“We work like ants…we avoid being troublemaker”: An exploratory inquiry on resilience of Chinese street vendors in the urban village

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to explore resilience strategies of Chinese street vendors in a shifted regulatory policy environment from a strength-based and entrepreneurial perspective. 

Design/methodology/approach - Drawing upon nine in-depth interviews and naturalistic observations in an urban village of Guangzhou, China, the study empirically investigates how unregulated sidewalk-based hawkers struggle to survive against socioeconomic adversities compared with regulated vendors’ operations in a legitimate transitional market. 

Findings - Mirroring a sub-group of rural-to-urban migrants, street vendors espouse subtle strategies centering on purposefulness, resourcefulness and hardiness, which are instantiated through family obligation, sales tactics, merchandising techniques, technology application, trading flexibility, moral sentiment and assistance network. As such, street entrepreneurs are both enacting and constructing resilience in response to specific challenging contexts including impoverishment, operating cost inflation, contingent loss, fierce competition, market uncertainty, intensive workloads, municipal inspection and arbitrary governance practice of village cooperative organization. 

Research limitations/implications - Notwithstanding its limited generalizability, the result sheds light on crystallization of street vendors’ resilience and informs social services and policy remedies. 

Originality/value - The study provides a frame of reference to examine the interplay of resilience theory from psychology and entrepreneurship thesis from the field of business management by adding new evidence to the research on “entrepreneurial resilience” and potentially serves as a catalyst to enrich existing literature with an integrated perspective to comprehend the coping process of these necessity-driven micro-enterprise operators. The antagonistic understanding of informal economy is so predominating that it obscures structural oppression undermining social justice, whereas the spirit of self-reliance among street entrepreneurs is ought to be respected.