Love and work: How co-entrepreneurial couples manage the boundaries and transitions in personal relationship and business partnership

Copreneurs (Barnett & Barnett, 1988) are co-entrepreneurial married couples sharing ownership, commitment and responsibility for an enterprise. As a subset of dual-career couples and of family businesses, copreneurs are representative of the intersection of the two domains of love and work.;This study compares how copreneurs and dual-career couples establish boundaries between home and work life, and how they transition between the two domains.;Thirty copreneurial couples and 30 dual-career couples filled out three research instruments: (1) a survey specific to this study, (2) the 24-Item Personal Attributes Questionnaire (Spence & Helmreich, 1978), and (3) the Work-Home Identity Scale (Friedlander, 1990).;Copreneurs and dual-career couples have similar transition styles, with the morning transition to work anticipatory, and the evening transition to home either discrete or lagged. Stress is greatest during the middle of the work day and least during commutes. Copreneurial wives and dual-career husbands have more stress than their spouses during the morning transition due to crossing the identity tension line (Rapoport & Rapoport, 1979).;Copreneurs and dual-career couples establish boundaries differently. Copreneurs use their traditional sex-role orientations to distinguish boundaries, whereas the more androgynous dual-career couples rely on changing self-concepts to define work and home domains. As a result, copreneurial boundaries are more permeable to both work and home issues than are the boundaries of dual-career couples.;The traditional sex-role orientations of copreneurs is evidenced in the unequal division of household responsibilities, the preponderance of which fall to the wife. Dual-career couples have a fairly equal division of household responsibilities. Both copreneurs and dual-career couples report that the division of responsibilities is equitable.;Developmental stages of the family, business and career interact with lifestyle. Dual-career couples emphasize career more so than family development. Copreneurs emphasize family more so than business growth.;Recommendations for future research include the use of the integrated systems theoretical framework (Kanter, 1977). Practice recommendations include facilitating a more androgynous sex-role orientation for copreneurs which may, in turn, foster business growth.