Sight Unseen: The Visibility Paradox of Informal Economy Entrepreneurship
9 Jun 2023
12:45 -14:15
Open to: Members of the University of Cambridge
Room W4.03 (Cambridge Judge Business School)
Trumpington St
Cambridge
CB2 1AG
United Kingdom
Join our Organisational Theory and Information Systems seminar
Speaker: Dr Joel Bothello, Concordia University
About the seminar topic
In many informal economies, new ventures must minimise their exposure to certain audiences, for instance, law enforcement or criminal elements. At the same time, entrepreneurs must also attract the attention of customers and resource providers in order to overcome liabilities of newness. We explore this “visibility paradox” for informal economy entrepreneurs by examining the multidimensionality of visibility and how it is associated with embeddedness and performance in an informal economy. We leverage a unique, hand-collected, small-area census dataset of ventures in the township of Delft South in Cape Town, South Africa, providing rare insight into a population of otherwise unobserved ventures. Through an abductive approach that includes quantitative and configurational analyses, we identify distinct dimensions of visibility, namely authority- vs. community-oriented visibility. Using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), we explore how these dimensions of visibility are associated with entrepreneur, venture, and industry characteristics as well as performance. Our theoretical framing of embeddedness reveals insider/outsider status as a key factor in venture visibility and show that authority- and community-oriented visibility have a joint bearing on venture performance. We distill our abductive findings into the concept of selective visibility, which we define as practices around making a venture visible to certain stakeholders but not to others.
Speaker bio
Dr Joel Bothello is an Associate Professor in Management and holds the Concordia University Research Chair in Resilience and Institutions at the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University. An organisational theorist, Joel examines how organisations adapt to changes in their institutional environment, specifically with respect to stakeholder demands. His research has been published in leading journals (eg Academy of Management Review, Organization Studies, Journal of Management Studies) and practitioner outlets (Stanford Social Innovation Review, Harvard Business Review). He is also currently developing a graphic novel on the informal economy.
For more information, contact Luke Slater.