ABSTRACT
Minority women have had to contend with abuse and invective, in part because they do not fit the usual demographic for business leaders, but also because they have the temerity to resist standard business practices, at times replacing competitive policies with cooperative ones. The minority women in the study demonstrate that business does not have to operate as a separate economic sphere outside the context of human social values. The minority women interviewed and demonstrate there is no need to adhere to the rigid protocol of prioritizing profit; they do not need to deny their emotional attachments to family and community – they can celebrate them. Against the backdrop of many quantitative studies suggesting similar behavior, the minority women entrepreneurs featured here imbue their business decisions with a complex set of moral and economic imperatives, contextualized within and motivated by social considerations that serve to consciously create and develop relational selfhood.
