Check your guns at the door: how to get together to establish a secondary market

Proceedings of the Conference on the Secondary Market for Community Development LoansCommunity development ; Loans ; Secondary markets

Mutuality talk in a family-owned multinational: anthropological categories & critical analyses of corporate ethicizing

This article draws on work carried out as part of a collaboration between an elite business school and a family-owned multinational corporation, concerned with promoting ‘mutuality in business’ as a new frontier of responsible capitalism. While the business school partners treated mutuality as a new principle central to an emergent ethical capitalism, the corporation claimed mutuality as a long-established value unique to their company. Both interpretations foreground a central problem in recent writing on the anthropology of business/corporations: the tension between the claim that economic life is always embedded within a moral calculus, and the shift towards increasingly ethical behaviour among many corporations. Further, recent work in the anthropology of business rejects normative evaluations of corporate ethicizing. When corporations lay claim to ethical renewal, but maintain a commitment to competition and growth, then anthropologists must balance a sympathetic engagement with corporate ethicizing, and critical engagement with growth-based strategie

Contested terrain: gender, labor and religious dynamics in horticultural exporting, Meru District, Kenya

This seminar will provide an overview of 18 months of Ph.D dissertation research on the interplay of gender and horticultural production in Meru District, Kenya. The significance of this project is that horticulture "traditionally" the domain of women, has become rapidly intensified and commercialized for export production. My research examines the implications of horticultural exports for women's rights to land and labor by focusing on the district's most important horticultural export crop, French beans. While French beans remain widely grown throughout the District, both production and sales have dropped dramatically since 1993. Thus, this project explores how the fluctuation of multinational capital is restructuring social life, transforming domestic relations and precipitating new class configurations. My tentative findings include a host of social crises: a staggering population growth rate (3.9 percent) that has incited acute pressures on constricting land resources and catalyzed an escalation of clan and court cases related to land disputes; an exacerbation of domestic violence and deviant social behavior such as prostitution, rape and incest; ubiquitous occurrences of alcohol abuse; and finally, the transformation of French bean market centers into loci of corruption and duplicity. These social dynamics underscore the tensions that emanate in an atmosphere of financial disintegration that is coupled with an absence of prospects for economic amelioration. As the panacea of French bean wanes women have turned to Christ to cope with the economic plights of their households. The omnipresence of Christianity powerfully shapes all aspects of social change, as the convictions of female submission and male dominance are propagated through variant Christian ideologies and men face the backlash of such indoctrination by women bewitching or poisoning them. Thus the material and ideational reconstruction that has taken root invokes significant queries on the gender dimensions of power and raises important questions for the gen

Keeping African Girls in School with Better Sanitary Care

For young girls in developing countries, not knowing how to manage their periods can hinder access to education. Research from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London demonstrates that in rural Uganda, providing free sanitary products and lessons about puberty to girls may increase their attendance at school.ESRC-DFI

Gender and ethical trade: A mapping of the issues in African horticulture

Codes of conduct covering employment conditions of Southern producers exporting to European markets mushroomed throughout the 1990s. A recent article (Blowfield 2000) cited over 200 codes related to worker welface specifically, and over twenty codes applied to agriculture in developing countries.1 Codes have become very prevalent in the UK food retail sector, and most of the large supermarkets are now implementing codes along their supply chains to cover their own brand name products and fresh produce. But codes of conduct are also evolving at multiple levels both internally and externally to supply chains as various actors such as importers, exporters and local trade associations have adopted their own codes. Externally, independent standards have been established through organisations such as Social Accountability 8000 in the US and the Ethical Trading Initiative in the UK. As a result, suppliers of horticultural products are faced with a plethora of codes, some of which are similar, but amongst which there can be considerable variability

The ambiguity of mutuality:Discourse and power in corporate value regimes

Corporate values offer a means for consecrating alternative regimes of worth within businesses, explicitly orienting firms around more than the pursuit of profits. This paper examines how corporate values come to be constructed and diffused as a framework for interpretation and action through analysis of Food Co.’s flagship principle: ‘mutuality’. Tracing the deployment of mutuality through Food Co.’s internal processes (within the embodied practice and narratives of employees) and external relationships (within Food Co.’s bottom of the pyramid project in Kenya), the paper illustrates how the ambiguity of mutuality forms a strategic resource for the company by (i) sheltering multiple meanings and interpretations, thus enabling resonance among different situations and subject positions; (ii) allowing for syncretism between seemingly opposing and categorically different forms; and (iii) generating a space for negotiation and dealing with uncertainty. Employing these three themes of ambiguity as an organizing frame for our discussion, we highlight how the ambiguity of corporate values absorbs the contradictions emblematic of the ‘heterarchical firm’ (Stark 2000), while obscuring the obligations and expectations the concept entails as it moves beyond Food Co. to outsourced ‘entrepreneurs’ in Kenya. Language generates the appearance of equivalence and benevolence while seeking new spaces for accumulation and legitimizing the incorporation of labor on precarious terms

Musings of a future English teacher

This work is the culmination of my year of study. Here I comment on the most relevant aspects of theories examined, my personal teaching experiences and I draw my own conclusions about them, often using my viewpoint as a foreigner who grew up in a totally different educational system. I also highlight my aims for my future teaching career

Mobile Activism, Material Imaginings, and the Ethics of the Edible: Framing Political Engagement through the Buycott App

In this article, we explore the discursive constructions of Buycott, a free mobile app that provides a platform for user-generated ethical consumption campaigns. Unlike other ethical consumption apps, Buycott’s mode of knowledge production positions the app itself as neutral, with app users generating activist campaigns and providing both data and judgment. Although Buycott is not a dedicated food activism app, food features centrally in its campaigns, and the app seems to provide a mobile means of extending, and perhaps expanding, alternative food network (AFN) action across geographies and constituencies. Thus, as a case study, Buycott unveils contemporary possibilities for citizen participation and the formation of activist consumer communities, both local and trans-national, through mobile technologies. Our analysis shows, however, that despite the app’s user-generated format, the forms of activism it enables are constrained by the app’s binary construction of action as non/consumption and its guiding ‘mission’ of ‘voting with your wallet’. Grounded in texts concerning Buycott’s two largest campaigns (Demand GMO Labeling and Long live Palestine boycott Israel), our analysis delineates how Buycott, its campaigns, and its modes of action take shape in user, media, and app developer discourses. We find that, as discursively framed, Buycott campaigns are commodity-centric, invoking an ‘ethics of care’ to be enacted by atomized consumers, in corporate spaces and through mainstream, barcode-bearing, retail products. In user discourses, this corporate spatiality translates into the imagined materializing of issues in products, investing commodities with the substance of an otherwise ethereal cause. This individualized, commodity-centric activism reinforces tenets of the neoliberal market, ultimately turning individual users into consumers not only of products, but also of the app itself. Thus, we suggest, the activist habitus constructed through Buycott is a neoliberal, consumer habitus