Constraints and opportunities facing women entrepreneurs in developing countries A relational perspective

Purpose – This purpose of the paper to examine the interplay of constraints and opportunities affecting female entrepreneurship in developing countries. The paper integrates salient microand macro-level perspectives and provides a rounded account of opportunities and constraints as part of a holistic interdependent system. Design/methodology/approach – The paper adopts an integrative multi-level research design and an interpretive research methodology, capitalizing on in-depth interviews with ten women entrepreneurs to explore their perceptions and interpretations of constraints and opportunities facing female entrepreneurship in the Lebanese context. Findings – The findings presented in this paper clearly illustrate the relevance of micro-, meso-, and macro-level factors in entrepreneurship research and the usefulness of integrating multiple lens and units of analysis to capture the complexity of the women entrepreneurship experience in any particular context. Originality/value – The value added of this research lies in adapting a framework recently popularized in the context of diversity management for use in entrepreneurship research, helping to capture in turn the dynamic interplay of multiple levels of analysis and objective/subjective factors influencing female entrepreneurship.