Thanks. It's an interesting article overall (particularly the bit about lack of accommodation as a mechanism to reinforce social boundaries), but I do think it omits a extremely salient feature of the situation, and that is the inherently adversarial relationship between customers and vendors.
I never thought about this much until I read Margery Wolf's The house of Lim, an ethnographical study of a Taiwanese village. The small retailers in these villages are typically drawn from the local community, which embeds them in a complex web of social relationships. The customers are always foregrounding these relationships in order to claim benefits--chiefly the ability to purchase items on credit. Given the small margins these retailers operate on, it doesn't take many bad debts to pull them under. (IIRC, Wolf provides at least one example of this occurring during her period of study.)
This is, I think, a large part of the reason that retailing even at this level is often done by members of a different community. With fewer social obligations, the storekeeper is freer to refuse credit, which is a necessary strategy to preserve operating capital. The "friendliness" of the customers is easily interpreted by the shopkeeper as a an attempt to create social obligations that may compromise his business activities. How big a leap is it from remembering that a certain customer is on disability and smokes Winstons to being asked to give him a pack of Winstons on credit until his next check arrives?
It's really a shame there were no African-American store owners for this survey. One of the major reasons given for the lack of them in inner-city communities has always been racism. That's undoubtedly a factor, but I would be interested in seeing to what extant the pull of strong social obligations to the immediate community makes keeping such a business solvent more difficult that it would be for people from outside the community who maintain a clear social distance from it.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
momijizukamori
no subject
Date: 2008-07-14 05:02 pm (UTC)I never thought about this much until I read Margery Wolf's The house of Lim, an ethnographical study of a Taiwanese village. The small retailers in these villages are typically drawn from the local community, which embeds them in a complex web of social relationships. The customers are always foregrounding these relationships in order to claim benefits--chiefly the ability to purchase items on credit. Given the small margins these retailers operate on, it doesn't take many bad debts to pull them under. (IIRC, Wolf provides at least one example of this occurring during her period of study.)
This is, I think, a large part of the reason that retailing even at this level is often done by members of a different community. With fewer social obligations, the storekeeper is freer to refuse credit, which is a necessary strategy to preserve operating capital. The "friendliness" of the customers is easily interpreted by the shopkeeper as a an attempt to create social obligations that may compromise his business activities. How big a leap is it from remembering that a certain customer is on disability and smokes Winstons to being asked to give him a pack of Winstons on credit until his next check arrives?
It's really a shame there were no African-American store owners for this survey. One of the major reasons given for the lack of them in inner-city communities has always been racism. That's undoubtedly a factor, but I would be interested in seeing to what extant the pull of strong social obligations to the immediate community makes keeping such a business solvent more difficult that it would be for people from outside the community who maintain a clear social distance from it.