The Entrepreneurial Little Tradition: Bottom Line Business of Sri Lanka

Abstract

The main purpose of this article is declaring the specific identity of business pattern of the bottom line and showings distinguish between upper strata. The study argues that stratified identification is common in the business sector as well compare to all other social institutions. 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 has been collected following participatory observation, interviewing and studying cases among street vendors of several surrounded town areas of Nuwara Eliya and Badulla Districts of Sri Lanka. Under basic findings of the research, it discusses main characteristics of 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 provided by the concurrent capitalistic market system, the bottom line seems to be automatically expelled from the mechanism. Consequently, some informal manners of accumulating capital like seettu system and indefinite social networking structures like bajar seemed to have appeared as options from the bottom. 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. Though the risk taking personality has been described as a basic quality of a mainstream entrepreneur, we have suggested that the same characteristics could also be seen among their decision making ability.