The Study Of City Mobile Vendors’ Identity Construction

In recent years, the phenomenon of mobile vendors, which has been attracting a growing number of attention from the society, is the academic focus. Most of the scholars devote themselves to not only analyzing the connection between mobile vendors and urban management officers but also discussing about the patterns to govern those groups, however, their studies are lacking of the studies of the mobile vendors’ identity construction. This study aims at dissecting the related issues on the identity construction of the mobile vendors by means of observing and interviewing the groups to attain the first data, combining with the social identity theory, social mutual-construction theory and pull-push theory.In the first place, the study analyzes the reasons, based on pull and push theory, that why the mobile vendors chose to access the city from country and take this unstable and mobile trade as their business for a living. It turns out that there are two elements, the push factor which includes survival pressure, suffering from the land lost and lacking of capital, and the pull theory including interest-driven, attraction in the cities and market demand of the low economic level, responsible for the phenomenon. Then, the study analyzes the mobile vendors how to construct self-identity after they choose to enter big city and become a mobile vendor combing with social identity theory and social mutual-construction theory. The study founds that the mobile vendors form the dual cognition about professional identity, identity of belonging and survival situation on the base of the other group’s identity through combing them with their own life experience. Finally, the mobile vendors construct their identity with the joint power of others’ recognition and self-identity. On one hand, they desire for obtaining positive social identity and self-identity by maintaining current identity; on the other hand, they express the willing of exchanging current identity in order to seek a new professional identity to change farmer identity, or return their hometown to pick up their original identity. But the study turns out that the mobile vendors have to maintain their existing identity in that the condition of identity conversation restricted by real economic condition. Therefore, for mobile vendors, the identity construction maybe just a beautiful dream.