Relationship between social context and women’s entrepreneurship from the ASOPROMAHER artisanal production association, analyzed using Neutrosophic Cognitive Maps

Abstract

The study of women's entrepreneurship has been gaining notoriety in the academic community. This research explores the relationship between social context and female entrepreneurship. It is essential to understand the context in which the entrepreneur developed in an environment, to determine how this context affects entrepreneurship due to various factors. This paper aims to describe the influence exerted by the social context on the entrepreneurship of women from the ASOPROMAHER Artisanal Production Association in Ecuador. Several aspects, such as family, community, and social networks, are analyzed. It is concluded that the social context significantly influences entrepreneurship and that society is a predominant factor in the female artisan’s population that was the basis of the study. It was determined to use the Neutrosophic Cognitive Maps (NCM) because they allow us to represent causal relationships between concepts, in our case, from factors that contextualize female entrepreneurship to female entrepreneurship itself. Furthermore, the explicit inclusion of indeterminacy within this model allows us to adjust this tool to the complexity inherent in this phenomenon, where some relationships are unknown or partially known, and also it is based on subjective assessments.