"Embedded" Economic Activity And Action Strategies For The Street Vendors

The street vendors born in rural areas are relatively advanced strata in the migrant workers' groups,but they are still weak in urban society.The academia always studies the street vendors from the perspective of urban management,but ignores the vendors' needs.As the marginal groups in the city,street vendors can still develop their foothold in the city in the face of business threats and institutional exclusion,they must have their own survival logic.Based on the participation of a group of street vendors in the L district,this thesis analyze the economic activities and action strategies of street vendors in urban society from an embedded perspective.Thus explore the logic behind their actions and make some thinking for the development of the vendors in the city under their logic.The study found that the vendors mainly rely on the acquaintance relationship to entry the profession;In the stage of development,the same kind of competition can be dealt with by constructing the internal relations of the group.In the face of external pressure from groups,street vendors have established relationships with urban management through relationships,bribery,etc.,and have achieved a struggle with the formal system,demonstrating a "confrontational politics" of public power,and in the face of "street thugs",they can only compromise which embodies the "logic of the weak".Through the analysis of the above economic activities and action strategies,this paper reveals the survival logic of the street vendors in the urban society,that is,they still follow the traditional logic and norms of acting in the local society,and thus realize the possibility of operating outside the system.Their economic activities are actually embedded in the relations,but this kind of embedding has certain limitations and does not enable them to truly integrate into urban society.For urban street vendors from rural areas,if they want to achieve upward mobility of their own class,in addition to placing their hopes on the efforts of more than two generations,they must rely on urban governments' market laws.The governments should make systematic rules and regulations based on institutional and structural transformation from local to urban or traditional to modern to guide their rational developmen.In addition,by exploring the economic actions and strategic behaviors of street vendors from the perspective of embedding,it is found that the use of relations and order patterns in Chinese-style relations provides rich soil for the development of embedded theory localization.