The Entrepreneurial Little Tradition: Urban Bottom Line Business of Sri Lanka

Abstract

This paper declares the specific identity of business pattern of the bottom line of the urban sector of Sri Lanka showing distinguish between the upper strata. The study argues that stratified identification is common in the business sector as well comparing to all other social institutions. Conceptually, the paper attempts to apply the notions grate and little traditions that have been vastly used in ethnographic studies to evaluate the urban business structure. Thus, the study tries to show distinguishing entrepreneurial approaches of two different actions of bottom line and the mainstream business classes. The research may be interpreted as an ethnographic exploration that data have been collected via participatory observation, interviewing and studying cases among street vendors of several surrounded town areas of Nuwara Eliya and Badulla Districs of Sri Lanka. Under basic findings of the research, it discusses main characteristics of the mode of savings, crediting, security, target groups of bottom line retailers, and behaviors of market makers and market takers. When mainstream business holders obtain all kinds of financial, security, and other infrastructural facilities that are provided by the concurrent capitalistic market system, the bottom line seems to be automatically expelled from this structural mechanism. The study has also touched on some particular conceptual areas as key identities of the bottom line entrepreneurship in terms of the risk-taking personality, hedging norms and values, and informal networking that are significant among them. Although the risk-taking personality has been described as a basic quality of a mainstream entrepreneur, the paper has suggested that the same characteristics could also be seen among the bottom liners’ decision-making ability that deal with the debtor economy.

Keywords: Business Networking, Ethnography, Street Vendors, Urban Bottom Line, Sri Lanka

Australian Academy of Accounting and Finance Review, vol 3, issue 1, January 2017, pp 1-10