Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".