Working the Boardwalk: Entrepreneurial Trust in an Informal Marketplace

• In Event: 542 - Section on Social Psychology Paper Session. Culture, Social Psychology, and Everyday Practice

Abstract

This research explores the process by which vendors, artists, and performers in one informal marketplace maintain continuous access and consistent income under conditions of daily uncertainty. Drawing on 3½ years of ethnographic data and using an interactionist approach, I argue that continuous access is possible due to the development of a specific form of trust shaped by the entrepreneurial setting of the informal marketplace. Under conditions of competition, open accessibility, ongoing impermanence, a lack of formal regulation, and a focus on individualism and suspicion, individuals often marginalized by formal employment options are able to reproduce a durable system of access and income. By following individuals as they gain, maintain, and occasionally lose access to the marketplace, I argue that entrepreneurial trust emerges as a daily strategy to produce and maintain essential outcomes of stability, continuity, and profit.

Author

• Laura A. Orrico, University of California-Los Angeles