How entrepreneurship may affect different types of poverty constraints?
Research Paper Title:
“Discipline, abjection, and poverty alleviation through entrepreneurship: A constitutive perspective”
Authors:
Background:
Collective entrepreneurship has been found to alleviate extreme poverty by helping poor individuals integrate into their societies and overcome their multiple intertwined liabilities. This line of inquiry is complemented by exploring the conditions under which group structures may instead reinforce economic and gendered poverty constraints.
Methodology:
Sample: Poor women entrepreneurs operating in Buea, South-West Cameroon, and belonging to either farming cooperatives or non-farm groups
Sample Size: 104 entrepreneurs and small business owners
Analytical Approach: Grounded theory and vignettes
Hypothesis:
Discipline, the strength with which rules confirm, contrast, and influence the attribution of status and roles in societal structures, is a key determinant of the types of poverty constraints abject women can overcome.
Rigid organisational forms encourage women entrepreneurs to conform to traditional patriarchal and collectivistic norms and penalise those who deviate from the expected behaviours.
Flexible rules in non-farm groups allow women to entertain a broader range of entrepreneurial activities and pose fewer constraints to personal enrichment and emancipation.
Results:
Women rising out of poverty enact dominative, cognitive, and normative structures.
Due to their marginalization, abject women cannot confront poverty on their own.
Entrepreneurial groups help abject women face economic and gendered constraints.
Groups with rigid discipline help alleviate economic but not gendered constraints.+
Groups with a loose organisation work best against gendered constraints.
Conclusion:
Prior research explored how entrepreneurial groups may help the abjectly poor overcome their liabilities by substituting for individual agency in the enactment of profit opportunities. In contrast, we found that the groups exercising most control over their members are not only more efficient in raising the abjects out of poverty but also less effective in generating economic prosperity and emancipation from discriminatory norms. These findings shed new light on poverty alleviation through entrepreneurship by highlighting some undesirable consequences of collective action and development interventions tackling abjection. We encourage scholars to build on our insights and explore how entrepreneurship may affect different types of poverty constraints that vary with localized practices, traditions, and contingencies. All in all, we have provided theoretical and methodological advancements to further the study of global poverty and its possible solutions.