To Be an Entrepreneur: Social Enterprise and Disruptive Development in Bangladesh

by Julia Qermezi Huang

Overview

In To Be an Entrepreneur, Julia Qermezi Huang focuses on Bangladesh's iAgent social-enterprise model, the set of economic processes that animate the delivery of this model, and the implications for women's empowerment. The book offers new ethnographic approaches that reincorporate relational economics into the study of social enterprise. It details the tactics, dilemmas, compromises, aspirations, and unexpected possibilities that digital social enterprise opens up for women entrepreneurs, and reveals the implications of policy models promoting women's empowerment: the failure of focusing on individual autonomy and independence.

While describing the historical and incomplete transition of Bangladesh's development models from their roots in a patronage-based moral economy to a market-based social-enterprise arrangement, Huang concludes that market-driven interventions fail to grasp the sociopolitical and cultural contexts in which poverty and gender inequality are embedded and sustained.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501748271
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	05/15/2020
Pages:	324
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.12(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Julia Qermezi Huang is a Lecturer in Anthropology of Development at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Tribeswomen of Iran. Follow her on X @Juli_Q_Huang.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Disruptive Development in Bangladesh
iAgent Megh's Story
1. Women's Work: The Arena of Disruption
2. Digital Technology: The Problems of (and Solutions to) Connectivity
iAgent Deepti's Story
3. The Making and Unmaking of Entrepreneurs
4. A Diversified Basket of Services
iAgent Ayrin's Story
5. Middle-Class Projects and the Development Moral Economy
6. The Ambiguous Figures of Social Enterprise

What People are Saying About This

Naila Kabeer

A very well researched and written book. Huang forges an organic link between anthropological theories on the new entrepreneurship and her own empirical findings and weaves these together in a seamless narrative.

Anke Schwittay

To Be an Entrepreneur makes a significant contribution to a number of academic literatures in anthropology, development studies and beyond. It adds an ethnographically rich and analytically sophisticated case to the growing literature on social enterprises in international development.

Editorial Reviews

To Be an Entrepreneur is an important, though academic, read. Both fascinating and disturbing, it is a cautionary tale on how not to do international development.

The Marketplace Magazine

To Be an Entrepreneur offers a nuanced assessment of disruption in development through careful ethnographic attention. In her ethnography, Huang's attention to these young women works to undo some of this erasure by focusing on their rich and complex lives and words.

The Journal of Asian Studies

To Be an Entrepreneur is an important, though academic, read. Both fascinating and disturbing, it is a cautionary tale on how not to do international development.

-- "The Marketplace Magazine"

To Be an Entrepreneur offers a nuanced assessment of disruption in development through careful ethnographic attention. In her ethnography, Huang's attention to these young women works to undo some of this erasure by focusing on their rich and complex lives and words.

-- "The Journal of Asian Studies"

From the Publisher