Why I studied informal entrepreneurship
Picture 1:2 Sampling: Enterprises selected by being inside a building (left) or clearly marked
Source: Researcher
Of importance in the sampling was that I required that the enterprise should have operated for not less than 42 months. This threshold was adopted from the ‘total entrepreneurial activity’ (TEA) index
used in the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor reports (see Acs et al., 2016; Reynolds et al., 2002). Enterprises younger than 42 months are regarded as nascent businesses and perceived to still be in the start-up process. This stage is associated with a proportionately higher death rate of young enterprises according to the reports. I was looking for informal enterprises that were established in
terms of their operations and out of the ‘death zone’. This stability meant that their practices were
not just fleeting episodes or serendipity but embodied imprinted survival strategies.
Most of the enterprises in the study operated in the personal space11where their clients’ emotional
and sensory experience was important. Table 1: 1 shows a sensory analysis of the products and services provided by the informal enterprises. It can be seen from the table that most of the participants derive their income from manipulating the visual sense. It is coincidental that I use visual techniques and that the visual sense turns out to be the dominant sense manipulated by participants. I did this section of analysis after encountering Sarah Pink's Doing Sensory Ethnography
which encourages ethnographers to consider ‘multisensoriality of experience’ (2015: 11) as possible
‘new routes to knowledge’ (p. 19).
11 I use personal space to refer to services that involve manipulating the human body (like tailoring), individual
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Product main attribute
Sensory appeal Skills upgrade channel
112 Temperature Touch/ Taste Internet/ Self taught
2 Sound Hearing Internet/ Self taught
3 Printed colours Visual Self-taught/ Consultations
4 Objects/Fabrics Visual Internet/ Paid classes
5 Chemical reactions
- College Qualification
6 Fabrics Visual Internet/ Self taught
7 Food (baked) Taste/ Visual Tv/Internet/Paid classes
8 Food (cooked) Taste/ Visual Internet/ self-taught / paid classes
9 Objects Sound/ Visual Internet/ Self taught
10 Colour Visual Self-taught
11 Printed colours Visual Internet/ Paid classes
12 Physical space arrangement
Smell/ Visual Observation/ mentoring
13 Sound Hearing Self -taught
14 Fabrics Visual Self-taught
Table 1:1 Description of enterprises according to nature of service, sense and skills training.
Most of the participants were self-taught in the basic skills anchoring their enterprises but at the same time they used the internet extensively to continuously upgrade their skills. A few of the participants had access to broadband internet at home and at work. Most of them accessed the internet through their mobile phones.
12 Numbers 1 to 14 represent each of the different participants and no other identifiers of the participants will be used
to ensure complete anonymity. Everywhere in this thesis where these numbers are used they consistently refer to the same entrepreneurs or enterprises.
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Visual ethnography
Morphy and Banks (1997) and Pink (2012) opine that the visual has become acceptable and central to qualitative research to the extent that it has become a recognisable subdiscipline of social anthropology. My interchange in the use of visual ethnography and visual anthropology is not a conflation of the two. I use visual ethnography as a method to understand broader anthropological concerns about humanity and the connection between individual lived experiences and the big picture (Horst, 2012). Pink (2012: 6) emphasises that visual methods are a ‘field for interdisciplinary scholarship’ involved in ‘shifts’ and‘advances’ in ‘the production of knowledge and ways of knowing rather than with the collection of data’ (Pink, 2006: 53). Whereas Morphy and Banks (1997: 1)
submit that visual anthropology has ‘a duality of focus: [… it] concerns the use of visual material in anthropological research […] and on the other it is the study of visual systems and visible culture’.
Of note is the assertion by Pink that visual ethnography;
[…] does not make any claim to produce an objective or truthful account of reality, but should aim to offer versions of ethnographers’ experiences of reality that are [as] loyal as
possible to the context, the embodied, sensory and affective experiences, and the intersubjectivities through which the knowledge was produced (2006: 53).
In reviewing Bourdieu’s habitus, Sweetman (2009: 494) reflects on Bourdieu’s use of photographs and references photographs,
[…] as prompts and personal mnemonics, and as powerful ways of conveying information in an accessible, economical and non-verbal way - visual material and visual methods may be particularly helpful in revealing and illuminating aspects of the mundane, the taken–for- granted and that which cannot be made explicit (my emphasis).
I conducted at least three rounds of image elicitation conversations with each participant. After conducting the first round, I discovered that there was an upturn in the numbers of pictures from participants to be included in the second round of discussions. This pointed to a pleasant realization by participants that they had more to share about their entrepreneurial practices aided by the pictures than they had initially thought. After conversing for just over an hour, participants were surprised that I would deliberately stop the interviews when they still had more to say and were
24 willing to go on. On such developments, Sweetman points out that ‘[…] visual material may also contribute to their own understanding of aspects of everyday practice which would not otherwise easily be uncovered, articulated or understood’ (2009: 504). They all remarked that the pictures made them think deeply. In addition, they experienced that they were learning not only from the pictures as significant artefacts of their enterprises but also, from my curiosity on their narratives and the type of probes I offered them.
Image elicitation
Image elicitation is a process of making pictures part of the process of interviewing. The process gives control of the narratives to the participants as they make reference to the details of the image itself. Alternatively, the image serves as a memory trigger for events or opinions they wish to narrate. In an iterative manner, I initially asked participants to generate and share pictures that represented any aspect of their enterprises. The lowest number of images shared with me was 1213
and the highest number was 17014. It took between two and three cycles of recorded conversations
(1.5 hours each, on average) to go through the images. All image elicitation conversations were electronically recorded using the tablet that warehoused the data.
For each participant, the total amount of engagement taken to go through the image narratives was at least four hours, spread over different days. In most cases, there was a gap of a month between each round of the recorded conversations. I intentionally created this gap between these conversations because my goal was not necessarily to go quickly through all the pictures but to ensure that there was adequate time to produce rich and informed narratives. I also did not want the participants to think I was in a rush to go through the pictures. The gap between the conversations allowed me to ethnographically learn more about the context of the enterprise
outside the ‘formal’- recorded conversation. There were several informal encounters with each participant within this gap. The contextual issues I identified brought greater depth to the narratives as this improved my awareness on the issues to probe. In some cases, there were complete changes
13 This participant unfortunately did not make it to the end of the study and he became sick and passed away. 14The majority of the pictures were in a digital archive on the participant’s laptop.
25 in opinion or a revision in the narratives, especially from the first to the second round as we both would have learnt and reflected more about the issues.
I learnt to my initial dissatisfaction that the narratives we generated consistently focused on the inside processes of the enterprises and the quality15 of the narrative richness deteriorated once
discussions moved to abstract notions such as indigenization or empowerment. I should highlight this as a limitation of a participant generated elicitation method. It works well when the research focuses on the phenomenological reality of the participant but is of limited utility with abstract
notions that contribute to making up the ‘big picture’.
As part of my ethnographic presence, I used to take random walks across the city. On some occasions, I took a friend along to discuss our observations. I tried to pick out activities that were outside the immediate reality of the enterprises I was studying. In these walks my general focus was on the city centre buildings and what happens within and outside them. In taking these city walks, I
realised that although I was an ‘insider’, I was out of touch with the changing realities by living
outside the country as well as being a middle-class person that generally lived and worked outside the CBD. In my walks, I captured different pictures I thought were of interest. One moment of revelation emerged in my own realisation that old buildings were being repurposed into smaller and brighter shopping malls. I decided to sort these pictures and added them to various folders for participants to comment on. Picture 1:3 shows some examples of the researcher generated pictures taken during these random walks in the city.
Picture 1:3 Examples of researcher generated pictures (Left) Banner at a church entrance (Right)