Understanding subsistence marketplaces: Toward sustainable consumption and commerce for a better world

This article provides the background and the events leading up to this special issue, and the composition of articles that follow. This special issue includes articles that take a bottom-up approach in understanding and explaining subsistence marketplaces, focusing on individual, communal, and cultural factors that influence consumers and entrepreneurs who live at or near subsistence, and who comprise a majority of the world's population. This bottom-up focus is distinct and complementary to the macro-level economic development and mid-level business strategy (e.g., base of the pyramid) approaches to the role of business in poverty alleviation. This special issue consists largely of papers based on presentations at the second subsistence marketplace conference held in Chicago in 2008, with articles and essays reflecting a healthy commingling of disciplinary perspectives that cuts across social and commercial enterprises.     

Introduction to the special section on subsistence marketplaces

We provide an introduction to the special issue on subsistence marketplaces. We briefly describe the stream of subsistence marketplaces, and the conference series associated with the call for papers. We provide a brief overview of the diverse set of papers in the special section.     

Marketing to subsistence consumers: Lessons from practice

Over 4 billion people live in what is commonly referred to as the “bottom of the pyramid” or as subsistence marketplaces. These individuals and families live in substandard housing, with limited or no access to sanitation, potable water, and health care, have low levels of literacy, and earn very low incomes. Scholars and practitioners alike suggest that the problems existing in subsistence marketplaces demand the attention and involvement of responsible businesses and that doing business with consumers in such marketplaces can be both socially responsible and profitable. This research explores the strategies and tactics currently being used across commercial and social enterprises engaged in subsistence marketplaces. The analysis leads to recommendations about marketing practices currently used by companies and organizations that are successfully operating in subsistence marketplaces.     

Fuel-efficient stoves for Darfur: The social construction of subsistence marketplaces in post-conflict settings

This paper explores the development of market roles and transactions in fuel-efficient stoves in Darfur from 1997 to 2008 as a grounded example of how subsistence markets are socially constructed in post-conflict settings. Using a combination of archival texts, interviews, and real-time discourses by protagonists, this study explains the who, what, why and how of emergent marketplaces by showing how development interventions come to imbue market participants and transactions with socially (re)constructed meanings. The fitful emergence of subsistence marketplaces for fuel-efficient in Darfur is punctuated by development interventions which at times under- or misrepresent market participants and by successes and failures in bringing together trainers, producers, sellers, consumers and users of fuel-efficient stoves. Subsidies and handouts delay and distort the emergence of grassroots demand, choices, and prices; a plurality of competing development interventions re-shape the supply. By the end of 2008, the subsistence market for fuel-efficient stoves catches momentum, engaging over 52% of the Darfuri communities in market transactions for the product. As market participants gain voice and influence they reshape the market to favour mud stoves over metal stoves. Reports by several development organizations suggest that among fuel-efficient stove users, 90% use mud models, and 49% of women who own both mud and metal stoves prefer mud stoves.     

Why art matters: Artistic consumer‐entrepreneurship in subsistence marketplaces

This reflective essay explores the role art can play in subsistence marketplaces, focusing particularly on its role in consumer‐entrepreneurship. Using informal field engagement in Mexico, Tanzania, and Native American tribes, in dialogue with the literature, it poses three questions as the basis for a research agenda: How can consumer‐entrepreneurs preserve art and heritage to sustain socioeconomic value? What transformative role does art play in subsistence marketplaces for the consumers and entrepreneurs involved? How can indigenous consumers and entrepreneurs protect their cultural identity and sovereignty through art? Directions for future research include the need to better understand the role of assemblages and intermediaries for artisan consumer‐entrepreneurs, an issue with evident policy implications. As indigenous and near‐indigenous societies seek identity, meaning, and cohesion in a turbulent world, art can preserve, transform, and assert.     

What the subsistence marketplaces stream is really about: Beginning with micro-level understanding and being bottom-up

This commentary reiterates the essence of the subsistence marketplaces stream in light of the focal paper. The subsistence marketplaces stream provides a granular, micro-level understanding of the intersection of poverty and marketplaces. The term ‘subsistence marketplaces’ was deliberately coined to keep the focus on preexisting marketplaces to learn from in order to design solutions for all contexts. Such marketplaces should be studied in their own right, and not as a means to a preconceived end, whether it be for outside companies or government policy and so forth. We study subsistence marketplaces inside-out rather than outside-in – beginning at the micro level and being bottom-up in deriving implications for many sectors of society. We traverse a journey which is in the opposite direction to beginning with ideological lenses, wherein we have developed an ecosystem of research, forums, curricular innovations and community outreach.     

The Village Network™: Partnership and collaboration to alleviate poverty in subsistence marketplaces

The Village Network is a unique model of poverty alleviation involving the collaboration of a host subsistence market community and a nonprofit organization, typically a university, with a multidisciplinary academic module. All parties in this partnership stand to gain from collaboration. The subsistence market benefits from the skill set and labor provided by the university. The university benefits by placing their students in a position to apply theory guided by the social and economic development experience and insights of the indigenous village leadership. The coordinating organization improves relationships and fosters growth in developing communities. The discussion then focuses on insights about subsistence marketplaces that emerge from this initiative.     

Envisioning a community‐centric approach to impact assessments in subsistence marketplaces

What does a community‐centric approach to impact assessment look like? That is the central question addressed in this article. Our community‐centric perspective provides an alternative to discipline‐centric approaches to impact assessment that emphasize specific methodological gold‐standards (e.g., randomized controlled trials [RCTs] in development economics). Disciplinary approaches to impact assessment owe their principal allegiance to the discipline's knowledge‐creation norms. Consequently, the concerns, interests, and voices of community members are not fully captured in the impact assessment process. In this article, we flip the conventional perspective to offer a community‐centric view of impact assessment that places the concerns, interests and voices of community members front and center. We present the case for why we need a community‐centric approach to impact assessment and clarify its axiological content, theoretical perspective, and methodological stance. Specifically, we advocate for a relational axiology, a system‐theoretic perspective, and a phenomenological methodology.     

Policy‐related implementational fluidity in subsistence marketplaces

This paper sheds light on policy‐related implementational fluidity—a context‐dependent adaptation of policies—adopted by policy implementers to address heterogeneous needs of subsistence consumer‐merchants (SCMs). In subsistence research, despite the emphasis on bottom‐up policymaking, implementational fluidity persists because of institutional and sociocultural factors that hinder policy implementers’ from effectively and accurately implementing the policies. To enrich the current bottom‐up policy process, this paper shares insights from an ethnographic study of Fijian market traders and marketplace personnel (policy implementers) and shares insights on how implementational fluidity manifests in subsistence marketplaces. Analysis reveals the interplay amongst sociohistorical context, marketplace relational dynamics and policies leading to policy adjustments and re‐negotiation by marketplace personnel and perceived injustices amongst the SCMs. The paper provides policy recommendations and practice ideas for subsistence researchers and policy practitioners to examine policy implementation gaps and the role of policy implementers in subsistence marketplaces.     

Strategic motivations and choice in subsistence markets

This paper examines the different motivations behind strategic choice in base of the pyramid or subsistence markets. Two strategies are examined through comparative analysis: market extension and strategic intent. Using two commercial bank's micro-lending business strategies in Sri Lanka, a comparative case study suggests that strategic intent is motivated by building capabilities over time that results in successful poverty alleviation, whereas market expansion is motivated by an immediate desire to expand overall sales revenue. This conclusion may help reframe subsistence market or BoP arguments away from such false choices as appropriate size (e.g., multinational corporations versus small and medium size enterprises) toward more useful discussion on understanding why firms participate in subsistence markets and what is the motivation behind their strategic choice. By considering more than just size and scope and studying the motivations behind long-term solutions to poverty alleviation, firm success can be better understood and achieved.     

Extreme exclusion and relative deprivation in subsistence marketplaces: A study in a refugee settlement in Nakivale,Uganda

We study how refugees in a settlement face extreme marketplace exclusion through three phases of qualitative research. Overlaying the context of subsistence marketplaces, such exclusion is accentuated by refugee status, fleeing from unimaginable suffering. We interpret our findings in terms of relative deprivation, or the state of feeling deprived relative to some social reference, often used to understand how consumers feel deprived in terms of their relative financial status. We extend relative deprivation theory in research, introducing extreme marketplace deprivation. Whereas most relative deprivation research emphasizes social comparisons to other people, our study of the refugee settlement demonstrates the adverse effects of intrapersonal relative deprivation, that is, feeling deprived relative to one's past. We develop a theoretical framework to demarcate types of extreme marketplace deprivation, classifying these experiences in terms of consumption and livelihood along three facets (material, social, and psychological). We derive implications for consumer affairs.     

Fostering fair and sustainable marketing for social entrepreneurs in the context of subsistence marketplaces

Abstract

In recent years, in-depth, on-the-ground research has generated many insights into the nature and functioning of subsistence marketplaces and the people who operate in them. Such knowledge is bound to be useful to various companies and organisations, as they seek to engage such marketplaces, particularly for marketing managers, who quite likely have not had education or experience in marketing in such impoverished settings. This paper complements these practical insights with a normative ethical framework, presented in the marketing literature and labelled the integrative justice model (IJM) for impoverished markets, so as to synthesise a new framework for fair and sustainable marketing for social entrepreneurs in the context of subsistence marketplaces.     

Understanding factors that influence purchases in subsistence markets

International marketers face the challenge of understanding the decision making process that consumers in subsistence marketplaces go through when choosing which products to buy. The unique characteristics of these marketplaces pose distinct challenges which researchers need to address in order to understand what motivates consumers in these markets to make purchases. This paper identifies the potential influencers of purchase by subsistence consumers using a study conducted in Zimbabwe. The findings from this study indicate a set of purchase influencers which motivate consumers to buy products, discussed in terms of their order of importance.     

Consumer well‐being and social responsibility of subsistence entrepreneurs in subsistence marketplace

Business malpractices, such as the sale of overpriced, underweight and adulterated foodstuffs and essential commodities, can pose serious threats to subsistence consumers' wellbeing, given they are more vulnerable than their affluent counterparts. Drawing on 40 interviews with subsistence entrepreneurs in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, our findings provide insights into the interplay between religiosity and social responsibility of entrepreneurs. We further explore how socio‐economic conditions and local embeddedness—two important characteristics of individuals in subsistence marketplaces—moderate the relationship between religiosity and social responsibility of entrepreneurs, providing implications for consumer welfare at the macro‐level. Our research makes a distinctive contribution to three streams of literature relating to social responsibility, subsistence marketplaces, and consumer affairs, with specific policy implications.     

Marketplace literacy education and coping behaviors among subsistence consumer–entrepreneurs during demonetization in India

We study the impact of marketplace literacy education on marketplace coping behaviors in the face of systemic shock due to demonetization, deriving important implications for consumer affairs from this radically distinct context. We study whether and how such education can have positive impact even in the face of such macrolevel disruption that disproportionately affects those with the least resources and renders them even more vulnerable. Marketplace literacy education encompasses awareness and knowledge about marketing as well as self‐confidence and awareness of rights as buyers and sellers. We examine the influence of marketplace literacy in urban and rural areas on coping behaviors of low‐income women consumer–entrepreneurs during demonetization in India, using a retrospective survey. We derive implications to mitigate the effect of future shocks on consumers and entrepreneurs at the vulnerable end of the income spectrum.     

Adoption of multiple electronic marketplaces: Antecedents from a grounded theory study

To achieve economies of scope, most motor carriers combine long-term contracts with shippers and brokers with periodic spot assignments found on electronic marketplaces (EMs). While previous research has addressed how carriers adopt an EM, we know little about factors that influence carriers to adopt multiple EMs. Given the rise of the platform economy of the trucking industry, we chose to address this gap and generate mid-range theory on adopting multiple EMs in a logistics context. To do this, we applied grounded theory and conducted 23 interviews with motor carriers and EM experts in North America and Europe until we reached theoretical saturation. Our findings reveal that many motor carriers adopt a portfolio of different EMs, and that their awareness of platforms, expected and realized benefits, attitude, and vigilance determine how they configure their EM portfolios. The implication for existing theory is that, while previous studies depicted EM adoption from a single-system perspective, we found that it is actually a continuous selection process that follows a portfolio perspective. Our paper also has implications for practice in that it illuminates the rationales behind EM portfolio development and identifies actionable factors that can help managers configure stronger portfolios.     

Quality‐of‐life as chronotopefication and futurization: Subsistence consumer experiences in India

In the poverty‐ridden settings in neo‐liberal India, we explore how subsistence consumers construct their quality‐of‐life (QOL). Drawing on the concepts of chronotope and futurization, we posit two additional dimensions of subsistence consumers' construction of QOL namely, chronotopefication and futurization. Our findings suggest that chronotopefication and futurization are defining processes of subsistence consumers' construction of QOL perceptions; their sacrifices, efforts, and costs, however painful they may be, would be perceived as QOL enhancing from the prism of chronotopefication and futurization; and subsistence consumers chronotopize and futurize QOL for the whole extended household within the intergenerational temporal space by focusing on stable input–outcome pathways. Based on the evidence, we propose QOL as chronotopefication and futurization framework (QOL‐CFF). The framework suggests that subsistence consumers construct QOL as chronotope building, futurized and having a symbolic effect. They consider current agonies as a foundation for future building.     

Poverty as we never knew it: THE source of vulnerability for most of humankind

ABSTRACT

Most of humankind lives in poverty. Over 1.2 billion people survive on less than $1.25 per day, and around 2.7 billion people survive on less than $2.50 per day. Of course, these statistics do not take into account those living in relative poverty within the very highest development nations in the world. Yet few within entitled sectors of the global economy have had much to do with people living in poverty, except for occasional and indirect contact. Even basic ideas about poverty lack clarity; for example, what is the line between poor and not poor both within and among countries? Is it only about income or do other resources matter or act as substitutes for money when impoverished consumers engage their markets? Is poverty in the USA the same or different than poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa? Answers to such questions are provided in this commentary through an examination of three different research projects conducted in poverty communities. Together, they reveal distinct patterns of results between more affluent and more impoverished consumers across the globe.