Mumpreneurial Agency: Mobilizing Motherhood and Reconfiguring Family Relations in China

ABSTRACT Women's entrepreneurship has expanded rapidly in China despite persistent gendered expectations that position mothers as primary caregivers, raising the question of how women make entrepreneurship possible while remaining embedded in family responsibilities. Based on interviews with 24 mumpreneurs and online observations within a digital business‐school community in China, this study examines how entrepreneurial agency is exercised within and through gendered norms and role expectations. Informed by social theories of agency and gender, our analysis identifies three interrelated reconfigurative practices through which participants entrepreneurialised domestic life: capitalizing motherhood by converting maternal experience and family‐oriented legitimacy into entrepreneurial expertise and credibility; reorganizing domestic time and space to accommodate entrepreneurial work; and renegotiating parent–child relations to make entrepreneurial routines doable while reframing entrepreneurship itself as part of good mothering. These practices generated both intended and unintended outcomes: participants gained market recognition and social connections and reclaimed financial autonomy and family recognition, while increasingly internalizing self‐reliance and individual responsibility for managing work–family tensions and financial insecurity. The findings contribute to research on gendered entrepreneurship and mumpreneurial agency in China while highlighting the ambivalent relationship between women's agency and neoliberal responsibilisation.