Dangerous Categories: Narratives of Corporate Board Diversity

In this article, we report the results of a series of interviews with corporate directors about racial, ethnic, and gender diversity on corporate boards. On the one hand, our respondents were clear and nearly uniform in their statements that board diversity was an important goal worth pursuing. Yet when asked to provide examples or anecdotes illustrating why board diversity matters, many subjects acknowledged difficulty in illustrating theory with reference to practice. This expressed reluctance to come to specific terms with general claims about the value of director diversity inspired our title phrase: dangerous categories. That is, while diversity evokes universal acclaim in the abstract, our respondents’ narratives demonstrate that it is an elusive and even dangerous subject to talk about concretely. So we are left with narratives that simultaneously extol difference and express embarrassment with it.This expressed reluctance to come to specific terms with general claims about the value of director diversity inspired our title phrase: dangerous categories. That is, while diversity evokes universal acclaim in the abstract, our respondents’ narratives demonstrate that it is an elusive and even dangerous subject to talk about concretely. So we are left with narratives that simultaneously extol difference and express embarrassment with it

Mirage at the Bottom of the Pyramid

Poor people -- at the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) -- represent a very attractive market opportunity. The ‘BOP proposition’ argues that selling to the poor can simultaneously be profitable and help eradicate poverty. This is at best a harmless illusion and potentially a dangerous delusion. This paper shows that the BOP argument is riddled with fallacies, and proposes an alternative perspective on how the private sector can help alleviate poverty. Rather than focusing on the poor as consumers, we need to view the poor as producers. The only way to alleviate poverty is to raise the real income of the poor.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/57215/1/wp835 .pd

It’s Not Because I’m Black

This piece is my way of responding to the accusations that a lot of minoritized peoples receive. Too often, they are asked to explain why they are offered an amazing opportunity. They do not owe anyone an explanation as to why they were chosen any more than their white counterparts would. It takes away from the joy of their success and can motivate them to avoid opportunities for success in the future

The Familial Grotesque in the Poetry of Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Framing the representation of the family in Shirley Lim’s poetry against the concept of the grotesque, this essay aims to demonstrate how the aesthetic category is arguably enlisted as a symbol referring to the trope – or more accurately, with particular members of the family– in order to mount a criticism against it, or less directly, the Confucian, male-biased symbolic order that underscores it. That the maternal-figure is most often transfigured as a grotesque embodiment in Lim’s poems is telling in its implication of the poet’s own ambivalent feelings towards her own mother whom she recognizes as a woman who illustrates empowering individualism but also reprehensibility. As such, while some of her poems express affirmation of the grotesque’s capacity for transgressing ideological borders and confusing distinctions, others are less celebratory of the concept, which they evoke explicitly to clarify the family’s monstrous dimensions

Mirage at the Bottom of the Pyramid

Poor people – at the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) – represent a very attractive market opportunity. The ‘BOP proposition’ argues that selling to the poor can simultaneously be profitable and help eradicate poverty. This is at best a harmless illusion and potentially a dangerous delusion. This paper shows that the BOP argument is riddled with fallacies, and proposes an alternative perspective on how the private sector can help alleviate poverty. Rather than focusing on the poor as consumers, we need to view the poor as producers. The only way to alleviate poverty is to raise the real income of the poor.Poverty; Bottom of the pyramid; Selling to the poor; social responsibility

Heat in the Heartland: Climate Change and Economic Risk in the Midwest

This report offers a first step toward defining the range of potential economic consequences to the Midwest if we continue on our current greenhouse gas emissions pathway. The research combines state-of-the-art climate science projections through the year 2100 (and beyond in some cases) with empirically-derived estimates of the impact of projected changes in temperature and precipitation on the Midwest economy. The authors analyze not only those outcomes most likely to occur, but also lower-probability, higher-cost climate futures. These are the "tail risks," most often expressed here as the 1-in-20 chance something will occur. Unlike any other study to date, this report looks at climate impacts at a very geographically granular level, in some cases providing county-level results