Sight unseen: The visibility paradox of entrepreneurship in an informal economy

Robert Nason, Siddharth Vedula, Joel Bothello, Sophie Bacq and Andrew Charman

Journal of Business Venturing, 2024, vol. 39, issue 2

Abstract: In many informal economies, entrepreneurs face a visibility paradox: increasing visibility to resource-granting stakeholders simultaneously increases exposure to resource-extracting stakeholders. To investigate this phenomenon, we leverage a unique, hand-collected, small-area census dataset of firms in the township of Delft in Cape Town, South Africa, providing rare insight into a population of otherwise unobserved firms. Through an abductive, multimethod approach, we address three interrelated research questions: (i) How do informal economy entrepreneurs make their firms visible? (ii) Which informal economy entrepreneurs make their firms visible? (iii) How does firm visibility relate to firm performance? Our analysis identifies distinct dimensions of authority- and community-oriented visibility and introduces the concept of selective visibility, which refers to making a firm visible to certain stakeholders (e.g., community members) but not others (e.g., authorities). Using a social embeddedness lens, we find that while highly embedded entrepreneurs are more associated with invisibility, less embedded entrepreneurs are more associated with community-oriented selective visibility. The QCA results also indicate a configurational relationship such that visibility's association with performance varies with an entrepreneur's level of embeddedness. As a whole, our study builds theory regarding the taken-for-granted concept of firm visibility and provides important insights that are generative for entrepreneurship research in informal economies and other difficult-to-access settings.

Keywords: Informal economy; Visibility; Poverty and entrepreneurship; Fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0883902623000782
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jbvent:v:39:y:2024:i:2:s0883902623000782

DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusvent.2023.106364

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Venturing is currently edited by S. Venkataraman

More articles in Journal of Business Venturing from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().