Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 1 of 1
Full-Text Articles in Business
Re-Thinking Informal Entrepreneurship: Commercial Or Social Entrepreneurs?, Colin C. Williams, Sara Nadin
Re-Thinking Informal Entrepreneurship: Commercial Or Social Entrepreneurs?, Colin C. Williams, Sara Nadin
Colin C Williams
This paper evaluates critically the assumption that entrepreneurs
who start-up their business ventures operating wholly or partially
off-the-books are engaged in commercial entrepreneurship. Reporting evidence
from a 2005–2006 survey involving face-to-face interviews with
298 informal entrepreneurs in Ukraine, the finding is that they are not all
commercially-driven. Instead, these informal entrepreneurs range from purely
rational economic actors who pursue for-profit logics through to purely social
entrepreneurs who pursue solely social logics, with the majority somewhere
in the middle of this spectrum combining both for-profit and social rationales.
The result is a call for a more nuanced understanding of the heterogeneous …