Självständighetens former - kvinnoföretagande på värmländsk landsbygd

Sammanfattning: This thesis focuses on the social context of business enterprise on the basis of women's business enterprise in rural areas of the Swedish province of Värmland. The aim is to find patterns in this business enterprise and make it comprehensible. The theoretical sensitizing concepts used are life mode and life style. Life mode is here seen as an embodied, taken-for-granted way of living, historically rooted in a support strategy. The traditional independence of rural areas, with its roots in farming and forestry smallholdings, constitutes a soil for the business enterprise, while at the same time rural areas are changing and complex. Life style is the more superficial, chosen level, where symbolic communication creates limits as regards the groups people can belong to. Qualitative interviews have been performed with women business owners in different fields.



The business enterprise displays a variety of driving forces - the independent life mode manifests itself in different forms. On the basis of attitude to work and family life, different variants of business enterprise can be distinguished: genuine entrepreneurs, family-orientated business owners, business owners with an interest as a driving force and business owners who emphasize the business enterprise itself as their profession. However, they express a common business enterprise life style, which includes a positive evaluation of hard work, an appreciation of being their own masters and of having chosen and shaped their own lives. A suggestion of inclusive and exclusive distinctions solves in part the empirical problem of the different levels of the sensitizing concepts.



Women's business enterprise is seen both as a manifestation of neocultural processes - a desire to consolidate self-evident values - and as new elements in women's support strategies. Women's business enterprise problemizes independence, but does not change any structures. They do what is independently possible. Their business enterprise includes both independence and taking responsibility for home and family. The "uncontemporariness" of the country is one background for understanding the independence of women's business enterprise; business enterprise as a new career form is another.



Key words: Women's business enterprise, rural areas, independence, life mode, life style.