This study investigates copreneurship in rural tourism businesses. It explores the experiences of owners of rural tourism accommodation businesses in New Zealand within the framework of copreneurship. It also examines roles within copreneurial rural tourism businesses and studies women’s experiences of entrepreneurship specifically. Copreneurs are couples who share ownership, commitment and responsibility for a business together (Barnett and Barnett, 1989) and these couples in business together (copreneurs) are one form of family business. To date there has not been any published discussion of the concept of copreneurship and tourism, which is remarkable, given that many tourism businesses are SMEs built around lifestyle and integration of life stakeholders such as family and partners. This dissertation represents the first attempt to study copreneurship within tourism entrepreneurship, and within a rural tourism environment specifically. It uses an interpretive approach as part of the study to give the participants a voice and to stress the methodological importance of reflexivity where the researcher is an insider to the study. Triangulation of data sources and methods, combining qualitative and quantitative techniques enables a rich understanding of copreneurial expectations, roles and responsibilities and of women’s experiences specifically. The method of the research is a postal survey of rural tourism accommodation business owners complemented by in-depth interviews with women in copreneurial business relationships. This thesis concludes that the rural tourism accommodation sector in New Zealand is characterised by lifestylers and copreneurs running their businesses as a ‘hobby’, with the main aim being ‘to meet people’ and that non-economic, lifestyle motivations are important stimuli to business formation. Specific analysis of women’s experiences of tourism production in copreneurial situations has shown that any perception of copreneurship as a tool for enabling women to become freed from traditional gender roles may not equal the reality. Women’s voices were able to come through in both the survey and the interview part of this research, revealing that a gendered ideology persists even through copreneurial relationships in rural tourism. The copreneurs in this study have strong and widely shared preconceptions of their roles as accommodation providers and as task managers in their households; role perceptions which appear to be largely invariant of the situation. Copreneurial couples appear to engage in running the accommodation business using traditional gender-based roles mirroring those found in the private home.

This PhD thesis builds on the current trends in the research on entrepreneurship and gender, which pay attention to the fact that women are being excluded from or ignored by the entrepreneurship research and that female entrepreneurship is studied and assessed from a male perspective and no attention is paid to important contexts which affect the situation of entrepreneurs. With regard to this criticism, the focus is on the embeddedness of entrepreneurship in various contexts. In order to approach this issue I use the institutional perspective and I look for relations with formal and informal institutions in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The research deals with entrepreneurial couples as it is possible to look into their entrepreneurial embeddedness in the domestic context. The aim of the thesis is to provide a micro-insight into the construction of role distribution in the domestic and work area and show how these constructions are justified by cultural repertoires. I look into the negotiation of roles in heterosexual couples by the method of qualitative interviews which I carried out with each of the partners individually. Thanks to his method it is also possible to study the suppressed voices in the couple (more often female than male). I analysed the data using the social constructivist...

The purpose of my research is to examine how copreneurial couples make sense of their lived experience of working in a copreneurial business and shape their mutual identity. The research context is copreneurs operating micro-businesses in the Greek leisure and tourism industry. Given the size of the tourism industry worldwide and the fact that many businesses within this sector are family-owned, this is an important area of inquiry. The aim is twofold: 1. To build theory in the field of entrepreneurship by focusing specifically on the undertheorized topic of how copreneurs understand and shape their identity and responsibilities within copreneurial businesses 2. To bring an under-utilized methodology to entrepreneurship studies, that of interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA), as a means of enhancing the understanding of the lived experience of copreneurs. Drawing on phenomenological philosophy, IPA foregrounds the meanings research participants give to their experience and therefore offers rich interpretations from copreneurial couples While taking an idiographic approach, which focuses on the first-person experience of copreneurs in a particular context, the findings will resonate with other copreneurs. The contribution of this research therefore lies in advancing our understanding of copreneurship and familial entrepreneurship by elucidating the interrelationship between personal and business partnerships. The study makes visible the often invisible recursive links between paid work and family life for men and women

Family businesses including copreneurships have a high failure rate. Copreneurs experience work-family conflict (WFC), which can have a negative effect on business sustainability. The purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore strategies that copreneurs used in managing WFC to achieve business sustainability for longer than 10 years. Three copreneurs from 3 copreneurial businesses located in the Greater Accra region of Ghana, who have employed effective strategies to cope with WFC to achieve business sustainability longer than 10 years, participated in the study. The WFC model for business/marriage partners (copreneurs) and the reciprocal coping model served as the conceptual framework that grounded the study. Data were collected from semistructured interviews, company documents, and a reflective journal. The data were analyzed using the framework of compiling, disassembling, reassembling, interpreting, and making conclusions. Emerging themes included strategy themes of personal coping, family-friendly organizational supports, and integrated coping. The implications for positive social change include the potential to help copreneurs use strategies identified to manage WFC to improve business sustainability, which may contribute to wealth creation and poverty reduction in the local economy.