Poverty, Disadvantage, and the Promise of Enterprise

There's no need to encourage the world's poor to open businesses, most already have, and their tiny ventures are what keeps them alive. What if it were possible to move more of those survivalist firms up the business ladder toward profitability and employing labor? How might that work? Asking these questions, two business academics, Michael H. Morris and Susana C. Santos, finally take seriously the business ventures of the poor, a topic shamefully ignored by business research for decades. What is more, taking those questions seriously, Morris and Santos fill a desperately needed niche in the extensive social science literature on poor people's self-employment. This literature lacked a technical analysis of the business-building process among poor people. Now that Morris and Santos have provided exactly that, everyone interested in world poverty and its alleviation needs to read this important and humane book.

There have been great books providing an understanding of the nature of poverty. There have been great books providing an understanding of entrepreneurship. Morris and Santos deliver an initial and powerful riposte that marries an understanding of the experience of poverty with the nuance of entrepreneurship in impoverished contexts. The authors take a human development approach in describing why ventures for the poor matter despite the liabilities of the poor and the typical commodity trap of entrepreneurs in poverty. Leveraging this foundation, Morris and Santos then describe the stepwise process for developing as an entrepreneur in poverty and how institutions can support entrepreneurs in helping them progress from fragile to stable and impactful ventures.

"Poverty, Disadvantage, and the Promise of Enterprise: A Capabilities Perspective makes an important and novel contribution to the broad field of entrepreneurship studies. It's a very welcome corrective to the prevailing focus on high tech, high growth ventures, focusing on everyday entrepreneurship within constrained environments."