Welcome
There are more than a billion poverty-stricken entrepreneurs in the world who run micro-enterprises to meet basic consumption needs. Being a consumer and being an entrepreneur are fundamentally intertwined in the fabric of their economic lives - a condition of life captured in the term 'consumer-entrepreneur duality'. The said duality blurs the boundaries between consumption and entrepreneurship, which have traditionally been distinct domains of scholarly inquiry. My research aims to provide a theoretical foundation for the notion of consumer-entrepreneur duality and test its implications empirically. A key import of the aforementioned duality is that events in the consumption domain create ripples in the entrepreneurial domain and vice versa.
In a parallel stream of research, I examine how social enterprises entering contexts of poverty a) negotiate the institutional differences and b) bring about positive social change in local contexts, through the marketplace.
Over the past decade, the subsistence marketplaces literature in marketing has systematically studied the consumption and entrepreneurial lives of those living in contexts of poverty across the world. My research builds on this academic discourse by focusing on market creating, market sustaining and market altering activities of both poor-entrepreneurs and external social ventures, who cater to essential needs in subsistence marketplaces. My work aims to foster well-being in contexts of poverty by removing barriers (eg. social, economic, psychological and cultural) to market inclusion.
