Informal entrepreneurship and the insidership–outsidership duality

Abstract

Entrepreneurs who operate in contexts of poverty and informality are, in many ways, archetypal ‘outsiders’. By virtue of the resource deficits they experience, their acute lack of political power, and the overall precarity of their economic lives, they are profoundly marginalised. And yet, entrepreneurship in contexts such as this is frequently characterised by high levels of social embeddedness, suggesting that – rather than being fixed or mutually exclusive conditions – ‘outsidership’ and ‘insidership’ interact and intersect across different levels of analysis. Drawing on ethnographic data collected during fieldwork in an informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya, this study explores how entrepreneurs navigate this duality.

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