Making-Do on the Margins: Organizing Resource Seeking and Rhetorical Agency in Communities During Grassroots Entrepreneurship

Abstract

Innovation and entrepreneurship are important yet understudied pathways in the technical and professional communication (TPC) literature for studying how underresourced people enact agency given weak or absent access to institutions. Despite TPC’s social justice turn and continued internationalization of research and practice, little is known about how economically underresourced entrepreneurs work in the majority world. Drawing on multisited, ethnographic research in communities of such grassroots entrepreneurs in India, the author inquires into the processes by which innovation and entrepreneurship are practiced in extrainstitutional settings of the majority world. Popular and scholarly reports paint a simplistic picture when they claim that grassroots entrepreneurs are resourceful, resilient bricoleurs who possess deep, contextual knowledge of complex problems for which they improvise affordable solutions. Challenging this homogenizing view, the author shares rich accounts of how such individuals navigate the complex sociocultural contexts that constrain and enable bricolage on institutional margins.

Tuning to Place: Using Photos to Better Understand Problems in Technical Communication Classes

“…In her work regarding Kānaka Maoli's indigenous ways of knowing, Ingersoll (2016) argued that identity and place are intertwined and dynamic: An identity might be fluid, able to adapt to ever-changing conditions, but “anchored in place” (p. 93). People's attachment to their places can motivate them to engage in difficult tasks in their communities (Mara & Mara, 2017; Rajan, 2021).…”

Emotion, Rhetoric, and Entrepreneurial Experience: A Survey of Start-Up Community Membership

“…Other such studies within the field of RPC have examined entrepreneurs’ writing practices (Jakobs & Digmayer, 2020; Spartz & Weber, 2015), pitching practices (Belinsky & Gogan, 2016; Cabezas et al, 2020; Galbraith et al, 2014; Lucas et al, 2016; Spinuzzi et al, 2014; Spinuzzi, Nelson, et al, 2015; Spinuzzi, Pogue, et al, 2015), and value proposition development (London et al, 2015; Spinuzzi et al, 2018). A growing number of these studies have foregrounded the intersections of entrepreneurial identity and cultural context with communicative practice (Fraiberg, 2021b; Lauren & Pigg, 2016; Mara, 2008; Rajan, 2021; Van Hout & Van Praet, 2016; Williams, 2010; Williams et al, 2016, 2020). And some of these studies focus on professional communication practices associated with entrepreneurial incubators (Belinsky & Gogan, 2016; Pellegrini & Johnson-Sheehan, 2021; Spinuzzi et al, 2014; Spinuzzi, Nelson, et al, 2015).…”

Everyday Ethics at the Border: Normative Ethics for the 21st Century

“…The field has recently begun to focus more on TPC work conducted in the looser ecologies of entrepreneurial networks (Fraiberg, 2017(Fraiberg, , 2021Jones, 2017;Rajan, 2021;Spinuzzi, 2017). Scholars regularly wrestle with the longstanding challenge of distributed work in the digitally mediated networks created by social media (Potts & Jones, 2011) and in traditional, global networks of digital professional communication tools, such as video conferencing and email (Fraiberg, 2013(Fraiberg, , 2017McNair & Paretti, 2010).…”

“…3-4). This approach centers TPC work at the margins of the global economy (Rajan, 2021) and pursues decolonizing methodologies responsive to global localities (Agboka, 2013(Agboka, , 2014Itchuaqiyaq & Matheson, 2021).…”