Evaluating Competing Explanations for Street Entrepreneurship: Some Evidence from India

Participation in street entrepreneurship has been variously explained as either a residue from a pre-modern era (modernisation theory), a necessity-driven endeavour and last resort (structuralist theory), a rational economic choice (neo-liberal theory) or conducted for social or lifestyle reasons (post-modern theory). To evaluate critically these competing explanations, face-to-face interviews are reported with women street entrepreneurs in India during 2006 and 2007. Finding that no one explanation suffices to explain all women’s participation in street entrepreneurship and that different theoretical explanations apply to varying segments of the population surveyed as women street entrepreneurs, the outcome is a call to combine these previously competing explanations in order to achieve a richer and finer-grained explanation ofwomen’s street entrepreneurship.