Sarah Turner

Photo: Owen Egan

Sarah Turner understands the value of a wok made from a discarded boat propeller. A recently transplanted New Zealander, the new professor in development geography has spent the past decade researching how small entrepreneurs on the economic margins eke out an existence in Southeast Asia, with her most recent research based in Makassar (Indonesia), and Hanoi and Sa Pa (northern Vietnam).

"Development geography in-cludes looking at how people in these parts of the world are attempting to improve their livelihoods in relation to social and physical space," says Turner. "It's about understanding how past and current processes are working in these countries, and asking how these people could change their situation if they wanted to."

Her study focuses on the "borderline survival" of low-income businesses involved in manufacturing goods (such as the aforementioned propeller woks), food, clothing, jewellery and textiles. By interviewing the people entrenched in these crowded trading centres, Turner digs for answers about basic quotidian survival: "How do they cope given the local economic and political environment? How do they cope given the bureaucracy? Given the local gender norms? Cultural divisions of who can do what? How do they structure their enterprises? Are they being innovative? If they are, how? If they aren't why not?"

Not surprisingly, politics plays a huge role in determining the success (or lack thereof) of small-scale entrepreneurs. Turner says political decisions directly influence one's access to job training, resources, capital and credit. "There's also often a lot of corruption involved with things like getting a license," she adds, "or the bureaucracy makes it really hard for a small entrepreneur to fight through the red tape -- leading to huge implications as to whether they have a legal status to get credit from a bank, or if they have to work illegally."

Turner's study also looks at social and cultural forces that don't usually register on the radar of traditional small enterprise studies. "A lot of the constraints I see," she says, "are because of generational expectations that you will keep doing things the way the previous generation did them. It can be seen as inappropriate to suggest changes to your father because it's like you're saying 'I know more than you do.'"

When innovations do occur, she says, they're "usually really small scale. It might be things like borrowing technology from another part of the country, or it could be picking up a magazine from somewhere and copying jewellery ideas. Or it could be coming up with an idea in situ, like trying to create a new type of coffee table because you've seen one in a design store in the city."

Turner plans to return to Hanoi and Sa Pa this June, citing ongoing research, both contemporary and historical, as crucial to understanding (let alone solving) the problems faced by these communities. Her findings are channeled back into the community via local university researchers -- many of whom she works in collaboration with -- and "semiautonomous government organizations/Non-Government Organizations (NGOs)," but change is nevertheless a slow process.

"Change just doesn't happen fast," she says. "It's not immediate. There is some very good work being done by NGOs in these areas, but there's also a need for far more systematic, historically and culturally informed analyses of what's gone wrong.

"I think it's going to take a much bigger shift for us to be of any help to them: for example, certain cultural groups in Makassar have better access to bank credit than other groups. Trying to improve access for all small entrepreneurs is going to take a lot of time. I think that's where someone with more research background can make a difference; I think that's where I fit in.

"My job is not to go in there and be an NGO," she adds. "My job is to go in there and try to inform the NGOs, because often they have a very limited local understanding with not much historical background.

"I'm not there to just observe. I'm there to observe, understand and analyze the local political, cultural and social concerns that influence the small scale entrepreneurs at a deeper level, and then inform."

James Martin