Self‐Employment, Microenterprise, and the Poorest Americans

‘Is It Entrepreneurship, or Is It Survival?’: Gender, Community, and Innovation in Boston’s Black Immigrant Micro-Enterprise Spaces

“…Many analyses of schemes to support female micro-entrepreneurs are often focused on poverty-stricken, relatively under-educated women in developing nations (see [9]), but my study has focused on working women in a prosperous U.S. city who define themselves as professionals (based on cultural capital such as education and job status: most have university degrees and are either fullor part-time employed by large corporations). Still, they are yet to achieve their simple entrepreneurial goals: income and independence through their own social and economic efforts.…”

“…Thus, empowerment can also be experienced intersectionally. 9 Rather than individual entrepreneurs borrowing, investing, and sometimes losing all, they stay small, have multiple strategies of what to sell and to whom, and keep their day jobs. As Nadia says: "your 9 to 5 keeps your dream alive."…”

“…. they are radio personalities-I know them all, and I don't have to pay them, but I do get them a gift; 9 As Crenshaw [12] (p. 1241) states: "the social power in delineating difference need not be the power of domination; instead it can be the source of social empowerment and reconstruction." sometimes it's a donated gift, but it's a gift.…”

“…There is clearly plenty of wealth to go around. Helping programs that focus on fixing assumed pathology seem to ignore the fact that it is frequently people who are formally and highly educated who are among the majority of those who patronize-and presumably benefit from-the informal economy [8,9]. 3 Thus "helping" could more readily include providing support for what is already working well with the aim of increasing wealth and skills at the community level, where people who need affordable goods and services can access them, and can do so by patronizing entrepreneurs who share their community and a commitment to ensuring its viable future.…”

“…[6]. 3 Schreiner [9] suggests that customers who frequent micro-entrepreneurs tend to not be among the poorest or least educated in US society, nor are they usually unemployed. And although the average U.S. inhabitant does not spend a large share of budget on goods/services from micro-enterprises ( [10] p. 1569), research is certainly suggesting that micro-businesses have a symbiotic role in buoying up the ambitions and survival of the employed, yet (increasingly) economically struggling middle class.…”