Subsistence Marketplace Education 

Abstract: We discuss an international immersion research experience conducted by an interdisciplinary team of business and environmental engineering students and faculty in Tanzania. Using this experience as “data,” we bring out methodological and substantive issues in studying the intersection of poverty and the environment. The approach we describe is bottom-up, beginning with micro-level details of life circumstances. Such micro-level details are often the most challenging to learn and the most neglected in terms of informing practice.

Our work speaks to a number of issues such as organizing a short research immersion for effectiveness and efficiency, covering different units of analysis in terms of individuals, households, communities, village-level leadership, and the outside ecosystem of organizations using a bottom-up approach, and combining natural science analytical testing with social science to focus on the substantive domains of environments in subsistence contexts. Read more. 

Jones-Christensen, Lisa, Enno Siemsen, Oana Branzei, and Madhubalan Viswanathan, “Data in Danger: From Intermediation to Interdependency in Extreme Research Settings,” Strategic Management Journal, (Forthcoming).

Abstract: This chapter discusses the sense providing some data, and then place our insights in a broader context by discussing implications for research methods. It highlights issues of low literacy and low income in an advanced economy, providing a comparison point for the subsequent discussion of Indian subsistence contexts, additionally characterized by extreme poverty. Research in the social sciences has often focused on relatively resource-rich, literate individuals and societies. Commonly used tasks in social research can be too abstract and artificial for low-literate consumers. Research on low-literate consumers suggests that emotional considerations, such as the management of stigma and self-esteem, are very salient. Read more. 

Abstract: This paper examines the challenges involved in the design and administration of experiments with low-literate adults in business research, and derives implications for subsistence marketplaces. A brief review of the research methods used for studying low-literate adults in business, as well as other fields such as anthropology, sociology, behavioral economics, education, and health, suggests the lack of experimental approaches. Traditional experiments that employ literate adults are compared with those that employ low-literate adults. Using this review and authors' experiences spanning over a decade, the paper develops insights for using experimental methods to study subsistence marketplaces. Read more.