The untold love story: Chinese immigrant women entrepreneurs in Australia and in Canada

Research on women's entrepreneurship is often conceptualized in motivational theories embedded in social and economic opportunity structures set in a male-dominant terrain. However, there are interplays of human agency and structure to entrepreneurship and of late researchers, especially of women's entrepreneurship, are interested in recognizing entrepreneurship as an individual strategy; but what drives the individual strategy? This paper attempts to reveal 'love' as an emotional capital that adds to explain an individual's strategy to entrepreneurship amongst two groups of Chinese women in Australia and Canada. Love that is embedded in the relations of marriage and family, which has historically been understood as passionate and confined only to the private sphere and deems irrelevant to the instrumental public world, is found to be one of the important motivators and incentives that drives some women into business.