Craftswomen entrepreneurs in flow: no boundaries between business and leisure

Although the high levels in Latin America, women’s necessity-driven entrepreneurship is a field that has been little explored. Contemporary research suggests that entrepreneurs may experience less work-life conflict than other workers, but that gender differences mean that women are at a disadvantage in terms of uses of time and the sexual division of labor. We explore how 20 Chilean craftswomen experience their (productive) work time. The content analysis of group interviews shows that these socially at-risk women entrepreneurs achieve wellbeing at work by entering a state of flow. They describe their experience as personal time, which resembles leisure more than it does actual work. This source of emotional wellbeing seems to be a personal strategy that helps them cope with their precarious situation. Their boundaries between work and personal time are blurred. Our findings illustrate how uses of time can be perceived differently in different contexts. We put particular emphasis on the restorative nature of personal time and the need for further research in this area from a gender approach.