Journal of Business and Technical Communication Apr 2021

Making-Do on the Margins: Organizing Resource Seeking and Rhetorical Agency in Communities During Grassroots Entrepreneurship

Prashant Rajan Scripps College

Abstract

Innovation and entrepreneurship are important yet understudied pathways in the technical and professional communication (TPC) literature for studying how underresourced people enact agency given weak or absent access to institutions. Despite TPC’s social justice turn and continued internationalization of research and practice, little is known about how economically underresourced entrepreneurs work in the majority world. Drawing on multisited, ethnographic research in communities of such grassroots entrepreneurs in India, the author inquires into the processes by which innovation and entrepreneurship are practiced in extrainstitutional settings of the majority world. Popular and scholarly reports paint a simplistic picture when they claim that grassroots entrepreneurs are resourceful, resilient bricoleurs who possess deep, contextual knowledge of complex problems for which they improvise affordable solutions. Challenging this homogenizing view, the author shares rich accounts of how such individuals navigate the complex sociocultural contexts that constrain and enable bricolage on institutional margins.

Journal
Journal of Business and Technical Communication
Published
2021-04-01
DOI
10.1177/1050651920979999
Open Access
Closed
Topics
professional writing

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (7)

  1. Adavi et al. (2025)
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  5. Carlson (2023)
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  1. Gogan et al. (2022)
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  2. Pihlaja (2022)
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