Ahmed, Nahed ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1126-0073 and Weir, David ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6750-6722 (2024) The Journey of a Yemeni Female Entrepreneur: An Intermittent and Ambiguous Rihla? In: Migration and Entrepreneurship in the Global Context. Palgrave Studies in Entrepreneurship and Society . Palgrave Macmillan Cham, pp. 291-306

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Abstract

Entrepreneurship, especially for females from a Middle Eastern patriarchal cultural context, does not just follow a predetermined plan but emerges from a journey in which obstacles have to be overcome and boundaries traversed, not usually characterised by smooth transitions. An entrepreneurial journey of a woman from Yemen to Yorkshire that involves change in civil, economic, and familial statuses is described in this chapter.

In the literature on the journeys of international, intercultural female migrants framed by a long-term transition from an underdeveloped nation like Yemen to a highly developed one such as the United Kingdom, the support of family and friends and their informal networks act as bases of social capital, framing female entrepreneurship both in the start-up phase and after. It is supposed that female entrepreneurs tend to use personal networks to obtain human support and financial resources and that these opportunities may be rather equally open throughout many phases of the life cycle. But even if this picture is generally accurate, events such as those of familial ties cut by divorce and the ensuing lack of familial support for the available restructuring of reclaiming individual identity, the entrepreneurial journey may or may not be frustrating.

This chapter is based on ongoing field research into the journey of an Arab female entrepreneur. The initiating theoretical framework focussed on the potential impact of informal social capital and assumed that what appeared to be a rather even and seamless forward progression implied some forward planning and individual agency, as the forward motion seemed evident and the personal characteristics of the focal person appeared to support this interpretation and the outcome appeared to be successful.

A subsequent reading of the research material reveals another interpretation, highlighting the importance of events, serendipitous incidents, and responses in contributing to a Rihla that represents a success story, building on the experiences of multiple liminalities in the social spaces of gender, ethnicity, migrancy, divorce, social status, and limited skill set only partly and intermittently implicating social networks to create the elements of life course management towards a new and unanticipated familial, social, and business identity, a reclamation of identity and economic security in a new national context.

For this kind of journey, we suggest the borrowing of the Arabic term “Rihla”; this word became widely known as the name of the official match ball for the FIFA World Cup in Qatar in 2022, but originates in a term meaning both a journey and of the story of a journey and the learning that can be derived from the events that occur within that journey. The best-known classical Rihla in Arabic literature is that of Ibn Battuta, originating in Morocco in 1325 AD, as he set out to complete the Hajj, the journey to the Holy places of Mecca and Medina, usually followed by a return to the traveller’s homeland, but Ibn Battuta did not return until he had covered 70,000 miles and visited North Africa, India, the Middle East, and China with innumerable sideways journeys from where he happened to be to places that he had not intended to visit. His completed journey had taken two decades rather than the expected twelve months of the conventional Hajj, involving Constantinople, Damascus, Jerusalem, Delhi, Timbuktu, Beijing, and Granada. En route, he was beset by events, wars, pestilence, favourable and unfavourable circumstances, and virtuous, wicked, and ordinary people. His Rihla was an account of things that were not anticipated or planned but were experienced and subsequently written about.

In reality, venture creation tends to be anything but linear. It is messy, chaotic and ambiguous. The entrepreneur gets to a particular stage and encounters obstacles and new information that necessitate adjustments to decisions made in a previous stage.

—Kuratko and Morris (2021)

Item Type:	Book Section
Status:	Published
DOI:	10.1007/978-3-031-34067-3_12
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman
School/Department:	York Business School
URI:	https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/13356

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