RESPONSIBLE ENTREPRENEURSHIP VISION DEVELOPMENT AND ETHICS

Understanding spatial mobility and spatial capability in women entrepreneurship: a case study… 463
business as my husband disagrees on that’, stated one interviewee. Saudi woman’s social interactions
with the opposite sex are discouraged by the state policy and in most Saudi families.
Saudi women have experienced such segregation from an early age and throughout their lives
in schools, universities and government sectors. When it comes to meeting the opposite sex,
mobility becomes part of women’s self-help discourse with the society and their families.
In addition, the sex issue remains with the location of meeting (weak ties) of the same
sex. Therefore, it is worth mentioning that the finding shows that at the early stage of starting
a business woman usually travels to meet people with whom they have strong ties with
(e.g. friends, family, and relatives). However, the sensitivity towards mobility to meet weak
ties was mentioned. The need not to neglect the family view plays a role in discouraging
women from travelling to certain places when meeting network of weak ties. As one woman
confirmed, “my husband would not allow me to go to clients houses, especially the one who
I don’t know, because you never know what could happen to me, he tells me to meet them
in a public place” and this is associated with a justification of ‘fear’ and ‘protection’. Others
stated, “My father is over protective”, “my husband is concerned that something may happen
to me” Therefore the women interviewed did not judge that they experienced a lack of
freedom of options, rather they referred to their family preference of choice as a convincing
reasoning to their limited capabilities, due to the fact of fear and protection. This was because
in such a culture, the social policy and tradition deem the role of men to be responsible and
protective towards their female counterpart. Therefore, protectiveness seems as a convincing
reasoning when it comes to women’s lack of option.
Discussion
This study reveals that investigating mobility allowed an understanding of women decision
in relation to business social activities conducted by nascent women entrepreneurs. In
this context, the findings appeared to be mainly focused on family ideology as a contextual
factor to understand women’s mobility.
The mainstream argument was that Saudi women are excluded from the benefit associated
with autonomous mobility (access to means), where the law bans women from driving,
therefore, the assumption is that Saudi women exhibit to some extent mobility social-exclusion.
However, this does not seem to be the case as shown in the findings, where the outcome
of the responses was a shifting of attention from mobility per se to the capability of an
entrepreneur to actually travel, it was surprising to find that women had a preference to not
experience independent mobility. Moreover, the other argument was that the Saudi law and
policy affirms the role family as an institution to permit women to achieve functioning when
conducting entrepreneurship. Consequently, the study findings agree with Shin (2011), who
demonstrates in his study that family dissolution in some societies hurt women’s mobility.
Therefore, it seems that family ideology influences women’s actual travel and the potential
to travel when it comes to entrepreneurship in Saudi Arabia. These elements are not separated
but rather intertwined in an implicit way that influence women’s entrepreneurial activities.
Therefore, the study contributes to the discussion about family ideology, shaping women
entrepreneur’s mobility as part of entrepreneurial social activities.