated explanation of Emirati women’s digital entrepreneurship. These gaps motivate the empirical investigation undertaken in this study. Collectively, prior scholarship indicates that Emirati women’s entrepreneurial agency unfolds within a multilevel institutional environment in which digital technologies, family dynamics and cultural expectations intersect. Within this integrated perspective, Figure 1 conceptualizes Emirati women’s digital entrepreneurship as situated at the intersection of institutional logics and resource domains. The 5M framework captures the resource conditions mobilized in venture creation, while FIT explains how these resources operate within formal, informal and cognitive institutional environments.

As illustrated in Figure 1, institutional domains are not static but continuously negotiated and reshaped through entrepreneurial practice (Bogaards, 2022). In the UAE’s digital economy, this negotiation is particularly evident in how founders navigate legitimacy, modesty and family expectations while leveraging platform affordances to expand their market participation. The overlay of digital visibility work highlights how online environments mediate institutional constraints, enabling women to balance credibility, growth and cultural compatibility. This integrated framing positions digital entrepreneurship as an ongoing negotiation of gendered institutional structures within the UAE’s evolving entrepreneurial ecosystem (Thompson-Whiteside, Turnbull, and Fletcher-Brown, 2021). Building on this conceptual foundation, the following section outlines the methodological approach adopted to examine these dynamics empirically.

This study adopts a qualitative interpretivist and feminist epistemological stance to examine how Emirati women entrepreneurs negotiate gendered institutional norms within digital entrepreneurial ecosystems. A feminist perspective foregrounds voice, reflexivity and positionality, recognizing that knowledge is co-produced within relations of power and culture (Corlett and Mavin, 2017). This orientation is appropriate for investigating lived experience, meaning making and the negotiation of institutional constraints within culturally embedded entrepreneurial contexts.

The United Arab Emirates provides a revealing context for this inquiry, combining strong policy support for women’s entrepreneurship with enduring socio-cultural conservatism. National strategies, such as Vision 2031 and initiatives, such as the Khalifa Fund for Enterprise Development, encourage women’s participation in entrepreneurship. Yet institutional realities remain shaped by patriarchal norms governing visibility, mobility and reputational legitimacy (Thompson-Whiteside et al., 2021; Hashim, 2023).

The F&B sector offers a particularly revealing lens through which to explore these tensions. It is culturally acceptable, socially visible and rapidly digitizing through platforms such as Instagram, Deliveroo and Talabat. Many Emirati women operate home-based or hybrid digital ventures, blending domestic expertise with entrepreneurial aspiration. This duality of digital autonomy within bounded legitimacy renders the sector a valuable site for understanding how women’s entrepreneurship is enacted and negotiated in the UAE. Rather than assuming a uniformly “supportive” context, we foreground the ways in which gendered divisions of labor shape opportunities and legitimacy in the F&B sector. In the UAE, food work is culturally valued yet feminized; translating domestic expertise into public, commercial presence requires navigating modesty, family governance and reputational risk. The study examines how women convert domestic capital into entrepreneurial capital within these institutional constraints.

A purposive sampling strategy was used to select participants capable of providing deep, experience-rich data (Patton, 2015). Inclusion criteria required that participants be Emirati nationals, female founders or co-founders of digitally enabled F&B ventures, and active operators for at least one year. Recruitment began through women’s business councils, entrepreneurship accelerators and social media networks, with snowball sampling extending access to additional entrepreneurs. Twenty Emirati women participated, representing a range of ages, education levels and emirates (Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman). This sample size enabled thematic sufficiency while capturing variation across business maturity and family background, consistent with qualitative entrepreneurship standards (Guest et al., 2020; Olan et al., 2024). Table 1 presents the demographic profile of the participants, including their age, education, business type, funding sources and entrepreneurial characteristics.

The participant composition reflects a balanced range across age, education and business maturity, with ventures primarily established between 2020 and 2023 within the F&B sector. The diversity across online, hybrid and physical formats aligns with the purposive sampling design and enables analytic variation rather than statistical representation. Most businesses were self-funded or family-supported, consistent with micro-enterprise dynamics observed in the UAE context. This profile supports the sampling aim of capturing information-rich cases illuminating the intersection of institutional norms, family support and entrepreneurial agency. Detailed participant overviews are presented in the  AppendixTable A1.

Data were collected through semistructured interviews and field observations. Interviews were conducted in English and lasted 60–90 min. The interview guide was informed by the study’s conceptual framework and explored topics including family approval, digital visibility, resource access and legitimacy strategies. Open-ended prompts encouraged reflection on motivations, constraints and the interplay between digital affordances and sociocultural norms. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim and translated when necessary to ensure semantic accuracy. Field observations at local pop-ups, cafés and digital exhibitions enriched contextual understanding and supported triangulation of discursive and behavioral data. Detailed field notes captured entrepreneurs’ interactions, workspace organization and branding aesthetics, factors important for interpreting how digital identity aligns with gendered expectations.

Data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2022) facilitated by NVivo 14. The process involved multiple stages of engagement: initial open coding to capture descriptive meanings; iterative clustering to identify relationships among codes; and theoretical abstraction to develop higher-order analytical themes. Themes were developed through recursive movement between data and theory, rather than through a linear process, ensuring that the analysis remained empirically grounded while conceptually coherent. The coding process combined primarily inductive coding with sensitizing concepts drawn from the FIT × 5M framework. Initial codes were generated from the data without imposing predefined categories, allowing participants’ meanings to guide interpretation. These codes were then iteratively grouped and refined through constant comparison, resulting in higher-order themes. Theoretical constructs from FIT and the 5M framework were introduced at later stages to support abstraction and analytical integration, rather than to constrain initial coding. For example, early codes such as family permission, digital modesty and Instagram branding converged into higher-order themes such as bounded visibility, legitimacy work and institutional negotiation. The analytic process emphasized constant comparison, memo writing and reflexive dialogue until conceptual clarity and thematic sufficiency were achieved (Essers et al., 2025). Reflexivity was operationalized through ongoing memoing and critical reflection on how the researcher’s positionality shaped coding decisions and theme development, thereby enhancing transparency and analytical rigor. Table 2 summarizes the analytical progression from initial open coding to theme generation and theoretical integration.

Methodological choices were aligned with the study’s interpretive and feminist orientation, ensuring that data collection and analysis remained sensitive to lived experience, relational context and institutional embeddedness.

Reflexivity constituted an integral component of the research design. The researcher occupied an insider–outsider stance culturally proximate to participants through sustained engagement in the UAE entrepreneurial context, yet distinct in nationality and academic role. This positionality facilitated rapport and contextual sensitivity while requiring ongoing reflexive awareness. Reflexive journaling and periodic peer debriefings with supervisors were employed to document assumptions, emotions and analytical decisions, thereby strengthening transparency and trustworthiness. Beyond procedural reflexivity, attention was given to the emotional and relational dynamics of the research encounter. Interviews often involved discussions of family authority, constraint and personal aspiration, requiring sensitivity to participants’ vulnerability and narrative control. The researcher remained attentive to power asymmetries inherent in academic research and adopted a participant-centered, dialogic approach consistent with feminist methodology, allowing participants to shape emphasis and meaning. Subjective interpretations were continually examined through reflexive memoing, documenting how positionality, assumptions and emotional responses influenced theme construction and analytical interpretation.

Trustworthiness was ensured through the four criteria of credibility, transferability, dependability and confirmability (Lincoln and Guba, 1985). Credibility was reinforced through triangulation across interviews, field notes and digital artifacts, such as social media posts. Transferability was facilitated by providing a thick description of the research context and participant profiles, supporting analytical transferability to comparable Gulf contexts. Dependability was maintained via an audit trail documenting coding iterations and decisions, while confirmability was supported through reflexive journaling and supervisor audits. Ethical approval was obtained from the university’s Research Ethics Committee (Approval No: ERSC_2023_4093). All participants provided written informed consent and were assured anonymity, confidentiality and the right to withdraw at any point. Pseudonyms were used throughout, and data was encrypted and securely stored.

This section presents the findings organized around the three research questions. Although the themes are analytically interlinked, each addresses a specific dimension of how gendered institutional logics shape Emirati women’s digital entrepreneurship. Rather than presenting isolated barriers or enablers, the analysis reveals patterned mechanisms through which women negotiate visibility, family governance, institutional translation and capability formation within the UAE’s digital F&B ecosystem. As outlined in Table 2, themes were derived through iterative comparison and theoretical integration under the FIT × 5M lens. The following subsections present the main empirical insights from 20 in-depth interviews and field observations of Emirati women operating digitally enabled F&B ventures. Guided by FIT and the 5M framework, five interconnected themes illustrate how these entrepreneurs negotiate visibility, family authority, capability formation and institutional translation within the UAE’s gendered digital ecosystem. Rather than listing isolated barriers, the findings explain how women convert institutional constraints into workable entrepreneurial strategies. Table 2 outlines how initial empirical categories were developed into final analytical themes through iterative coding and theoretical integration. The following sections unpack these themes in detail.

The study draws on insights from 20 Emirati women entrepreneurs (coded R1–R20) operating digitally enabled F&B ventures across Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah and Ajman. Participants ranged in age from 23 to 45 years, with diverse educational backgrounds – from high school graduates to university-educated founders – and varying venture maturities, spanning home-based bakeries, catering services, boutique cafés and confectionery brands. All participants actively managed their businesses through social media and delivery app platforms (Instagram, WhatsApp, Talabat, Deliveroo), reflecting the hybrid digital–physical nature of contemporary F&B entrepreneurship in the UAE. Pseudonyms (R1–R20) are used throughout to preserve confidentiality while ensuring analytic traceability across quotations.

Across cases, digital platforms such as Instagram and TikTok provide new arenas of visibility, yet exposure remains socially conditional. Women emphasize that professionalism must be communicated without violating modesty or family values. Their brand pages focus on product aesthetics, packaging and ambiance; self-presentation is mediated through careful visual codes – hands arranging desserts, voice-overs or indirect selfies blurred by filters:

This bounded visibility functions as legitimacy work – a strategy to appear modern while remaining morally aligned with cultural expectations. The women’s “respectful visibility” contrasts with Western entrepreneurial norms that equate transparency with authenticity. Instead, legitimacy is constructed through curated absence. The practice reinforces findings by Thompson-Whiteside et al. (2021) yet extends them by showing that digital tools themselves – story filters, comment moderation, “women-only” groups – become institutional negotiation devices. Such selective participation challenges the notion of digital entrepreneurship as inherently liberating; empowerment here lies in the ability to choose when and how to be visible. To complement the interview findings, Table 3 summarizes the online presence and media engagement characteristics of the participating Emirati women entrepreneurs based on online observations.

These practices directly address RQ1 by demonstrating that participation in digital entrepreneurship is not unrestricted exposure but culturally calibrated visibility. Gendered institutional norms shape not whether women engage online, but how they construct legitimacy through selective self-presentation. Visibility, therefore, becomes a negotiated institutional practice rather than a neutral technological affordance.

The second theme extends the first by locating visibility practices within family-governed moral frameworks. Family approval operates as both a safety net and a gatekeeper. Decisions around suppliers, events and collaborations often require explicit or tacit family consent. Entrepreneurship is narrated not as rebellion but as a moral duty – feeding, hosting and contributing to the community:

These accounts reveal how Motherhood, interpreted as care and familial accountability rather than biological status, organizes entrepreneurial time and legitimacy. Home-based work is framed as morally superior to public commercialism, providing moral cover for economic activity. The findings diverge from earlier Gulf studies that portrayed family as purely restrictive: here, families also function as resource orchestrators, offering unpaid labor, contacts and emotional assurance. However, this governance slows scale-up and limits spatial mobility.

This moral pacing represents a unique regional mechanism: progress is calibrated against reputational risk rather than market opportunity. It underscores FIT’s argument that informal and cognitive institutions do not merely constrain women but define the terms of legitimate action.

This finding extends RQ1 by showing that legitimacy practices are embedded within family-governed moral systems. It also addresses RQ2 by illustrating how digital affordances are mediated through familial approval and caregiving logics. Entrepreneurial agencies are therefore paced and sanctioned within domestic institutional frameworks.

While participants acknowledge extensive government encouragement, free licenses, incubators and grants, meso-level frictions hinder practical uptake. Women repeatedly describe confusion about digital registration portals, leasing rules and banking procedures:

These experiences highlight what this study terms institutional translation gaps – disconnects between macro intent and everyday routines. Whereas formal policy (macro) is gender-neutral, execution (meso) re-embeds patriarchal assumptions: requests for male guarantors, discomfort with women signing leases or ad hoc rule interpretation. Interestingly, women mitigate these gaps through peer mentoring and digital solidarity. WhatsApp groups and female-only online forums serve as informal institutions that circulate procedural knowledge, filling in for absent intermediaries. When such networks are active, policy inclusion translates into practical inclusion; when absent, women retreat to safer digital-only models. Compared with prior Gulf evidence, this study shows that the meso level, not culture alone, is the decisive site of gendered inequality. It calls attention to the need for institutional brokers able to mediate between progressive policy and conservative practice.

This theme addresses RQ3 by demonstrating that venture sustainability depends less on macro policy intent than on meso-level translation mechanisms. It also refines RQ1 by showing how institutional legitimacy is reproduced through procedural ambiguity and dependence on intermediaries.

Participants exhibit sophisticated digital craft, branding, content creation and customer engagement, but thinner managerial depth. Skills such as cost accounting, supplier negotiation, HR and data analytics are learned reactively or outsourced at personal cost:

Many link these gaps to university curricula and incubator programs that remain theoretical. Formal training often stops at ideation, overlooking daily operational competencies. Consequently, entrepreneurial learning is peer-driven and experiential rather than institutionalized. Women express desire for Arabic-language mentorship and hands-on workshops in pricing, marketing analytics and contract literacy. This finding extends Syed et al. (2024) by illustrating how capability deficits are gendered and linguistic, not merely pedagogical. For instance, English-only training materials deter older entrepreneurs or those educated in Arabic streams. Some participants construct informal mentorship networks, friends in accounting or male relatives in business, to fill these voids, revealing agency within constraint. These capability constraints reinforce bounded agency, as limited managerial and analytical confidence shapes how women control visibility, manage the pacing of growth and negotiate institutional legitimacy within digital markets.

These findings directly answer RQ3 by revealing that linguistic, cultural and experiential institutional conditions mediate capability development. Digital confidence emerges as uneven and institutionally filtered, shaping the limits of strategic growth.

The transition from digital to physical space encapsulates both opportunity and tension. Physical outlets confer symbolic legitimacy – “real business” status – but expose women to scrutiny, regulatory complexity and escalating rents.

Participants described three triggers for moving from digital to physical: (i) pandemic-era rent holidays and incentives that lowered entry costs; (ii) delivery-app fees eroding margins for premium, low-volume items; and (iii) post-COVID footfall recovery in malls/pop-ups that improved discovery and legitimacy. As one founder noted, “delivery takes too much; a kiosk pays back in weekends.” (R2) Another highlighted temporary rent discounts that “made the risk acceptable” in 2021–2022 (R5). These dynamics reframed physical presence as both identity work and risk work under FIT × 5M: Macro shock (COVID) filtered through Meso (landlords/platforms), shaping Money/Market/Management choices under Motherhood and modesty norms:

This risk calculus reveals how spatial decisions intertwine with moral economies. Entrepreneurs read space not only economically but reputationally; a storefront can elevate status or invite gossip. Some adopt hybrid models – delivery-only brands with physical pick-up points – to balance exposure and control. Unexpectedly, a few younger participants leverage public presence as a form of empowerment, viewing café ownership as cultural progress. However, even these “boundary pushers” anchor legitimacy in moral discourse (“It is a family-friendly place; even my grandmother visits”). Hence, expansion does not dismantle norms but renegotiates them through respectable modernity.

This finding integrates RQ1 and RQ2 by showing how spatial expansion becomes both identity work and reputational risk management. Movement into physical space is negotiated through institutional logics of respectability rather than purely economic calculation.

Rather than representing isolated empirical themes, the five mechanisms identified in this study operate as an integrated system through which institutional logics shape entrepreneurial action. Each mechanism interacts with the others to form a dynamic process of institutional negotiation that links visibility, family governance, institutional translation, capability formation and spatial expansion. Together, these mechanisms form a coherent analytical model explaining how entrepreneurial agency is structured across multiple institutional levels. Taken together, these themes portray digital entrepreneurship among Emirati women as a negotiated process of bounded agency – where women exercise entrepreneurial agency within, rather than beyond, institutional and moral constraints. This conceptualization connects the empirical evidence to the study’s integrated theoretical framework, positioning bounded agency as the study’s central contribution and as the theoretical bridge between FIT and the 5M framework:

• Formal (Macro): Supportive policies and funding mechanisms exist and are widely celebrated.

• Meso: Translation gaps and procedural ambiguity re-inscribe dependency on intermediaries, creating friction between policy intent and practice.

• Informal/Cognitive: Gendered scripts of respectability and modesty define the contours of acceptable entrepreneurship and shape legitimacy work.

The intersection of these institutional levels explains why many ventures plateau as home-based micro-enterprises despite visible digital success. In comparative terms, these results differ from prior narratives that emphasized cultural conservatism as a static barrier. Instead, institutions are dynamic arenas where Emirati women actively craft legitimacy through bounded visibility, moral pacing and hybrid spatial strategies. The study, therefore, extends the 5M framework by showing that Motherhood and Macro/Meso levers dominate the other Ms under patriarchal logics, and advances FIT by demonstrating how digital affordances become instruments of institutional negotiation. To visualize these interconnections, Figure 2 illustrates how Emirati women’s digital entrepreneurship operates at the intersection of the 5M framework and FIT, showing how institutional domains and digital affordances jointly shape entrepreneurial agency.

This integrated mechanism-based model is visualized in Figure 2. The model depicts how the formal, meso and informal/cognitive institutional domains interact with the five Ms – Money, Market, Management, Motherhood and Macro/meso – through the mediating influence of digital affordances. Arrows indicate the dynamic process through which Emirati women negotiate institutional constraints, exercise agency and reshape gendered norms within the UAE’s digital entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Figure 2 presents the integrated conceptual model underpinning Emirati women’s digital entrepreneurship. Table 4 then maps the study’s research questions and theoretical levers to the mechanisms observed in the data.

Collectively, these findings demonstrate that Emirati women’s digital entrepreneurship is structured through layered institutional negotiation rather than through linear exploitation of opportunity. Agency is enacted within gendered legitimacy systems that condition resource mobilization, growth pacing and spatial expansion. This integrated pattern provides the empirical foundation for theorizing bounded digital agency in the following discussion.

This study set out to explain how gendered institutional logics shape the enactment of digital entrepreneurship among Emirati women in the UAE’s F&B sector. The findings reveal that entrepreneurial agency is not exercised in opposition to institutional constraints but through patterned negotiation with them. Across visibility practices, family governance, institutional translation, capability formation and spatial expansion, women convert institutional conditions into workable entrepreneurial strategies. This section develops these empirical patterns into a theoretically integrated explanation of bounded digital agency, demonstrating how institutional environments structure the scope, pace and form of entrepreneurial action in platformised markets. These dynamics demonstrate how Motherhood and Macro/Meso logics filter Money, Market and Management moves, with the meso level (permits, leasing, banking) acting as the decisive site of institutional translation (Theme 3). At the same time, capability gaps shape management depth (Theme 4) and online-to-offline risk work (Theme 5).

Bounded visibility theorizes digital engagement as an institutionally negotiated performance rather than as unrestricted exposure. This extends prior Gulf evidence (Thompson-Whiteside et al., 2021; Hashim, 2023) by showing that Emirati women do not reject modesty norms but transform them into strategic presentation logics. These practices illustrate how digital platforms become “negotiated spaces of agency” (Olan et al., 2024), where filters, voiceovers and logo-led branding serve as instruments of institutional negotiation. This aligns with recent work by Alkhaled (2021), who highlights those Arab women re-appropriate digital tools to balance autonomy and moral conformity. Our study thus reinforces that visibility is not synonymous with liberation; rather, curated invisibility emerges as an entrepreneurial competence that sustains legitimacy within gendered markets. Conceptually, bounded visibility reveals that digital participation does not dissolve institutional constraints but relocates them into mediated spaces of self-presentation. This extends FIT by demonstrating that institutional compliance and strategic agency are co-produced through digital practice. Visibility, therefore, operates not as transparency but as a culturally negotiated resource that shapes legitimacy within gendered markets.

The second theme – family governance and moral pacing – demonstrates that Emirati women frame entrepreneurship in terms of familial responsibility and religious morality. While families impose boundaries on participation in mixed-gender events and public engagement, they also provide emotional capital, unpaid labor and legitimacy endorsements that substitute for weak formal structures. This duality resonates with evidence from Hashim, McAdam, and Nordqvist (2024), who found that women in the Gulf rely on relational capital as both a safety net and a governance mechanism. It also deepens FIT’s insight into the idea that informal and cognitive institutions are not static constraints but dynamic systems of moral arbitration (Bogaards, 2022).

This reframes family not as a constraint variable but as a co-regulatory institution that governs entrepreneurial tempo and legitimacy.” The concept of moral pacing advances the 5M framework by showing that the Motherhood dimension governs not only role expectations but also the temporal regulation of entrepreneurial growth. Family structures, therefore, function as co-regulatory institutions that calibrate expansion in light of reputational legitimacy, transforming social approval into a form of entrepreneurial capital.

The third theme identifies institutional translation gaps between macro-level reforms and meso-level execution. Despite abundant policy rhetoric and financial incentives, Emirati women face bureaucratic opacity and reliance on male intermediaries when engaging with licensing, leasing or banking institutions. This finding refines FIT’s multilevel logic by positioning the meso domain platforms, incubators, councils – as the pivotal site of gendered reproduction. Similar patterns are noted by Abdelwahed, Bastian, and Wood (2022), who observed that Saudi women’s policy inclusion often falters at the implementation stage, where procedural norms remain masculinized.

Our evidence also confirms the work of Yadav et al. (2022) that institutional mechanisms can simultaneously empower men and exclude women. Emirati women mitigate these frictions through peer mentoring and informal digital networks, effectively constructing shadow institutions that translate policy into practice. This adaptation reveals that women’s collectives, not state policy, drive genuine institutional inclusion at the operational level. This finding repositions the meso domain as the primary site where gender-neutral policy becomes gendered practice. Institutional translation emerges as a mediating mechanism through which macro inclusion is either operationalized or diluted, extending FIT toward a more processual understanding of how institutional logics are enacted in everyday entrepreneurial interaction.

Although participants exhibit strong digital marketing and creative skills, the findings show fragile managerial confidence, particularly in finance, analytics and HR compliance. This reflects broader regional evidence of an educational–market mismatch (Syed et al., 2024). However, our results reveal that capability deficits are also linguistically and culturally mediated. English-centric incubator programs and abstract entrepreneurship curricula alienate older or less Western-educated women. Compared with other research, Salamzadeh, Salamzadeh, and Hadizadeh (2025) emphasize that digital literacy programs must be localized to the cultural context to translate empowerment into sustainability. Hence, the Management lever of the 5M remains constrained by linguistic and cultural accessibility issues, not just by technical skill gaps. Emirati women’s reliance on informal mentors and kinship-based learning networks further illustrates that peer translation, rather than formal training, underpins capability formation – echoing feminist epistemologies that valorize experiential over institutional knowledge (Corlett and Mavin, 2017). Capability formation, therefore, operates as an institutional mediation mechanism, shaping the limits and expression of bounded digital agency. Capability formation, therefore, operates as an institutional mediation mechanism that shapes the limits and expression of entrepreneurial agency. Rather than purely technical deficits, capability gaps reflect linguistic, cultural and institutional accessibility, demonstrating how the Management dimension of the 5M framework remains embedded within broader institutional structures.

The fifth theme – online-to-offline transition – highlights that spatial expansion embodies identity and risk work. While physical outlets confer symbolic legitimacy (“real business” status), they simultaneously expose women to reputational surveillance and bureaucratic complexity. A similar form of hybridity was observed by Essers, McAdam, and Ossenkop (2025) among women in masculinized industries, where spatial movement required re-anchoring legitimacy through moral narratives.

In the Emirati F&B sector, hybrid spatial strategies (shared kitchens, pickup models) exemplify a respectable modernity: women embrace entrepreneurship while reinforcing cultural propriety. This interplay between visibility, morality and modernity exemplifies what Krook and Mackay (2011) conceptualize as institutional bricolage, in which actors selectively recombine norms to maintain credibility and advance progress. Spatial mobility thus becomes a process of legitimacy negotiation rather than a purely economic scaling decision. Spatial expansion thus represents a process of institutional bricolage, where entrepreneurs recombine modern entrepreneurial practices with culturally legitimate identity narratives. Growth becomes a negotiated reconfiguration of legitimacy rather than a simple transition from micro to formal enterprise.

This study contributes theoretically by repositioning the relationship between institutional logics and resource mobilization. While FIT has traditionally explained how institutions constrain or enable action, the findings demonstrate that digital platforms function as mediating arenas through which institutional logics are enacted, negotiated and selectively transformed. Simultaneously, the 5 M framework is extended by showing that its dimensions do not operate as parallel resource categories but rather as hierarchically structured mechanisms, in which Motherhood and Macro/Meso domains regulate the conditions under which Money, Market and Management can be legitimately activated.

Taken together, the findings reveal a hierarchical structuring of entrepreneurial agency in which institutional logics condition the activation of resource-based actions. Within the integrated FIT × 5M framework, the Motherhood and Macro/Meso domains regulate the operation of Money, Market and Management, shaping not only access to resources but the legitimate ways in which those resources can be mobilized. Emirati women’s entrepreneurship, therefore, emerges as a bounded digital agency, defined as agency enacted within institutional legitimacy systems rather than outside them. This extends feminist institutionalism by showing that digital technologies do not dissolve patriarchal structures but relocate them into new arenas of negotiation (Olan et al., 2024).

The study also contributes to digital entrepreneurship theory by contesting the universalist assumption that digital platforms inherently democratize opportunities. Consistent with Paul et al. (2023), the findings confirm that technology operates as a conditional enabler, with its emancipatory potential realized only when institutional coherence and cultural congruence align. This synthesis directly addresses the study’s three research questions (RQ1–RQ3) and demonstrates clear coherence between the empirical evidence presented and the theoretical interpretation developed through the integrated FIT × 5M framework. Conceptually, the study advances a theory of bounded digital agency, alongside a meso-centric account of institutional translation and a culturally embedded model of digital entrepreneurship in patriarchal platform economies.

The findings demonstrate that the primary constraints facing Emirati women’s digital entrepreneurship do not stem from the absence of formal policy support, but from gaps in institutional translation, culturally mediated legitimacy systems and uneven capability formation. Because gendered barriers are reproduced most strongly at the meso level, where policy intent is operationalized through licensing routines, financial procedures and platform governance, ecosystem interventions must prioritize translation mechanisms rather than solely expanding macro-level initiatives.

In particular, the analysis shows that entrepreneurial growth is calibrated through family governance and moral pacing, indicating that support structures cannot assume an individualized model of agency detached from relational contexts. Mentorship architectures should therefore integrate family-sensitive approaches, creating women-led advisory networks that combine professional training with recognition of dynamics of relational legitimacy. Such structures would enable women to navigate reputational expectations while expanding managerial confidence and market participation.

The study further reveals that capability deficits are shaped as much by linguistic and cultural accessibility as by technical provision. Entrepreneurship education and incubation programs should move beyond abstract business ideation toward practice-oriented, Arabic-language training in regulatory navigation, digital analytics, financial management and contract literacy. By aligning capability pipelines with the lived institutional environment of Emirati founders, ecosystem actors can reduce dependency on informal intermediaries and enhance sustainable growth trajectories.

Finally, as digital legitimacy emerges through bounded visibility rather than unrestricted exposure, platform governance requires culturally responsive design. Enhanced privacy controls, moderated interaction environments and trust-signaling mechanisms that recognize women-led enterprises can enable entrepreneurs to manage visibility strategically while maintaining moral legitimacy. In this context, moral legitimacy should not be treated as a constraint to overcome, but as a form of institutional capital that can be leveraged productively within the UAE’s evolving digital economy.

Building on the preceding analysis, this study advances a theoretically integrated explanation of how gendered institutional logics structure women’s digital entrepreneurship in platformised contexts. Three interrelated contributions emerge.

First, the study advances integration between FIT and the 5M framework by demonstrating how institutional domains condition the operation of resource-based entrepreneurial action. The findings show that Money, Market and Management are not autonomous levers but are filtered through Motherhood and Macro/Meso institutional logics, which regulate the legitimacy, pacing and scope of entrepreneurial engagement. This reconceptualizes the 5M framework as institutionally mediated and extends feminist institutionalism by providing an empirically grounded account of how institutional logics are enacted through everyday entrepreneurial practice in digitally mediated economies.

Second, the study develops the concepts of moral pacing and bounded visibility to explain how entrepreneurial ambition is negotiated within socio-religious legitimacy systems. Bounded visibility captures how women strategically calibrate digital presence to align entrepreneurial participation with culturally legitimate self-presentation, while moral pacing explains how family governance regulates venture growth through relational and reputational accountability. Together, these concepts demonstrate that informal and cognitive institutional logics operate simultaneously as both constraints and enabling resources, thereby refining FIT in the context of platformised markets.

Third, the study positions the meso-institutional domain as the decisive arena where gendered inclusion or exclusion materializes. By identifying institutional translation as a mediating mechanism between macro policy intent and everyday entrepreneurial practice, the findings shift analytical attention from formal reforms to the processes by which institutional inclusion is operationalized. This contributes to institutional and entrepreneurship scholarship by highlighting the procedural and relational dynamics that shape access to opportunity in digitally transforming economies.

To sum up, these contributions develop a contextually grounded theory of bounded digital agency, demonstrating how agency is enacted through institutional negotiation rather than institutional escape. The study, therefore, highlights the importance of ecosystem designs that strengthen institutional translation, support culturally grounded capability development and create legitimate pathways for women’s digital entrepreneurship within platformised markets.

The qualitative and sector-specific focus of this study limits statistical generalisability beyond Emirati women in the F&B domain. However, the aim of the research is analytical rather than statistical generalization. Future studies may adopt longitudinal or mixed methods designs to examine how bounded visibility and moral pacing evolve across regulatory change, generational shifts and technological transformation. Comparative research across the Gulf and other emerging economies would further clarify how variations in institutional configuration shape women’s digital entrepreneurial trajectories. Additional inquiry into platform governance, algorithmic visibility and the role of male allies would deepen understanding of gendered dynamics within digital entrepreneurship ecosystems.

This study began with the paradox that expanding digital opportunity and formal institutional support do not necessarily translate into scalable entrepreneurial autonomy for women in conservative contexts. The findings resolve this paradox by demonstrating that digital entrepreneurship among Emirati women operates as a socially embedded process of institutional negotiation rather than individual emancipation. Entrepreneurial action is shaped through bounded visibility, moral pacing, institutional translation and hybrid spatial strategies, which collectively structure how legitimacy, growth and capability are enacted within gendered institutional environments. By integrating FIT with the 5M framework, the study conceptualizes bounded digital agency as agency exercised within, rather than outside, cultural legitimacy systems. This advances context-sensitive theorization of women’s entrepreneurship in the Global South and challenges universalist assumptions that digitalization alone equalizes opportunity. For scholars, the study highlights the importance of analyzing how institutional logics mediate entrepreneurial action in digitally transforming economies. For practitioners and policymakers, the implication is that empowerment emerges not from dismantling institutions but from redesigning their interfaces with lived realities, enabling bounded agency to evolve into sustained participation within an increasingly digital future.