Srinivas Venugopal

University of Vermont | UVM · Grossman School of Business

More than a billion entrepreneurs worldwide live in subsistence contexts and run microenterprises to meet life's basic consumption needs. In this article, the authors investigate how two types of consumption constraints in poverty, chronic and periodic constraints, combine to influence entrepreneurial intention. Chronic and periodic constraints are...

Marketplace exchange occupies a central place in the lives of poor consumers and entrepreneurs across the world. The subsistence marketplaces literature has systematically examined marketplace exchanges in contexts of poverty and built a critical mass of knowledge. This knowledge stems from an approach with roots in the discipline of marketing and...

Implementation of social innovations in subsistence marketplaces often fail as a result of not bringing about institutional change. In this article, we study the process through which social enterprises facilitate local communities in effecting the process of institutional change as they introduce social innovations. Analysing rich ethnographic dat...

Making transformative services such as healthcare accessible to low-income consumers is an ethical challenge of vital importance to marketers. However, most low-income consumers across the world are excluded from the market for such transformative services because of financial constraints arising from poverty. In this paper, instead of focusing on...

Millions of women entrepreneurs in subsistence contexts face consumption constraints while embedded in strongly patriarchal social institutions. In these contexts, the place for women is believed to be within the home as homemakers and not in the market as entrepreneurs. Yet these women are able to overcome gender-based institutional barriers and e...

A defining societal challenge in the era of climate change is ensuring consumption adequacy in subsistence communities. To understand the intricacies of this challenge, we have conducted an ethnographic study of a low-income community that relies on subsistence fishing to maintain consumption adequacy. Based on our data analysis, we advance a conce...

Social enterprises can play an instrumental role in addressing major societal challenges in subsistence marketplaces through the creation of shared value. However, there are many social barriers in subsistence contexts that exclude vulnerable groups from participating in, and benefiting from, the shared value creation process. These social barriers...

What does a community‐centric approach to impact assessment look like? That is the central question addressed in this article. Our community‐centric perspective provides an alternative to discipline‐centric approaches to impact assessment that emphasize specific methodological gold‐standards (e.g., Randomized Control Trials [RCTs] in development ec...

Environmental disruptions, such as extreme weather events or poisoning of natural resources, are increasing in frequency and intensity. These critical global problems demand market-and policy-based solutions. Adopting a transformative consumer research perspective, this article examines the effects of environmental disruptions on the livelihoods of...

Environmental disruptions, such as extreme weather events or poisoning of natural resources, are increasing in frequency and intensity. These critical global problems demand market- and policy-based solutions. Adopting a transformative consumer research perspective, this article examines the effects of environmental disruptions on the livelihoods o...

We provide an introduction to the special issue on subsistence marketplaces. We briefly describe the stream of subsistence marketplaces, and the conference series associated with the call for papers. We provide a brief overview of the diverse set of papers in the special section. Special issue on Consumer Affairs in Subsistence Marketplaces

This paper explores the impact of environmental disruptions on traditional livelihood practices in subsistence communities. Our research was conducted in a South Indian fishing community, which has faced several environmental disruptions over the last two decades. Our findings illustrate how environmental disruptions threaten livelihood security an...

The introduction of money into previously non-monetary, alternative economies can lead to many socio-cognitive tensions, if money is perceived as having been imposed from the ‘outside’, and disconnected from traditional ways of life. In this paper, we employ the lens of institutional theory to frame the phenomenon of money-use in remote Indigenous...

We discuss an international immersion research experience conducted by an interdisciplinary team of business and environmental engineering students and faculty in Tanzania. Using this experience as “data,” we bring out methodological and substantive issues in studying the intersection of poverty and the environment. The approach we describe is bott...

This article demonstrates why and how bottom-up understanding and local collaboration can enable outside entities to design context-sensitive solutions in subsistence marketplaces in emerging markets. Using the literature, we argue that external entities need to understand subsistence marketplaces from the bottom-up in terms of customers/consumers,...

We study subsistence entrepreneurship, defined as entrepreneurial actions undertaken by individuals living in poverty. Subsistence entrepreneurs are important elements of the global economy. By virtue of being poor themselves and co-locating in the same community as their customers living in poverty, subsistence entrepreneurs create value for their...

The book takes us on a fascinating journey tracing the evolution of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in India. A key idea that shines through the book is how the development of CSR in India is a result of an organic growth, which is shaped in many ways by important factors and events in Indian history. The book sketches the evolution of Indian...

The objective of this article is to develop micro-level behavioral insights at the intersection of poverty and the environment and derive macro-marketing implications. This micro-level behavioral perspective encompasses psychological and socio-cultural phenomena and emphasizes consumption and conservation. Construing the environment in a broad sens...

In many developing countries, buyer-seller exchange among the poor occurs mainly in unique, socially embedded environments that are essentially informal markets. This paper describes the findings of an in-depth, in-situ study of an informal-economy subsistence marketplace in South India. Using interviews with consumers and owners of survivalist mic...

Extension materials for low-literate learners are often developed as part of specialized projects for specific regions or groups. In some cases these materials are inaccessible to other development organizations during the project’s life or are lost at the end of the project. More recently, such development materials are typically placed on individ...