Scrutinizing the Link between Poverty and Business Strategy: What Can We Learn from the Case of Shuttle Traders in Laleli, Istanbul?

The literature on strategy has long been silent as regards the possible link between poverty and business strategy, and the subject matter has only recently begun to attract attention in this particular line of thinking. The main debate shaping this newly emerging literature (e.g., Rankin 2001; Prahalad 2005) seems to revolve around one basic idea, which advocates that a long-term solution to the problem could be attained if the poor become active participants in business life. Accordingly, the discipline of strategic management should help in this endeavor by working on ways to transform the poor into consumers and/or into producers/entrepreneurs. This argument is, in fact, not new in the broader literature on poverty, and the responses to this stream of thought range from those emphasizing the possibility that there might be instances in which such an approach might or might not work (thus there is a need to conduct ethnographically informed studies), to those severely criticizing the idea on both ideological and substantive grounds (Blowfield 2005; Darrell 2005; Walsh, Kress, and Beyerchen 2005).