Dataset Information

Unequal but essential: How subsistence consumer-entrepreneurs negotiate unprecedented shock with extraordinary resilience during COVID-19.

ABSTRACT: We use qualitative interviews to study subsistence consumers confronting the global, pervasive and extended challenges of COVID-19, encompassing literally all realms of daily life. For subsistence consumers whose circumstances are filled with day-to-day uncertainty and a small margin of error to begin with, the pandemic has led to manifold uncertainties and a disappearing margin of error, with potentially lethal consequences. Their constraints to thinking and lack of self-confidence arising from both low income and low literacy are magnified in the face of the complex, invisible pandemic and the fear and panic it has caused. Characteristic relational strengths are weakened with social distancing and fear of infection. Yet, subsistence consumers display humanity in catastrophe, and confront the uncontrollable by reiterating a higher power. Consumption is reduced to the very bare essentials and income generation involves staying the course versus finding any viable alternative. We derive implications for consumer affairs.

SUBMITTER: Viswanathan M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8014055 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Unequal but essential: How subsistence consumer-entrepreneurs negotiate unprecedented shock with extraordinary resilience during COVID-19.

Viswanathan Madhubalan M Faruque Aly Hussein H Duncan Ronald R Mandhan Namrata N

The Journal of consumer affairs 20210219 1

We use qualitative interviews to study subsistence consumers confronting the global, pervasive and extended challenges of COVID-19, encompassing literally all realms of daily life. For subsistence consumers whose circumstances are filled with day-to-day uncertainty and a small margin of error to begin with, the pandemic has led to manifold uncertainties and a disappearing margin of error, with potentially lethal consequences. Their constraints to thinking and lack of self-confidence arising from ...[more]

PMID: 33821035

Similar Datasets

Project description:Watershed resilience is the ability of a watershed to maintain its characteristic system state while concurrently resisting, adapting to, and reorganizing after hydrological (for example, drought, flooding) or biogeochemical (for example, excessive nutrient) disturbances. Vulnerable waters include non-floodplain wetlands and headwater streams, abundant watershed components representing the most distal extent of the freshwater aquatic network. Vulnerable waters are hydrologically dynamic and biogeochemically reactive aquatic systems, storing, processing, and releasing water and entrained (that is, dissolved and particulate) materials along expanding and contracting aquatic networks. The hydrological and biogeochemical functions emerging from these processes affect the magnitude, frequency, timing, duration, storage, and rate of change of material and energy fluxes among watershed components and to downstream waters, thereby maintaining watershed states and imparting watershed resilience. We present here a conceptual framework for understanding how vulnerable waters confer watershed resilience. We demonstrate how individual and cumulative vulnerable-water modifications (for example, reduced extent, altered connectivity) affect watershed-scale hydrological and biogeochemical disturbance response and recovery, which decreases watershed resilience and can trigger transitions across thresholds to alternative watershed states (for example, states conducive to increased flood frequency or nutrient concentrations). We subsequently describe how resilient watersheds require spatial heterogeneity and temporal variability in hydrological and biogeochemical interactions between terrestrial systems and down-gradient waters, which necessitates attention to the conservation and restoration of vulnerable waters and their downstream connectivity gradients. To conclude, we provide actionable principles for resilient watersheds and articulate research needs to further watershed resilience science and vulnerable-water management.

Dataset Information

Unequal but essential: How subsistence consumer-entrepreneurs negotiate unprecedented shock with extraordinary resilience during COVID-19.

Publications

Unequal but essential: How subsistence consumer-entrepreneurs negotiate unprecedented shock with extraordinary resilience during COVID-19.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets