Abstract

This paper examines the lived, everyday experiences of women fashion entrepreneurs in Uzbekistan as they navigate the realities of building and sustaining their businesses. Drawing on qualitative interviews and digital ethnography, it explores how entrepreneurial practices and processes are embedded within social relations and culturally specific gender expectations.

The findings show that women entrepreneurs encounter different formal and informal constraints, including unpredictable taxes and regulations, as well as gendered expectations. However, instead of claiming constraints and opportunities as separate, the paper shows that they are intertwined and continuously negotiated in their daily lives. Considering Deniz Kandiyoti’s concept of patriarchal bargaining, the paper argues that entrepreneurial agency is not expressed by resistance but, through strategic negotiation within patriarchal structures. Furthermore, it shows that entrepreneurship in Uzbekistan is relationally embedded, where social ties play as constraints and enabling resources, simultaneously.

This paper contributes to debates on gender and women entrepreneurship by demonstrating contextually shaped entrepreneurial agency in post-Soviet Central Asia. Also, it shows how patriarchal bargaining can be extended outside household dynamics, operating as an entrepreneurial strategy through which women navigate formal and informal constraints and opportunities.