Entrepreneurial identity in the care sector: navigating the contradictions

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore how the business and research context influences how female entrepreneurs construct their identities. Design/methodology/approach Focussing specifically on the care work sector, the analysis of interview transcripts explores how participants struggle to establish a positive identity through reconciling the contradictory subject positions produced at the intersection of entrepreneurialism and caring. Findings The accounts reveal a silencing of the participants entrepreneurial identity and an embracing of their female identity, reflected in the mobilisation of a number of highly gendered “selves”. This is explained in terms of the participants' desire for legitimacy and integrity, principally in the eyes of their employees, something which is itself prompted by the precariousness of their position as female business owners in this sector. Research limitations/implications The identity work is theorised at a structural level, reinforcing the need for future accounts of identity work to consider how this is always embedded in broader material conditions. Practical implications Presents an alternative way of enacting entrepreneurship and thus broadens normative notions of what it is to be an entrepreneur. Originality/value The paper complements existing post‐structuralist accounts of entrepreneurship and also illustrates the role of both broader structural and local contextual factors which both constrain and enable the identity work enacted.