Professor of Marketing Elliot Maltz was recently awarded a 2018-19 Fulbright U.S. Scholar grant by the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.
The award will take Maltz to Canada where he will study transformative subsistence entrepreneurship - “an aspirational process wherein a small but thriving subset of subsistence entrepreneurs create unique marketing value and grow their business.”
The goals of these entrepreneurs, Maltz explained in his research proposal, “are bi-directional. On the one hand, they wish to ensure that their family continues to transcend subsistence living. But they also want to improve the economy of the subsistence community in which they live so others can also break the cycle of poverty endemic in these communities.”
Maltz is planning to focus his research and study on aboriginal populations in the Alberta area of Canada. The well-documented pattern of income inequality in the United States among ethnic groups is similar to patterns of inequality in Canada when looking at income by ethnic group.
“At the ethnic group level, in 2010 the aboriginal population (in Canada) had a median individual after-tax income of $20,000 while non-aboriginal individuals were over $27,000,” Maltz wrote in his Fulbright proposal. “My joint exploration of the transformative entrepreneurship phenomena with the Alberta faculty is likely to yield important insights about this issue.”
Those insights, according to Maltz, can give us a much better view of how transformative subsistence entrepreneurship operates in developed countries.
“The recent discussion of the extremely high income inequality in developing countries turned my attention to the possibility that subsistence markets are not simply a phenomena of developing countries and exist in developed countries as well. Assuming they do, it is also likely that the phenomena of transformative entrepreneurship exists in subsistence markets in developed countries,” Maltz wrote. “However, it may manifest itself differently in terms of the factors that drive pursuing bidirectional goals (family and community) and/or how those goals are conceptualized and pursued in practice. The purpose of this grant is to conceptualize the notion of transformative entrepreneurship in developed countries (e.g., Canada and the U.S.) and gather data to empirically test our conceptualization.”
After finalizing details, Maltz is planning to embark on his research in Alberta during his upcoming sabbatical year. He has been at the Atkinson Graduate School of Management since 1999 and was most recently named Guy F. Atkinson Professor of Marketing in 2017.
This is Maltz’s second time working within the Fulbright spectrum of awards and grants in his time at Atkinson. In 2013, he spent three weeks in the Philippines as the 2012-2013 Fubright-SyCip Distinguished Lecturer.
Maltz’s winning proposal is aligned closely with the stated goal of the Fulbright U.S. Scholar grant program, which aims to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries and is considered the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government.
As a grantee, Maltz will join the ranks of distinguished participants in the Program. Fulbright alumni have become heads of state, judges, ambassadors, cabinet ministers, CEOs, and university presidents, as well as leading journalists, artists, scientists, and teachers. They include 59 Nobel Laureates, 82 Pulitzer Prize winners, 71 MacArthur Fellows, 16 Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients, and thousands of leaders across the private, public and non-profit sectors.
Since its inception in 1946, more than 380,000 “Fulbrighters” have participated in the Program.