To be an entrepreneur : social enterprise and disruptive development in Bangladesh

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.

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.

Prologue : digital first responders -- Introduction : disruptive development in Bangladesh -- Women's work : the arena of disruption -- Digital technology : the problems of (and solutions to) connectivity -- The making and unmaking of entrepreneurs -- A diversified basket of services -- Middle-class projects and the development moral economy -- The ambiguous figures of social enterprise -- Conclusion : the time of social enterprise "Based on fifteen months of ethnographic research in northwestern Bangladesh, this book examines social entrepreneurship through the set of economic processes that animate the delivery of social-enterprise models and enmesh the social identities of poor women entrepreneurs, front-line enterprise workers, and the development elite"-- Provided by publisher