The Transformative Potential of Entrepreneurship for Women Living in Poverty

By Srini Venugopal

Women’s Subsistence Entrepreneurship: A Globally Pervasive Phenomenon

For most people, the word women-entrepreneur conjures up names like Oprah Winfrey or Arianna Huffington – both of whom are iconic entrepreneurs. In my research, I focus on women-entrepreneurs whose accomplishments are no less impressive. There are hundreds-of-millions of women entrepreneurs in the world who live in poverty and run micro-enterprises to meet their own basic needs, and that of their customers. Their impact in low-income communities around the world is profound and pervasive. Yet – there is very little that we understand about the lives of these women-entrepreneurs - a situation that my research aims to remedy.

To understand the lives of such women, I tracked 25 women entrepreneurs from several low-income communities of South India over a period of 5 years. Our research involved longitudinal interviews with these entrepreneurs and visits to their homes and business location. We also gathered othered materials such as family tree, major life events and entrepreneur’s own narratives of how running a business changed their lives.  Collectively, these diverse sources of information generated insights that are anchored firmly in their lived realities. I discuss some of these findings below.

The Iron Grip of Social Institutions

Entrepreneurship can bring about transformative outcomes for women living in poverty. For instance, one of our respondents Meena revealed that starting a venture changed her life because she could finally buy things for her children without having to ask her husband for money. It had changed the way she looks at herself and helped her bolster her self-worth and refashion her self-identify.

However, realizing these transformative outcomes is not easy. Women subsistence entrepreneurs are often embedded within strongly patriarchal social institutions where the place for women is considered to be within the home as homemakers and not in the market as entrepreneurs. Many participants in our research had internalized these social norms and faced tremendous internal turmoil in starting ventures – often saying things like “the market is no place for a women”. In addition, our respondents also faced resistance from other family members such as spouses and children when they decided to start new ventures. For example, when our respondent, Amudha, first told her husband that she wants to start a business, he replied saying that he does not want her to start a business because she will become too arrogant and start talking back to him.

Despite these institutional barriers, millions of women subsistence entrepreneurs are able to overcome the iron grip of social institutions and operate their ventures in the marketplace. How do they achieve this?

Negotiated Agency in the Face of Consumption Constraints

In our paper, we theorize the notion of negotiated agency. Negotiated agency captures how women in poverty overcome the iron grip of institutional barriers to become entrepreneurs. The construct of negotiated agency provides a rich explanation of the middle ground between complete conformity to social norms and unbridled agency. Below, we provide some examples from the paper to describe the enactment of negotiated agency.

Our findings revealed that challenging unjust institutional norms was not a motivator of entrepreneurial action for women. Instead, what motivated entrepreneurial action was the desire to better serve the institutional role of being a caretaker for the family. Our respondents repeatedly reinforced that the reason they started a venture was to overcome their family’s financial constraints so as to better serve the needs of their family. It was interesting to note that the impetus for deviating from institutionally prescribed gender roles (becoming an entrepreneur) came from the desire to serve valued institutional role of being a caretaker for the family.

Agency is often characterized as a complete departure from institutionally prescribed behaviors. Negotiated agency, on the other hand, involves reconciling continuity with change. Many of our respondents chose ventures that allowed them to continue playing traditional roles such as childcare, while also running a venture. For example, Nagamma runs a small grocery store from home so that she can take care of household tasks while running her business.

Negotiated agency also entails continuous dialogue and compromise with norm-enforcers. For example, when Amudha’s husband resisted her efforts to become an entrepreneur, she did not rebel against him. Instead, she convinced him that she will run a business from within the threshold of their home, which means her husband can still feel “in charge”. Over the years, however, Amudha’s husband was able to observe her entrepreneurial creativity, transforming him into her most ardent advocate.

In summary, our paper shows that entrepreneurship can bring about transformative outcomes for women entrepreneurs in poverty. However, realizing these transformative outcomes requires women to enact negotiated agency. Negotiated agency is comprised of protracted, micro-level battles that women wage against systems of domination. Understanding negotiated agency is critical to grasping how social change can be brought about by women entrepreneurs in low-income context.

Article Details
Negotiated Agency in the Face of Consumption Constraints: A Study of Women Entrepreneurs in Subsistence Contexts
Srinivas Venugopal, Madhubalan Viswanathan
First Published October 7, 2020
DOI: 10.1177/0743915620953821
Journal of Public Policy & Marketing

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