Evaluating competing theories of street entrepreneurship: some lessons from a study of street vendors in Bangalore, India

Conventionally, street entrepreneurs were either seen as a residue from a pre-modern era that is gradually disappearing (modernisation theory), or an endeavour into which marginalised populations are driven out of necessity in the absence of alternative ways of securing a livelihood (structuralist theory). In recent years, however, participation in street entrepreneurship has been re-read either as a rational economic choice (neo-liberal theory) or as conducted for cultural reasons (post-modern theory). The aim of this paper is to evaluate critically these competing explanations for participation in street entrepreneurship. To do this, face-to-face interviews were conducted with 871 street entrepreneurs in the Indian city of Bangalore during 2010 concerning their reasons for participation in street entrepreneurship. The finding is that no one explanation suffices. Some 12?% explain their participation in street entrepreneurship as necessity-driven, 15?% as traditional ancestral activity, 56?% as a rational economic choice and 17?% as pursued for social or lifestyle reasons. The outcome is a call to combine these previously rival explanations in order to develop a richer and more nuanced theorisation of the multifarious motives for street entrepreneurship in emerging market economies.