Striving for Dignity: Everyday Struggles of Subsistence Entrepreneurs in Nonempathic Marketplaces

Abstract

Protecting the well-being of subsistence entrepreneurs is of vital importance to marketing and public policy scholars. To that end, the subsistence marketplaces literature has contributed to unpacking how these entrepreneurs harness dense social relationships to construct empathic market exchanges. However, despite the decades of progress in the field, it is not fully understood how entrepreneurs protect their valued emotional outcomes in nonempathic marketplaces marked by tensions along the lines of caste, gender, literacy, and class. To address this gap, the authors conduct immersive ethnographic research in a weekly village market in Odisha, India. The findings illuminate three broad mechanisms that subsistence entrepreneurs deploy to negotiate everyday struggles in the marketplace: (1) curating marketplace interactions, (2) signaling identity fluidly, and (3) crafting self-affirming narratives across the preinteraction, during-interaction, and postinteraction stages, respectively. Broadly construed, the findings underscore the imperative of dignity protection and help articulate implications for public policy by advancing a dignitarian market policy framework.

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