The Construction of Women Entrepreneurs’ Legitimacy: A Transactional Approach
This paper proposes to interpret the process of entrepreneurial legitimacy construction for women entrepreneurs from a theoretical framework based on the social transaction theory perspective. We use a qualitative research design based on grounded theory and undertaken with 41 French women entrepreneurs operating in different sectors. Our findings show that the feeling of legitimacy is strongly embedded with their interactional experiences and their underlying mental framework. This study also underlines how social interactions are strongly imbued with categorical gender judgments which women entrepreneurs must counter through the development and implementation of interesting strategies in order to acquire legitimacy.