Keywords

The girls that are forced into the sex trade at 13 are really locked in. They start off in a real prison, which then becomes a psychological cage, so that they are scared to step outside of the confines of that. It’s heartbreaking. (Archival transcript from a non-governmental organization)

Introduction

Some entrepreneurs engage in exploitative practices that harm and sacrifice workers’ well-being to reap economic profits. For instance, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO), more than 20.9 million people worldwide are forced into labor through coercion and deceit and cannot leave, with this form of labor generating more than $150 billion in profits annually (ILO, 2012). Worker exploitation exists in many forms and to varying degrees and includes practices like discrimination in hiring, under-payment of immigrant labor, and the initiation and continuation of sweatshops (Catron, 2019; Gordon, 2005; Mobasseri, 2019). Moreover, this exploitation appears in various industries, including agriculture, construction, domestic work, manufacturing, and military service (ILO, 2012). As an especially severe form of worker exploitation, modern slavery entails “situations of exploitation that a person cannot refuse or leave because of threats, violence, coercion, deception, or abuse of power” (Crane et al., 2021: 1). Although modern slavery and the human trafficking that often accompanies it are illegal, these problems endure. Indeed, tens of millions of people are exploited by organized traffickers each year, with estimates indicating that one in four are children (ILO.org). The individuals who pursue these exploitive opportunities tend to be highly entrepreneurial in deploying mechanisms to take advantage of workers over long periods for their own financial gain.

In response to this labor exploitation, management scholars have mainly taken the perspective of established organizations to examine the risks they could face if one of their suppliers is caught exploiting vulnerablepeople’s labor. For instance, research has investigated how such a discovery can damage organizations’ public reputations and stakeholder relationships. In particular, management research has explored organizations’ social responsibility strategies, supplier inspection, and penalty schemes, and other types of supply chain management practices used to handle the potential negative outcomes of human exploitation (Crane et al., 2019; Plambeck & Taylor, 2016). This research has provided important insights into organizations up the supply chain. Still, as Crane and colleagues (2021) argued, scholars have paid insufficient attention to the supply chains of firms currently engaging in modern slavery—namely, the entrepreneurs who actively perpetuate this slavery. Further, while we have gained knowledge of some of the practices involved in modern slavery (e.g., debt bondage [LeBaron, 2014]) and human trafficking (e.g., trauma-bond recruiting [Reid & Jones, 2011]), we do not have the complete picture of how entrepreneurs exploit vulnerable individuals’ labor.

Addressing this lack of knowledge on the entrepreneurial process of exploiting vulnerablepeople is increasingly important due to the pervasiveness of human traffickingand exploitation worldwide. Indeed, the US State Department recently reported that more than 46 countries fail to systematically respond to these issues (State.gov; see also Global Report on Trafficking in Person, 2018). In addition, management theories on how organizations handle socio-cultural problems (e.g., corporate social responsibility, social entrepreneurship, etc.) do not sufficiently cover explicit organizational efforts to exploit vulnerable individuals. Thus, in this chapter, we explain the entrepreneurial process of exploiting vulnerable people to continue working under bleak conditions against their will.

Specifically, we explore the process entrepreneurs in and around Mumbai, India, use to force girls and women into the sex industry and keep them there against their will. Apart from research on sex trafficking, we believe understanding how entrepreneurs exploit vulnerable people is critical to providing new insights into counter-entrepreneurship that can help eliminate such practices, including governmental policy, non-governmental organization (NGO) efforts, and so on.

In this chapter, we shed light on several aspects of the entrepreneurial process of exploiting vulnerable individuals, including a number of inter-related structures and practices that entrepreneurs implement to reduce these individuals’ autonomy and unjustly use their labor for personal financial gain. We use the term “entrepreneurial” here, given our interest in the creative processes of action underlying this exploitation and the changing nature of the (potential) workers instead of the organizational or individual actors involved. The findings and grounded theorizing from our study offer a first-hand look at lived experiences of labor exploitation across different exploiters and stages of this process, as well as provide an entrepreneurship perspective for the literature on human exploitation. Further, we add to the sex trafficking literature by providing insights into the entrepreneurial process of recruiting and exploiting vulnerable people, including the practices and structures involved. We hope this work ultimately mobilizes management scholarship that can begin dismantling exploitative labor practices at their core.

Theoretical Background

Entrepreneurial Process of Human Exploitation

In modern slavery, the entrepreneurial process of exploiting vulnerable individuals’ labor often starts with human trafficking. Human trafficking refers to the non-consensual recruitment and/or movement of a person to exploit his or her labor (United Nations, 2000). Research on human trafficking has mainly explored the sex industry and has applied numerous disciplinary lenses, including criminology, sociology, international studies, and clinical health. This research stream has also investigated definitional and operationalization issues, the prevalence of human trafficking, the push and pull antecedents of this phenomenon, and the negative outcomes experienced by those exploited. Based on these studies, we conclude that human trafficking is one type of modern slavery—“an acute intersection of vulnerabilityand exploitation” (Jones et al., 2007: 113).

Various reports have described the entrepreneurial process of human exploitation—namely, how exploiters recruit and retain vulnerable people to exploit their labor. For example, human sex traffickers start this process by first scouting vulnerable recruits, targeting (mainly) girls and women in abusive households or other forms of difficult living situations (Albanese, 2007). The traffickers then attempt to form a trauma bond with these vulnerable individuals by promising love, attention, and/or protection as either a boyfriend/lover or someone who can help them escape suffering (Reid & Jones, 2011). The joint effect of these individuals’ previous trauma and sex traffickers’ exploitative practices forms an emotionally entrapping connection that is difficult to break. Although governments and NGOs have collected substantial data on human trafficking, we lack a full understanding of how traffickers exploit vulnerable individuals due to the challenges inherent in detecting and documenting this phenomenon. However, like Kiss and Zimmerman (2019: 2) suggested, “serious consideration must be given to the structures and practices that enable exploitation and leave individuals with extremely limited ability to alter their circumstances.”

Indeed, structures and practices are key aspects of the entrepreneurial process of exploiting potential opportunities. By analyzing human trafficking through the entrepreneurial process lens, we can uncover the structures and practices that initiate and perpetuate human exploitation. In particular, the entrepreneurial process is a journey that unfolds over time (McMullen & Dimov, 2013) and has the following features:

First, its ultimate outcome (e.g., new venture) represents a complex task that cannot be executed in one go, but in small actionable chunks, in some sequence. This implies that, second, entrepreneurship transpires over time, with the different elements of what ultimately constitutes the realized entrepreneurial opportunity coming together in a path-dependent sequence (McMullen & Dimov, 2013). Third, it takes place in a context and, as such, is constrained, enabled or shaped by it (Welter, 2011). Entrepreneurship is inherently social: its activities take place among and are intertwined with other activities and are directed towards other people. (Dimov, 2020: 57)

Although prior management research on human trafficking and modern slavery has taken numerous perspectives, including governance, supply chain management, and corporate social responsibility perspectives, it has generally focused on actors far removed from the lived experiences of human trafficking and labor exploitation (Van Buren et al., 2021). Thus, investigating how traffickers engage in the entrepreneurial process (and the underlying structures and practices) to exploit human labor is essential for more fully understanding the entrepreneurship of human exploitation and why some traffickers are more effective than others at recruiting, retaining, and exploiting vulnerablepeople. We hope that with this increased understanding, more interventions can be developed to effectively thwart this illegaland destructive form of entrepreneurship.

Social Cognitive Theory and Loss of Agency

Social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1989, 2001) is a theory of agency focusing on the dynamic interplay between a person’s environment and behavior. According to this theory, having some degree of control over one’s life is the essence of being human. In other words, social cognitive theory proposes that people are neither entirely autonomous nor “simply mechanical conveyors of animating environmental influences” but instead make causal agentic contributions to their own actions and motivations within a system of “triadic reciprocal causation” (Bandura, 1989: 1175). This model of triadic reciprocal causation entails the dynamic interplay between a person (e.g., cognitive and affective), a behavior (e.g., problem-focused coping), and an environment (Benight et al., 2018). Moreover, this model applies to the process individuals undertake to recover agency after it has been lost due to a disruption or trauma.

Although the notion of post-traumatic agency is promising (Cieslak et al., 2009; Maitlis, 2009), trauma-related outcomes are frequently negative. Indeed, as Benight et al. (2018: 4) argued, “a subset of trauma survivors will reach a critical threshold when they believe it is just not possible to regain a sense of control over their recovery.” The authors called this threshold the self-determination violation effect, the consequences of which include negative emotional states driven by an agency crisis, perceived lack of ability to cope with threatening situations, and a sense of diminished connection to others. This effect can also result in the opposite of autonomy, namely, controlled regulation (Ryan & Deci, 2006: 1557). In other words, when people are extremely regulated, they perceive that others are controlling their behavior, causing them to experience a loss of autonomy and self-determination (Deci et al., 2017: 21)—essentially, they feel dominated.

Although the psychology literature has explored the loss of agency, the discussions have typically focused on individuals’ responses to ad hoc external influences that shape their sense of lost agency rather than on actors’ systematic, organized efforts to take people’s agency away. For instance, Ryan and Deci (2017: 77–78) proposed a scenario of a person who wants to stop smoking but then violates this internal goal: “after exposure to a cigarette ad, [he] find[s] himself mindlessly grasping for a smoke.” This example demonstrates how non-agentic behavior is frequently connected to habits and/or instincts that are reactionary and unconscious when particular actions or beliefs are primed (e.g., by the cigarette ad). Accordingly, loss of agency happens when “the extent that one engages in an extrinsically motivated activity [is] wholly... a function of external contingencies, or... the extent that the value underlying an activity is not personally embraced” (Ryan & Deci, 2017: 69).

Entrapment

When individuals lack self-control, they tend to experience decreased self-motivation and diminished well-being because they perceive that their regulation is being controlled by forces outside themselves (Deci et al., 2017). If these perceptions continue, individuals eventually develop a sense of entrapment. Entrapment refers to feeling hemmed into a situation against one’s will and, despite wanting to free oneself, being “tied with the perception that all escape routes are blocked” (Taylor et al., 2009: 795). Individuals who are entrapped believe escape is impossible, so they engage in defensive behavior to prevent additional harm from their entrapped circumstances. Combining the entrapment literature and social cognitive theory, we suggest that entrapped individuals may experience a loss of autonomy. They believe they are incapable of removing themselves from their harsh circumstances (Taylor et al., 2009).

Entrapment research has typically explored adverse social situations in which there is a power imbalance between societal roles. Further, with only a few exceptions, this work on entrapment has mainly focused on personal relationships rather than formal organizationally structured power imbalances (Brockner & Rubin, 2012). For instance, entrapment arises for people prone to depression, and their entrapment, in turn, contributes to their depression (Gilbert & Gilbert, 2003: 173). This depression is further aggravated by power differences in subordinate personal relationships, such as women involved in violent domestic relationships, battered women living lives of crime, and immigrants participating in the peripheral economy (Núñez & Heyman, 2007; Ritchie, 1996; Stark, 2009). One mechanism that is particularly effective in facilitating entrapment is entrappers’ use of trauma bonding to control their victims (Reid, 2016). In trauma bonding, an entrapper evokes fear in a victim that the victim experiences as gratitude for being permitted to live and for avoiding additional abuse. For trauma bonding to occur, there needs to be a severe power imbalance in the situation, leading to the victim’s helplessness and dependency and intermittent abuse commingled with positive or neutral interactions (Dutton & Painter, 1993).

Entrapment can result in mental defeat or a state of giving up with a “complete loss of inner resistance” (Wilker et al., 2017: 974). Mental defeat can cause negative self-views, maladaptive coping, and post-traumatic distress disorder (Dunmore et al., 2001; Ehlers et al., 2000) and has been found in victims of sexual assault, political prisoners who have been tortured, and individuals who have experienced other types of forced subordination. Although we understand the tactics abusive individuals implement in personal relationships, we lack an in-depth understanding of how entrapment and similar mechanisms might be applied systematically through organizational processes. Moreover, the link between the organizational processes of entrapment and victims’ diminishing autonomy needs further attention as it has yet to be investigated in the literature.

Context

The Entrepreneurial Process of Human Trafficking in the Sex Industry

Human trafficking and modern slavery in the sex industry are grand challenges currently afflicting countries worldwide. Although it is impossible to know precisely how many individuals are trafficked, given the illegality of this practice, numerous reports indicate that trafficking affects millions of people each year, highlighting that human trafficking in the sex industry is not uncommon (United Nations, 2000). Moreover, available data (which our informants confirmed) reveals that trafficking especially impacts female victims (70% of all identified victims are women or girls), with the bulk of these female victims (72%) being trafficked for sexual exploitation (and the remainder being trafficked for other forms of forced labor) (United Nations, 2000). Thus, we study this group of vulnerable individuals.

Prostitution—namely, the exchange of sexual services for money—is generally considered dirty work as society tends to view this occupation and the associated tasks as “disgusting or degrading” (Ashforth & Kreiner, 1999: 413). Nevertheless, prostitution is arduous work. First, the women and other individuals involved in prostitution are typically stigmatized. Interestingly, this stigmatization appears to be strongest in developing countries, wherein the recruitment of girls and women for prostitution is the highest. Second, prostitution is hazardous work. Indeed, women who engage in prostitution are frequently physically and verbally battered by customers, employers, and others, and they are particularly susceptible to contracting sexually transmitted diseases, such as HIV (Farley & Barkan, 1998; Gil et al., 1996). Finally, in developing countries, most of the places where prostitution occurs are located in large cities, meaning that many girls and women from villages are relocated to cities and thus experience social isolation and loneliness (Baker et al., 2010). For the study underlying this chapter, we purposefully sampled across four target groups: (1) current sex workers, (2) current human traffickers and brothel managers, (3) former sex workers (i.e., who escaped), and (4) individuals attempting to help current and former sex workers. Our informants were from Kamathipura, India, the largest red-light district in Asia (Gezinski & Karandikar, 2013). For more details on sample selection, research method, and analysis, see Shepherd et al. (2021).

Findings

Human traffickers target girls and women from disadvantaged environments to lure them into the sex industry to begin the entrepreneurial process of labor exploitation. People from vulnerable populations—those who are socially and economically marginalized from society—are particularly at risk of such exploitation as they are likely eager to attain the economic security exploiters promise. According to our data, this is the case in the sex trafficking industry as girls and women from underprivileged rural areas are targeted (field notes). These individuals (as well as their familyand community members) are desperate, making them particularly susceptible to exploitation.

Deceptive Recruiting of the Vulnerable

The first key aspect of the entrepreneurial process entails deceptive recruiting: the structure and practices used to deceive or otherwise lie to vulnerable individuals to channel them into exploitive organizations. For instance, one sex trafficker told us, “[We] tell the family that I am taking her [the female family member] for a year for a job opportunity. They pay six months upfront. Then, they pay the family [more money] later. [The payment goes] to their [the girls’ and women’s] parents” (Earaja,sex trafficking entrepreneur). An NGO affiliate similarly reported,

To be born poor in our world is to be born vulnerable and in danger of exploitation. To be born female and poor is to greatly intensify the risks. If you are born a girl to parents of tea pickers in Assam in northeastern India (earning as little as $1.50 a day), there is a good chance you will be sold to a local recruitment agent by your loved ones for around $50, and the agent will sell you on to a city employer for up to $800 and into a life of abuse and suffering.

We called this entrepreneurial practice “deceptive” to reflect how traffickers mislead targeted individuals (and their families) to begin the recruitment process. For instance, in the example of Earaja above, payments are initially sent to families but are stopped once recruits are “fully absorbed into the organization” (field notes). Likewise, we labeled this practice “recruiting” since the traffickers’ clear objective is to lure victims into a situation in which their autonomy can be systematically diminished for exploitation. According to our findings, three key mechanisms enable this deceptive recruiting.

First, traffickers harness patriarchal cultural structures to coerce vulnerable people into the sex industry. In particular, many of these individuals are driven into the sex industry by their husbands, who want to earn income off of them. Indeed, upon marriage (shortly after puberty, with some as young as 11), these girls and women realize their husbands’ expectations of them are significantly different than they had anticipated. For example, one NGO worker explained, “Yes. His wife is his means of earning [an income]. He is not earning himself. He is only using his wife. Whatever she earns, he takes it away from her because he does not want to work” (Udaan, NGO). The nature of these marriages further reinforces this practice of using one’s wife to generate income as most girls marry significantly older men, resulting in relationships with considerable power differences—essentially, older men wedding and domineering their child-aged brides. For example, we recorded the following account in our field notes: “Sahasra was married when she was around 11 years old. [Her] husband was born and brought up in Mumbai, and she had kids from him. After a few years, her elder sister-in-law sold her for 85,000 rupees to a brothel in Mumbai with the husband’s consent.” Considering the pervasiveness of marriage (in its myriad forms) as a fundamental and foundational institution from which other socio-cultural relationships emerge (Manning et al., 2007), traffickers seem to leverage the power imbalance in these relationships for effective recruitment strategies. Our findings reveal that deceptive recruitingand exploitation of girls (field notes) often involved family members.

Second, in addition to husbands’ patriarchal control over their young brides in marriage relationships, other male family members (typically a father, brother, uncle, etc.) sometimes sold unmarried girls to a middleman for a single sum or recurring payments. Publicly, the individuals we spoke to explained that this practice gives girls an opportunity to earn an income. However, they also attempted to conceal the reality that young girls are lured into the sex industry under the ruse of being recruited to do housework or some other type of reputable work. Moreover, when asked how much they knew about where these young girls are going, many family members responded that they feel certain the girls are offered “work... such as housekeeping work” (field notes). Regardless, several NGO workers claimed that these families’ deniability is not conceivable. For instance, a founder of the NGO Freeset recounted the following:

There’s a whole lot of different ways that women get into prostitution. Generally, the root and the foundation of it is it begins with poverty and vulnerability. And then there are people that exploit them. I thought at the beginning, it was people stealing little girls on their way home from school, something like that. Although it does go on, the reality is, particularly in this part of the world, you know, the traffickers are neighbors and friends and mothers and fathers and aunties and uncles. For generation upon generation, a daughter is placed or put into prostitution so the money can go back to the village, so the family survives. There is a little shame [felt by the family] attached to that [selling a female family member]. Nobody talks about it, that it’s been going on for generations. If you go to the village and say, “Does trafficking happen here,” they say, “It doesn’t happen here; it happens in the next village.” So, you go to the other village, and they say, “It doesn’t happen here; it happens in the village that you just came from.” So, they’re all ashamed. But the traffickers are known and often very, very close to most of the women [who are sold]. And so generally, that’s the case. It’s pretty difficult to understand why a father or mother would be involved in literally selling their own daughter. I was with a woman today, just a few hours ago, that actually did that—she put her own daughter in prostitution because they had bills to pay, medical bills for her husband. And so, the daughter was sacrificed.… It actually becomes the norm—it becomes what you do, the way you think, the way you understand. And women go into prostitution, knowing they have a responsibility to support the family. Sometimes they are not welcome back home; their money is welcome, but they are not.

Finally, beyond the risk posed by family members, non-family members often employ a recruiting practice we labeled “bait and switch,” deceptively recruiting girls and women for human traffickingand exploitation in the sex industry. There are two main types of bait—the promise of a good job and love. For the job bait, agents promise targets good work—usually housekeeping—to convince them to go to the city and later disclose that the women and girls will work in the sex industry. Perhaps surprisingly, these agents are not always men or strangers. Saaiqa (newly recruited sex worker), for instance, told us about the deceptive practices her exploiter used to recruit her:

A lady brought me here when I was 10. She had told me that she would give me housework and food and shelter and 5,000 rupees/month, and she said, you can send it to your mother. She told me this and brought me here. No one [in the family] knew about it. I had sneaked out with her and hidden it from them [the family].… If I had told [the family], they wouldn’t have allowed me to come.

For the love bait, boys court (i.e., essentially groom) girls to make them fall in love and want to marry and then sell the girls either to agents or to brothels directly. For instance, Saketha (experienced sex worker) spoke of her boyfriend’s deception:

When I was in the ninth grade, I fell in love with my cousin Ramesh. When I graduated [from the ninth grade], my parents started to get marriage proposals coming in, and they wanted to send me to someone else. Before that could happen, I told Ramesh, and we ran off to Bangalore. Ramesh sent me with his friend because he was scared of being caught with me. His friend took me to his auntie’s house because Ramesh said he could not find any hotel rooms. He said I could sleep there, and they would come back for me in the morning. I slept there, and in the morning, the auntie woke me up and gave me tea to drink. About 10 or 15 minutes after drinking the tea, I do not remember anything. Two days later, I woke up in a taxi in Bombay. They took me to the red-light area. By this time, I was no longer drugged. I noticed that my dress had been changed.… I started screaming. I got scared all of a sudden. I started screaming and asking for Ramesh.

These entrepreneurial deception practices are consistent with similar practices outlined in the human trafficking literature. We emphasize them here for several reasons. First, our findings show these deceptive recruiting practices are only the beginning of the more extensive entrepreneurial process of human exploitation. Their purpose is to break down victims’ free will. In other words, these practices represent the start of the journey of human exploitation, not the destination. Second, due to the challenges associated with obtaining information on these illegal activities and some genuine concerns about reporting recruitment stories that are untrue or questionable to raise money from donors, we deemed it essential to verify these recruitment practices ourselves. Thus, our findings replicate those from other studies and corroborate anecdotal stories. Finally, how these girls and women are recruited represents the first step in the entrepreneurial process of human exploitation and offers a context wherein the next steps in the process are successful—successful for the exploiters but highly adverse for the victims.

Entrapping Through Isolation

In the second stage of our model, traffickers engage in what we labeled “entrapping through isolation,” which involves practices to retain girls and women in exploitive organizations against their will. According to our findings, entrepreneurial efforts to exploit workers systemically focus on “breaking [workers’] will” to secure their submission and obedience, which eventually leads victims to “give up hope of an escape” and even embrace their new sex worker role (field notes).

First, brothel managers utilize physical domination to erode girls’ and women’s willpower—or the “belief that people can control themselves [and their outcomes],” which has been called “the greatest of human strengths” (Baumeister & Tierney, 2012: 8). Willpower is critical for perseverance under adversity, but it can be depleted when individuals draw on it continuously to sustain high performance over time or to cope with disruptive environmental factors (Vohs, 2013), such as severe poverty. Indeed, depleted willpower could explain why those facing adversity make self-defeating or irrational choices in an attempt to resist these disruptive factors. In our study, we found that the entrepreneurial process of human exploitation entails systematically diminishing recruits’ willpower through physical domination, including torture, rape, and threats to family members, to retain girls and women in the sex industry (field notes). Sudakshima (ex-sex worker), for instance, detailed the physical abuse she endured at the hands of her exploiters:

They used to hit us with a belt, not give us food, give us shocks, and lock us in our rooms. We had to do it [prostitution] because we had to live and survive. When customers used to come to sleep with us, we used to hit them [to try and keep them off us], but they were drunk, so they would force themselves upon us [at the behest of the brothel owner].

Exploiters use physical violence and domination to condition girls and women to believe they have no choice but to comply with their oppressors’ demands, thereby perpetuating the belief that once a person enters the sex industry, they have no options beyond being subservient.

Second, in addition to physical domination, exploiters leverage psychological techniques to break down recruits’ willpower, including social isolation and disconnection from reality. Social isolation entails, among other practices, confining girls and women in a room by themselves for prolonged periods (field notes). For instance, Seem (experienced sex worker) described how after she was initially detained, she and other recruits “were always inside for two years. I didn’t get to go outside.” An NGO worker (at Aadhar Trust) similarly explained,

Initially, they [girls and women brought to the brothels] don’t like it, and they try to run. But here there are madams and their gang of people with whom it is difficult to deal. [The sex workers] have to surrender. Plus, their home situation is not that great, so even if they go, what will they do there? The new recruits often try to escape for about one year. But [the brothel workers] are constantly watching, isolating, and guarding these girls. They don’t let them go outside or let us [NGO workers] meet with them.

As this quote illustrates, social isolation involves limiting girls’ and women’s autonomous movement to a very small geographic area, such as restricting movement outside the brothel, only permitting workers to go to specific locations, and escorting them anytime they leave the brothel (e.g., Ekaja and Sruthi, ex-sex workers). Additionally, exploiters cut ties between recruits and their family members or other possible allies from their past lives. In particular, brothel managers threaten to tell workers’ family members about their involvement in the sex trade, ultimately leading these family and village members to disown the workers (field notes). This practice further demonstrates the proliferation of deception and lies used from recruitment to entrapment: recruits are driven to feel guilt and self-loathing for the very activities they were forced to perform (in many cases) at the behest of family members who then turn around and disown these girls and women for partaking in the activities they sold them into. Sria (ex-sex worker), for instance, spoke about the power of these threats to tell family members about the workers’ activities:

They [brothel workers] all said no one will take you back. Your life will be a mess [if you leave the brothel]. They said they will tell everyone in my village what I am like [working in prostitution]. They will tell everyone, and your parents’ reputation would be spoiled. Initially, they used to make me sleep next to my partner, and there was a small camera. So, they took a photo and said they will show everyone. I don’t know whether they showed or not. I started crying so much.… I even tried to commit suicide. See here [she points to a scar]. They saved me. I got stitches. I understood nothing can be done and I have no support. Then two or three girls tried to make me understand: “We are also from good families, but our luck was also bad, and if we go [from the brothel], who will support us? And if we go, our family reputation would be spoiled, and our brothers and sisters will also be seen in that manner.” According to me, I have already died.

Such social isolation is combined with measures to disconnect workers from reality by instituting an alternate reality to which they feel bound. In particular, this process entails coupling false narratives (as evidenced above) with alcohol and other drugs to numb workers’ senses and convince them to engage in activities they would typically refuse if not in an altered state. For example, Sudakshima (ex-sex worker) described this practice:

They used to give us drugs, and they used to inject us as well so that we are numb and they [could] make us have sex. They used to give us injections. For six months, we tried a lot [to escape], but we couldn’t leave the place [the brothel].

Another informant told us about her similar circumstances: “If we said no [to having sex with customers], they used to mix Coca-Cola with alcohol and give it to us. I remember everything, and we could not tell anyone about what was going on.... There was no use in telling people anyway” given the shame and lack of support workers experience (Sadhita, ex-sex worker). In summary, sex traffickers repeatedly tell recruits stories like “You cannot go back [to your village] alive; you will be killed” (Saketha, ex-sex worker). These stories, along with recurrent doses of mind-altering substances and physical isolation, lead workers to experience a fundamental disconnect from reality. Once workers are separated from reality in this way, they become easier to control as they succumb to their exploiters’ new narratives of reality (field notes).

Finally, exploiters leverage the notion of contamination to convince workers that their role in the sex trade has made them sullied and unfit (i.e., contaminated) for normal society and that they cannot return to their previous lives nor progress to reenter society due to their association with disreputable activities and attributes. This entrepreneurial practice of contamination tends to work because of the stigmatization of sex work in society despite obvious inconsistencies between what members of society are willing to do (e.g., sell family members into the sex industry) and what they are willing to accept (e.g., taking care of family members who were once in the sex industry). For instance, Ekaja, a former sex worker, told us the following:

She [a brothel madam] said that if you attempt to leave here and if some customers recognize you, then you have to come back here; you will not be respected in society.... You can’t settle in Mumbai. I will spread rumors about you.

Although the madam was manipulative, her statement reveals the truth about Ekaja’s now-contaminated reputation. Indeed, our findings show that no matter how girls and women are recruited (even if family members sell them), their families, villages, and society blame and stigmatize them for working in the sex trade (field notes). Brothel managers harness this societal stigma of girls and women who work in the sex industry to destroy recruits’ social networks and trap them in the sex industry—a spiral—as a worker in a localNGO (Aadhar Trust) detailed:

Once the girl gets exposure in this [works in prostitution], then she has to accept this profession as the family also does not accept them [people working in the sex industry].... Any girl’s family will not accept her because everyone knows. So, they feel that now, they don’t have any other place to go, and they have to accept it [prostitution work]. They have to.

To sum up, after successfully deceiving girls and women, exploiters organize to deplete their victims’ willpower, thereby diminishing these individuals’ sense of autonomy and ensuring they feel trapped in their current situation. Therefore, these entrapment practices appear to serve as critical transitional mechanisms in converting unwilling recruits into organizational members who can be controlled, in turn perpetuating the deepening process of exploitive organizing.

Eliminating Alternatives by Building Barriers

Once they have successfully recruited and entrapped girls and women in the sex trade, exploiters seek to deepen their victims’ commitment by building barriers to eliminate any hope of an alternate life path. Indeed, as reported in our field notes, exploiters achieve “victory” when their victims effectively give up and fully submit to their wishes. This finding is consistent with research on learned helplessness, describing how victims eventually accept adverse environmental factors they believe are beyond their control—that is, victims believe they are helpless at the hands of their tormentors. Our findings reveal two main mechanisms that eliminate workers’ imagined alternatives to their reality.

First, exploiters implement financial contracts with recruits that create near-permanent indebtedness and thus form a considerable economic barrier that blocks them from leaving the sex industry due to financial obligations. Although exploiters promise workers their freedom if they pay off this debt, according to our findings, doing so is nearly impossible for workers (field notes). As an NGO member explained, the amount a girl or woman was purchased for is the amount of her debt, and that “debt is on the girl.” The girls and women are also indebted to landlords, making it “difficult for them to get out of it [debt]; they [are] in debt all the time.” One sex worker, Sruthi, described this debt, telling us that she wants “to go home. I want to be good at home with my family. Because of my loan, that is why I can’t go. I have a lot of loans to pay off. When I have paid it off, I will go home. I hope!” As a result of these financial arrangements, workers begin their time in the sex industry with considerable financial obligations. In addition to this initial debt, brothel managers loan workers money for everyday essentials (which workers cannot afford otherwise) at very high interest rates. However, exploiters also decide how much workers receive from customers and thus how much can be applied to their debt payments. An NGO worker (at Sia) described workers’ indebtedness well:

If you [the female sold to a brothel] settles into that brothel, then they [the brothel owners] give them [the girls and women working as prostitutes] loans. They come to know that the girl is settled, now she will not go anywhere, and she is the one who earns more. So, the brothel owner gives her 10,000 or 15,000 rupees.... They [the brothel owners] charge interest. In the red-light area, there are also many madrasi [money lenders] around. They give loans with 10%–20% interest, and they come to collect the money daily—it has daily interest. The girls who are in need take a loan and repay it.

Second, exploiters take steps to restrict the scope of workers’ networks to include only those in the sex industry, including other girls and women who work in prostitution, customers, and brothel managers. Although this approach makes workers believe they are forming healthy relationships, in reality, it causes them to slip increasingly deeper into their exploiters’ circle of influence (field notes). For instance, a former sex worker (Sudakshima) disclosed the following:

We stayed there [in a brothel] for almost two to two-and-a-half years. Then, we went out only when we were told to do a job. At that time, it was called lady piaros. We used to go to big hotels [where we met people in the industry]. We would get good food and clothes to wear. We interacted with and slept with politicians. They gave us 20,000 to 30,000 rupees. But we only got 1,000 rupees, and our mama [madam] took 9,000 rupees. This [type of socialization outside the brothel] went on for seven years.

Because these experiences are significantly better than brothel work, they give workers a sense of agency and relationship building. However, the reality is these workers are stuck in their situation. Some of the girls and women we interviewed described being nervous about meeting people outside the organizations exploiting them, which—while bad organizations—are at least known entities. For instance, one interviewee told us, “Since I reached Mumbai, I didn’t know where to go. I was afraid that someone would fool me again [similar to how she was deceived into entering this industry], so I stayed back here [in the brothel]” (Seem, experienced sex worker).

Due to how these workers are recruited (i.e., deceptively from an impoverished context) and retained (through entrapment and indebtedness), they generally find it hard to trust people. When workers do trust people, they often end up being untrustworthy due to their involvement in the sex industry. Saarya, an experienced sex worker, revealed how she came to trust a customer who ultimately let her down: “There was a person who told me he would take me away from here forever. I trusted him and gave him my earnings of one-and-a-half years, and he ran away.” Additionally, exploiters capitalize on recruits’ hesitancy to trust to create stories about the risks of interacting with strangers, particularly authorities. For example, a current sex worker, Saketha, detailed how she was told she could not trust the police:

[The police] went to the house where they knew I was staying and rescued 12 girls from there. But when they came to my house, my keepers [brothel madam and workers] hid me in a water tank. There were five of us hiding in it, and it was full of water. And they slightly covered the top, and they told us that if the police caught us, we would have to save ourselves because the police would rape us and beat us and then publish our photo in the paper, and then everyone would know about us. That is why we stayed quiet in the water tank when the police came.

Although exploiters create these stories to instill fear in recruits, it appears that such instances of police betrayal do occur. Indeed, Sriya (newly recruited sex worker) reported how she “went to the police to register a complaint. They put me in jail for three months. My brothel paid 60,000 rupees in bail money to secure my release.” As a result, workers generally find it hard to trust others and have little confidence in people’s goodness due to how their exploiters organize the exploitation process—namely, how they recruit, manage, and exploit. However, exploiters leverage girls’ and women’s distrust of some people to instill distrust of all outsiders, including individuals who can either help them escape the sex trade or help them after they leave by themselves. For instance, a member of an NGO (Sia) explained the following:

Some people must have betrayed them [the girls and women working in prostitution].... [They] do not trust people easily. They used to say to us [NGO workers] that there are many people like you that come to us and then betray us. So, they do not trust us. So, we have to convince them that we are from an NGO and this is for your betterment—your future will improve. In the future, we can help you if you have any issues. We are here to help you. After that, they started trusting us.

The apparent impossibility of escaping the sex industry, combined with financial obligation (e.g., indebtedness) and limited social capital, means that these girls and women can be exploited in the sex trade without end—namely, they lack agency to leave. After workers’ hope for a different life is eliminated, exploiters give them small rewards in the form of greater freedoms. However, these freedoms are still bound by the broader constraints established to exploit these individuals effectively in the sex industry. For example, Spruce (2017: 1) described how girls and women who work in prostitution over a prolonged period often find that “their madams or traffickers will increasingly offer more freedom, while the threat of abuse lingers over them causing an abusive relationship to develop between abuser and victim (think Stockholm Syndrome).” Accordingly, the entrepreneurial process to exploit these vulnerable individuals’ labor entails practices to (1) draw recruits closer to the illegal business, (2) offer them some autonomy, and (3) establish some (dark) kind of belonging that ultimately causes them to become exploiters themselves.

Converting the Exploited to Exploiters

Our findings reveal that exploiters who engage in entrepreneurial practices to diminish workers’ agency also employ various tactics to retain workers and convert them into ostensibly willing advocates of the organizations they despise. In particular, after isolating recruits and depleting their willpower, exploiters seek to deploy these workers as advocates for the sex trade, thus continuing the process of human exploitation. While a small minority of workers can escape the sex industry and obtain NGOs’ help, most take on new management roles in the industry once their “usefulness as sex workers” has ceased (field notes). These new roles include recruiters, brothel managers, and enforcers of isolation and containment rules. This practice of converting the exploited to exploiters seems to serve two primary purposes: it offers socially stigmatized workers a path forward after being physically damaged from years of performing this draining, hazardous work, which typically becomes evident by the age of 30 (according to Sadhita and Sagarika, both ex-sex workers), and supplies organizational staffing to recruit and exploit new workers (field notes). Our findings highlight two primary organizing mechanisms driving this conversion of the exploited to exploiters.

First, former sex workers are groomed to take on leadership roles, becoming brothel managers and even managers of their own exploitive businesses. Indeed, some women who were once exploited themselves become the most successful exploiters: they become the ones to target vulnerable girls and women, engage in deceptive recruiting practices to lure them into the sex industry, engage in practices to deplete their willpower to make them feel trapped, and/or engage in other practices to ensure these girls and women can be exploited for a prolonged period. Specifically, exploiters assign these women new roles because they understand how the industry works overall, how to engage customers, and help perpetuate the cycle of exploiting the vulnerable. As an example, in our field notes, we recorded the following account about Eilin, who was once exploited and now is an exploiter:

Eilin worked in prostitution for a while, and then after understanding how the entire process works, she got into supplying girls to customers. Eilin terms this as her business as it’s her source of income. She says that although she is not happy with the kind of work that she is doing, she does it because her survival is at stake.... Eilin feels that working in the sex industry is definitely a social stigma but states that she doesn’t care about it; when she wanted help from people, no one came up and extended help to her. She states that today she is quite happy and satisfied.

Second, former sex workers are groomed to recruit new girls and women for current human traffickers and brothels. The entrepreneurial process through which these women are selected, recruited, trapped, and exploited means they (1) are prime candidates for the recruiter role and (2) have few career options other than continuing to work in the sex industry. Perhaps more significantly, surviving years of exploitation alters these workers’ mindsets, including how they think and view reality. At the very least, being constantly exposed to the harsh conditions of the sex industry over such a long period desensitizes these women to the harmful practices used in the industry and normalizes the everyday life and operations associated with it. This normalization of life as a victim leads to the normalization of becoming a victimizer. Sudakshima (ex-sex worker), for instance, recalled the following:

I started enjoying this life because I was getting money and was getting to go to new places. And I had no option that someone from my home is alive so I go there. I had no sisters and grandparents. [As a recruiter and worker] I started enjoying that life, having cigarettes, drinking, roaming around. There was a time that I did not like that place [the brothel], but later I liked it. For example, if we get a pet dog, first we are scared of it, but later we get used to it. So, I got use to this life.

Although it may seem alarming that victims of trafficking can themselves become perpetrators in the trafficking trade, other research on child sexual abuse has revealed that the abused become abusers in some cases. We uncovered that this outcome of the exploited becoming exploiters aligns with the notion of a cycle of human exploitation, the continuation of which involves at least three mechanisms.

First, former sex workers who become exploiters develop non-transferrable skills and capabilities from their years in the sex trade. Indeed, once workers are finally able to earn money after the considerable period it takes to pay off their debt, they still need an income to take care of and educate their children and to send money back to their families in their villages (even when their families were who sold them into the sex industry). Thus, having developed expertise over many years, they choose to earn money via the sex trade they cannot otherwise acquire through alternative careers. Accordingly, despite the appalling nature of this line of work, these women know they can earn a living by doing what they know—namely, engaging in the practices of selecting, recruiting, trapping, and exploiting girls and women for exploitation in the sex industry.

Second, as discussed earlier, during their recruitment and exploitation, sex workers lose trust in others (from being deceived) and are cut off from most people outside the sex industry. Thus, although seemingly inconsistent, these workers tend to find a sense of belonging with other people associated with the sex trade, including other sex workers and brothel owners. This sense of belonging means that these women’s social capital and a shared sense of meaning are intrinsically linked to this industry, which facilitates their becoming exploiters themselves. For example, Ekaa, a sex trafficker, told us how she moved from working in prostitution directly to becoming an agent of prostitution:

There was a stage where there was nothing at home—nothing to eat, no education for the children. Then I again had to go into that line [the sex industry] after looking at my condition. I contacted the agent again since she was my good friend. She said, “Don’t go back in that line since you never liked it. Instead, do this [work as an agent of prostitution]. I stayed next to the agent’s house, took a room there, and learned from her how to do things. Then I started on my own [as an agent]. I had my zone; she had her zone.... If I ask for 6,000 rupees from them [the customers], then I give them [the women engaged in prostitution] 3,000 and keep 3,000 rupees for myself.... I have 10 rooms that I rent for about 30,000 to 40,000 rupees a month.... The one bad thing in this line [prostitution] is that the people who like you in the night are the same people who give you a bad word in the morning. Society throws us to one side, but we are human beings.

Finally, after having little to no autonomy for many years, these former sex workers turned exploiters can regain some autonomy by making decisions that impact the business and others’ lives. Eilin, for instance, described the benefits of autonomy and money she gained from being an agent in the sex trade:

I used my brain, and I was already staying in Mumbai, and I knew how people work here. So, then I started directly picking up [customers], and I started to recognize people, and I then started supplying [girls for prostitution]. Currently, this is a business for me. I am getting good money..... No [I do not feel helpless now]. I am used to it. I used to feel [helpless] in the beginning, but now I don’t feel any such thing.

Discussion

Our grounded theoretical model of organizing the exploitationof vulnerable individuals for labor is shown in Fig. 6.1. This model, combined with our finding that the associated entrepreneurial process to exploit others can create a cycle of human exploitation, represents our primary contribution to the management literature. We theorize the entrepreneurial process of exploiting the vulnerable as a four-phase cycle of human exploitation. Human exploitation goes beyond individual and community poverty and vulnerability; beyond deceptive recruiting practices; beyond physical, social, and psychological mechanisms of domination and entrapment; and beyond eliminating alternate career and life paths. Instead, the entrepreneurial process for exploiting the vulnerable labor comprises all of these combined activities. Indeed, these practices and activities work together and reinforce each other to eliminate workers’ agency and enable ongoing human exploitation. Thus, the entrepreneurial process of human exploitation entails orchestrating exploitive structures, processes, and organizational configurations such that exploiters can systematically assault workers’ autonomy and agency. This assault on workers’ autonomy and agency is not necessarily the opposite of enabling autonomy, so this chapter and the underlying study serve as a counterweight to prior management research on the costs to organizations that limit workers’ autonomy (Slade Shantz et al., 2020). Indeed, previous research on enabling workers’ autonomy has stressed a win–win from doing so—namely, both organizations and their workers benefit from greater autonomy among workers. However, we propose an alternative view: a win–lose situation whereby organizations benefit (in terms of profitability) from mistreating workers (i.e., reducing workers’ agency). We hopefuture research explores how people and organizations can impede the entrepreneurial process of exploiting human labor and possibly even undo its effects to help victims recover.

Fig. 6.1
A diagram of the cycle of exploiting the vulnerable involves deceptive recruiting, entrapping through isolation, extinguishing alternatives, and converting exploiting to exploiters.

Organizing the exploitation of vulnerable individuals for labor

Full size image

Moreover, prior management research has mainly studied the issue of human exploitation in terms of how organizations can detect entities in their supply chains that are engaging in human exploitation (Crane et al., 2019; LeBaron, 2020; LeBaron & Lister, 2015). Such research is valuable because if the demand for goods produced by exploited human labor decreases, this practice may be attenuated or even eradicated. Likewise, we propose that management scholars move closer to the source of human exploitation to elucidate how it begins, sustains, and perpetuates. In this chapter, we explored actors who exploit vulnerable individuals and the lived experiences of those exploited. In doing so, we complement previous management research taking the buyers’ perspective on how to constrain their suppliers’ choices to avoid human exploitation by instead highlighting the entrepreneurial mechanisms suppliers (or producers) use to limit (and eliminate) the choices of their own suppliers (vulnerable individuals forced into labor). This finding leads to an important question: how can organizations intercede to stop suppliers from exploiting labor or otherwise help them find sources of advantage that do not necessitate such exploitation?

Organizations can realize another advantage from recruiting workers (Powell & Baker, 2017; Wang & Zatzick, 2019). Specifically, organizations with strong cultures tend to recruit people open to acculturation (Battilana & Dorado, 2010) or those who appear to fit in. In exploitive organizing, however, recruitment entails leveraging individuals’ existing social relationships and/or establishing new relationships to deceptively enlist (i.e., trick) them in an organization so their agency can be eliminated and their labor exploited for a prolonged period. Accordingly, instead of recruiting vulnerable individuals and instilling a sense of belonging, exploitive organizing entails harnessing the vulnerabilities of those surrounding targets to facilitate the recruitment of these targets and shatter their sense of belonging. Thus, while poverty drives some people to choose to engage in arduous work (Gans, 1972; Paharia et al., 2009), the exploited workers we explored do not choose such work but are deceived and forced into it. Although management research has outlined many aspects of effective recruiting, less attention has been given to the role of deceptive recruiting. Throughout this chapter, we have shown how poverty and other vulnerabilities affect the selection and recruitment of individuals for exploitation. Future research can investigate what forms deceptive recruiting takes, why some types of deception are more successful than others, and who is most susceptible to being recruited in this way.

In addition, research has linked effective management of entrepreneurial firms to workers’ tendency to experience freedom and independence (Burgelman, 1983). However, the entrepreneurial process of exploiting vulnerablepeopleentails entrapment and mechanisms used to deplete individuals’ free will, cut ties from their previous lives to disconnect them, and impede their ability to create an improved future. Although dirty workers tend to be stigmatized by those outside their workgroups, they can discover positive meaning in their work and a sense of belonging with other individuals who perform the same work, so they frequently opt to continue engaging in this work (Ashforth & Kreiner, 1999). The entrepreneurial process of human exploitation harnesses the social stigma of certain types of work to trap individuals through negative meaning and feelings of loneliness, thereby highlighting how exploiters can utilize societal values to entrap vulnerable people in dirty work. Moreover, exploiters construct barriers to exit to keep these individuals locked in their work. Indeed, the initial recruitment of workers for exploitation paves the path for this continuing exploitation and inability to exit. In particular, workers often become indebted to their exploiters (e.g., forced to pay off the amount they were sold for and loans borrowed to purchase necessities), which establishes a financial exit barrier. The deception involved in such recruiting can also shatter exploited workers’ trust in others, ultimately stopping them from forming relationships that could help them escape. We hope scholars investigate how to alter or dampen the role stigma plays in entrapment, remove exit barriers for those being exploited, and help victims rebuild trust (after it has been shattered) so they can return to society.

The findings and model presented in this chapter also add nuance to social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1989, 2001). Research applying social cognitive theory has primarily focused on the benefits of gaining agency. Still, it has also investigated, to a lesser degree, the consequences of events and circumstances that take agency away. To further this research stream, scholars can clarify how exploiters take away people’s agency by exploring individuals with agency who initially face an environment in which they are vulnerableto exploitation and are then presented with a constructed environment that entraps them. According to our findings, such individuals can be led to working against their will and even exploiting other vulnerable people, thus creating a person-environment-behavior cycle of human exploitation. As this cycle becomes clearer, scholars will be better positioned to explore how to interrupt and ultimately end the cycle. We anticipate that researchers will take a social cognitive perspective to examine interventions of the person, environment, and behavior to counter agency loss and subsequent labor exploitation.

Finally, the insights we provide into the entrepreneurial process of exploiting vulnerable individuals contribute to knowledge on the continuation of human exploitation. Specifically, by developing an entrepreneurial process model of human exploitation across its different phases based on the lived experiences of exploited workers, we contribute to the literatures on human trafficking and modern slavery (LeBaron, 2014; Reid & Jones, 2011). We also augment accounts highlighted in these literatures by elucidating how this process perpetuates a cycle of exploiting vulnerable individuals. Namely, the mechanisms that drive and maintain human exploitation entail society’s stigmatization of certain types of work, communities’ extreme poverty, and the entrepreneurial practice of creating a succession path via which the exploited become exploiters. This succession is an extreme form of grooming workers to become managers. Grooming individuals for traditional management roles entails identifying leadership potential in workers, conferring greater responsibility for task performance, and monitoring this task performance (Rothwell, 2010). Similarly, but starting with low worker agency, grooming exploited individuals for the exploiter role entails providing workers small opportunities to gain agency and develop industry relationships. As burgeoning exploiters gain agency and build relationships, they can leverage these newly developed resources to take away others’ agency and exploit their labor. We hopefuture research explores how women who take this succession path mentally reconcile exploiting other girls and women in ways they personally experienced as traumatic.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we detailed an important yet largely neglected process in scholarship—the entrepreneurial process of exploiting vulnerable individuals’ labor. Our findings reveal that although economic poverty and other vulnerabilities drive some workers to choose various types of arduous work, some people are forced into occupations against their will. In delineating the entrepreneurial process of human exploitation, we took the first steps in uncovering practices that facilitate exploitive entrepreneurship to inform policy that might (1) help end such exploitive entrepreneurship cycles, (2) aid victims of exploitive entrepreneurship in avoiding and exiting the offending organizations, and (3) make it harder to recruit people to work against their will. We hope scholars build on the findings presented in this chapter to explore further the entrepreneurial practices actors utilize to exploit human labor so solutions for this form of human suffering can be found.