A Cost‐Effectiveness Analysis of the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh

Reports of the success of the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh have led to rapid growth in funding for microfinance. But has the Grameen Bank been cost‐effective? This article compares output with subsidy for the bank in a present‐value framework. For the timeframe 1983–97, subsidy per person‐year of membership in Grameen was about $20, and subsidy per dollar‐year borrowed was about $0.22. Although the article does not measure consumer surplus for Grameen users, the evidence in the literature suggests that surplus probably exceeds subsidy. The Grameen Bank — if not necessarily other microlenders — was probably a worthwhile social investment.     

Social Capital,Organic Agriculture,and Sustainable Livelihood Security: Rethinking Agrarian Change in Mexico*

Abstract This paper explores the relevance of extra local market linkages and local‐level social capital to sustainable livelihood outcomes in two agrarian communities on Mexico's Baja Peninsula. Contextualized by the specificity of Mexico's transition from state‐directed rural development to neoliberally‐guided rural development in the 1990s, findings suggest that market linkages can intersect with pre‐existing social capital to both create new and destroy preexisting social capital, thus shaping the direction of development and inequality outcomes. The nature of a community's social fabric is often a result of long‐standing historical legacies. In the communities presented, the quantity and quality of social capital was intricately connected to their history of state‐sponsored or market agriculture; the nature of local institutions, with particular emphasis on the formation and evolution of the ejido; and the access to and availability of natural resources, namely land and water, which are both intricately connected to market access options. Moving beyond a simple demonstration that social capital matters, this analysis explores the complex and dynamic interaction between local‐level social capital and extralocal market linkages. In doing so, it contributes to the larger debate on how the historical legacy of populist reforms and the social and political institutions created during state populism have nuanced the trajectory of neoliberal development in Mexico.     

BRAC: Anatomy of a “poverty enterprise”

Management of the poverty alleviation process has created a new form of poverty enterprise. This enterprise provides poverty‐production‐market linkages, and in the process, it combines three features: a nonprofit nongovernmental organization, a for‐profit nongovernmental organization that has established an internal market, and a profit‐making industrial and business concern. This article explains how BRAC (Building Resources Across Community) in Bangladesh has used poverty to transform itself from a tiny relief distribution organization into the world's largest poverty enterprise. This enterprise is characterized by contradictions between its public claims and actual practices.     

Neoliberal resource governance and counter-hegemonic social movement in Bangladesh

Bangladesh’s energy sector institutionalized neoliberal policies in the early 1990s after a decade long implementation of structural adjustment policies suggested by the World Bank. These policies strengthened the role of foreign private capital and reduced the role of public enterprises. In spite of the country’s success in exploring and developing petroleum resources, the World Bank pushed for policy reforms to reduce the role of state-owned companies. Bangladesh signed several production sharing contracts with multinational energy corporations during 1993–1998. This resulted in the development of a counter-hegemonic social movement, the National Committee. Its activists made the energy sector the most contested national policy domain. Its direct action programs and other mobilization tactics transformed Bangladesh’s public sphere vis-à-vis energy politics. The National Committee caused the government to reverse its decision in some cases, but is far from achieving its main goal: increasing the capability of national institutions to maintain full ownership in natural resource management. Notwithstanding this limitation, the National Committee is a fascinating case of a counter-movement in the Global South contesting neoliberal resource appropriation.     

The Grameen Bank in Bangladesh: Helping Poor Women with Credit for Self-Employment

Summary

Social work with poor women should include options for self-employment as avenues out of poverty. The Grameen Bank of Bangladesh exemplifies one micro-lending strategy to overcome traditional barriers and assist very poor women to earn an income and participate in the local economy. Credit lending principles combined with social development goals are highlighted, and the impact of this model discussed in terms of its success in alleviating poverty. Transferability of the model to the United States is discussed, and implications for social work offered.     

Differentiating selves: middle‐aged gay men in Manchester's less visible ‘homospaces’

Scholarship on gay bars/‘villages’ has overshadowed study of ‘homospaces’ (gay fields of existence) less available/inaccessible to a wider public – websites, saunas and social/support groups. Based on interviews with 27 men aged 39–61 living in Manchester, this article addresses what middle‐aged gay men's accounts of these particular homospaces say about their experiences of age/ageing and how relations of ageism work within them. Specifically, I focus on how study participants use ‘ageing capital’ in these fields to differentiate themselves from their younger counterparts in three ways. First, ageing capital is implicated in capitulation to gay ageism and a reverse ageism – visible in accounts of differentiation from the ‘superficial,’ reckless ways of sexualized space that participants associated with younger gay men. Second, it was visible in accounts of resistance to/questioning of gay ageism – strategies that could make sexualized homospaces more habitable. Third, ageing capital was implicated in negotiation with ageing/gay ageism – visible in ambivalent stances hovering between compliance and resistance – towards ageing and ageism, which could reinforce constraints on uses/display of the body. The first and third accounts indicate the multidirectional character of gay ageism, limits on the deployment on ageing capital and show how middle‐aged men can undermine their generational claims to represent a more authentic form of gay male embodiment. En route, I also complicate stereotypical thinking that gay social/support groups represent more inclusive, empowering space whilst overtly sexualized spaces of the ‘gay scene’ represent the opposite.     

Race,Gender, and the Invisible Hand of Social Capital

To better understand persistent race and gender inequality in the labor market, this article discusses the informal processes by which social connections provide individuals with access to information, influence, and status that help to further people’s careers. Because social networks are segregated by race and gender, access to these social capital resources tends to be greater for white men than for minorities and women. To illustrate this point, research on the invisible hand of social capital is presented. In short, high-level job openings are commonly filled with non-searchers – people who are not looking for new jobs – thanks to their receipt of unsolicited job leads. Recent studies find that this process operates more effectively for white men than for minorities and women, demonstrating how the invisible hand of social capital helps to perpetuate race and gender inequality. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings and directions for future research.     

Explaining microfinance's resilience: the case of microfinance in Australia

ABSTRACT

Microfinance has been unsuccessfully deployed as a poverty reduction strategy in the Global South. However, despite advocates acknowledging this shortcoming, the sector continues to grow. Moreover, over the past decade it has expanded its geographic scope, targeting poor communities in the Global North under the banner of financial inclusion. This article investigates the growth of the Australian sector. Analyzing the impacts of reforms to Australia's social security system alongside the political economy of the microfinance industry, it argues the debtfare state in Australia has provided fertile ground for microfinance's expansion. Documenting the advocacy strategies and tools to target vulnerable communities used by microfinance organizations and corporate partners, it charts how government support and subsidies have created a favourable regulatory environment, driving the sector's growth. This has benefitted these coalitions while displacing other forms of social security, despite the lack of robust evidence demonstrating microfinance's benefits for the poor.     

Who bears the burden of bribery? Evidence from public service delivery in Kenya

This article empirically examines how an individual's economic, social and political capital affects their propensity to make bribe payments in exchange for public services. Using an individual‐level survey on bribes, the econometric results suggest that the burden of bribery is borne by the poor, but substantially decreases when institutions that constrain bureaucratic corruption are strong and effective. The results also show that the incidence of bribery decreases when social capital is high but increases when political networks are prevalent. These findings support the need to combine anti‐corruption reforms with poverty reduction strategies and social policies in order to foster equity in public services provision in Kenya.     

Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State

Most commentary on the Edward Snowden affair and other recent accounts of government spying leaked in the media has focused on individual privacy concerns, while overlooking how contemporary neoliberal modernity has created a social order in which new surveillance technologies grant the state a degree of power unthinkable to past generations – exceeding in reach and complexity even the totalitarian state imagined in Orwell's dystopian account, 1984. Any critical analysis of the modern surveillance state must move beyond documenting abuses of state power to address how government repression has been allowed to proceed unchecked, and even to flourish, through its support of an antidemocratic public pedagogy produced and circulated via a depoliticizing machinery of fear and consumption. In the USA, repression works through the homogenizing forces of the market as well as a corresponding loss of public memory and political identity to encourage the widespread embrace of an authoritarian surveillance culture. The state and corporate cultural apparatuses now collude to socialize everyone into a surveillance regime, even as personal information is willingly given over to social media and other corporate-based sites as people move across multiple screens and digital apparatuses. It is no longer possible to address the violations committed by the surveillance state without also analysing this broader regime of security and commodification. The authoritarian nature of the corporate–state surveillance apparatus in the USA can only be fully understood when its ubiquitous tentacles are connected to wider cultures of entertainment, commerce and punishment, and the increasing labelling of democratic dissent as an act of terrorism. If democracy is to have a future in America, then it is imperative to organize social movements capable of recovering public memory and reclaiming dissent as essential features of responsible citizenship.     

The Role of Social Capital in the Start-Up of Non-profit Organisations: The Case of Fondazione Welfare Ambrosiano

This article investigates how a start-up foundation can build its organisational social capital, meaning a network of strategic partnerships with other organisations based on trust relationships, in order to fulfil its mission. Based on a case study analysis of Fondazione Welfare Ambrosiano—an Italian foundation created in partnership with private organisations and local public institutions—we explored whether and how some characteristics of the social capital of the foundation’s members contributed to the organisational social capital. By applying Nahapiet and Ghoshal’s (Acad Manag Rev 23(2):242–266, 1998) social capital framework, we discovered that the social capital configuration of the founders and staff, linked to some characteristics of the foundation, had driven the development of the organisational social capital. Our paper contributes to an understanding of what constitutes the best configuration of social capital to allow a start-up foundation to take off.     

Engaging for a social licence to operate (SLO)

Organizations - in free and relatively free market economies - depend on permission to operate being granted by stakeholders. This often-tacit permission functions as a social licence and reflects an organization’s ability to engage with its stakeholders to identify and respond to their demands and expectations. Research suggests the generation of a social licence to operate (SLO) and its reputational benefits depends on the quality of organization-stakeholder relationships, but limited attention to how this occurs has been given in the public relations literature. This paper explores two organizational approaches to building SLO – pro-self and pro-social – and considers the role of public relations and engagement in achieving, maintaining, and repairing SLO.     

A More Perfect Commodity: Bottled Water,Global Accumulation,and Local Contestation

Bottled water sits at the intersection of debates regarding the social and environmental effects of the commodification of nature and the ways neoliberal globalization alters the provision of public services. Utilizing Polanyi's concept of fictitious commodities and Harvey's work on accumulation by dispossession, this article traces bottled water's transformation from elite niche item to a product consumed by three fourths of U.S. households. Drawing on ethnographic research with participants in two cases of proposed spring water extraction from rural communities by industry leader Nestlé Waters, we make two principal arguments. First, the case of bottled water necessitates a reevaluation of existing theoretical frameworks regarding water privatization and commodification. Municipal tap water networks pose substantial barriers to capital accumulation, leading one influential scholar to frame water as an “uncooperative commodity.” However, bottled water's characteristics enable it to evade many of these constraints, rendering it a “more perfect commodity” for accumulation. Second, expansion of the market good of bottled water alters the prospects for the largely publicly provided good of tap water. We conclude that the growth of this relatively new commodity represents a more serious threat to the project of universal public drinking water provision than that posed by tap water privatization.     

Spaces for public orientation? Longitudinal effects of Internet use in adolescence

The article departs from an overarching research question: How does young people's engagement in different Internet spaces affect the development of their public orientation during adolescence? It analyses longitudinal panel data in order to explore how young people's public orientation develops during a phase in life (13–20) which is critical for political socialization. Data are derived from three waves of data collection among young people who were 13–17 years old at the time for the first data collection. The concept public orientation is measured by three indicators: young people's values, interests and everyday peer talk. These indicators are analysed with reference to respondents' Internet orientations, which we conceptualize as four separate but inter-related spaces (a news space, a space for social interaction, a game space and a creative space). The results primarily emphasize the importance of orientations towards news space and space for social interaction. Overall, the findings strongly suggest that orientations towards these spaces are related to adolescents' public orientation. The findings confirm the centrality of news and information in political socialization, but they also challenge the idea that social media facilities – such as Facebook, Twitter and blogging – enable forms of social interaction and creative production that have an overall positive impact on young people's public orientation.     

Symbolic Interaction with Consumer Products: An Affect Control Theory Approach

Symbolic interactionism is one of the few social psychology perspectives that recognizes the important role of physical artifacts, including consumer products, in social life. Consumer products are artifacts people can use to maintain the expressive order within social life – the order that is embedded within the shared meanings of a culture. As a formal theory of symbolic interactionism, affect control theory emphasizes culturally shared affective meaning, the impressions produced within social events, and identity processes that rely on those cultural meanings and social events. We contend that affect control theory provides a framework for understanding and researching how consumer products influence people's social experience and interaction. First, we specifically explore how affect control theory's concepts of affective meaning, identity modification, and impression management can be applied to understanding consumer products. Building on this foundation, we then consider how affect control theory might also contribute to three new research directions: social interaction with consumer products, affective design of consumer products, and the prosumer identity created from consumer products. Our conclusion is that affect control theory provides sociologists with a means of exploring the important and fascinating questions that emerge when we consider people's symbolic interaction with consumer products.     

Innenansichten eines Wohlfahrtsmarkts

The 2001 pension reform act (“Riester reform”) has recast old-age security in Germany by placing more emphasis on private provisions. The new policy draws on markets and competitive structures in social welfare, as done earlier in long-term care and in public utilities. In the social welfare sector in Germany, such privatisation mostly goes hand in hand with a far-reaching “social” regulation of markets. Old-age pensions are the most recent case in point. For the first time, financial markets figure as welfare markets. This is done in the politically most sensitive sector of the German welfare state, old-age security. In theoretical terms, we interpret the change as a structural transformation of German “social capitalism”. Empirically, we investigate the structure of the new welfare market and the attitudes of the providers, based on a survey of all providers of private pensions in Germany. The findings include: (1) Markets can produce the welfare good “income security in old-age” only by way of a complex arrangement of three markets – financial markets, pension markets and markets for financial consultancy services. (2) The pension reform of 2001 has given rise to a new welfare market: an old-age pension market as a distinct sub sector of the wider market for financial investment and saving. The pension market constitutes a new field of business, with new actors, new products and new arenas of competition. The new market is created and shaped by politics. (3) The new private pension market combines market principles with welfare state principles. The providers conceive of their business as contributing to social security, and they recognise that the state sustains and structures the market.     

The Double Challenge of Market and Social Incorporation: Progress and Bottlenecks in Latin America

Has the past decade of sustained economic growth and political transformations reversed Latin America's historical failure to secure market and social incorporation? To address this question this article draws on the experiences of Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Peru and Uruguay by distinguishing between short‐term outcomes – which may depend on benign international conditions – and policy changes, which are more important for long‐term performance. It highlights the overall success of both Brazil and Uruguay and shows that the other countries have made more progress in terms of social than market incorporation.     

Fair Trade: Social regulation in global food markets

This article analyzes the theoretical and empirical parameters of social regulation in contemporary global food markets, focusing on the rapidly expanding Fair Trade initiative. Fair Trade seeks to transform North/South relations by fostering ethical consumption, producer empowerment, and certified commodity sales. This initiative joins an array of labor and environmental standard and certification systems which are often conceptualized as “private regulations” since they depend on the voluntary participation of firms. I argue that these new institutional arrangements are better understood as “social regulations” since they operate beyond the traditional bounds of private and public (corporate and state) domains and are animated by individual and collective actors. In the case of Fair Trade, I illuminate how relational and civic values are embedded in economic practices and institutions and how new quality assessments are promoted as much by social movement groups and loosely aligned consumers and producers as they are by market forces. This initiative's recent commercial success has deepened price competition and buyer control and eroded its traditional peasant base, yet it has simultaneously created new openings for progressive politics. The study reveals the complex and contested nature of social regulation in the global food market as movement efforts move beyond critique to institution building.     

Migrant Children,Social Capital and Access to Services Post‐Migration: Transitions,Negotiations and Complex Agencies

For migrant children, moving to a new country is marked by excitement, anxiety and practical challenges in managing this significant transition. This paper draws upon the concepts of social capital and social networks to examine migrant children's access to services post‐migration. Using data from a qualitative study with Eastern European families in Scotland, we identify a range of cumulative barriers that limit children's access to services and illustrate how their experiences are shaped by ethnicity, social class and place. The study shows that migrant children are often disadvantaged post‐migration and develop their own mechanisms to mitigate the impact of migration on their lives. We argue that migrant children's own social networks are relevant and they need to be analysed through a more individualised approach.     

Social capital and the added value of social relations

Almost all empirical research reveals that social capital is a factor that enhances public goods, but scholars are divided into two strands of thought. According to the first strand, the enhancement of public goods does not need any network of social relations, while, according to the second, enhancement depends on the existence and good functioning of relational networks, to the point that it consists in the creation of social networks. Which one is right? In order to clarify the issue, one should ask: can a social relation have any added social value? If so, how can we conceive of the added social value of social relations, and how can we measure it? The author claims that the added social value of social relations can be observed in those processes through which social capital and public (relational) goods (re)generate or elide each other. These processes can be analyzed as morphogenetic cycles that work in temporal sequences and are not circular or recursive. By adopting this perspective, we can see and measure the added social value of social relations in primary and secondary networks, leading to the emergence of public goods. The relational approach can give abundant evidence as to how and why different public goods are produced and/or enhanced depending on the different added social value of the social relations that constitute them.