Remaking Africa's informal economies: youth, entrepreneurship and the promise of inclusion at the bottom of the pyramid

In recent years, the quest for 'inclusive markets' that incorporate Africa's youth has become a key focus of national and international development efforts, with so-called bottom of the pyramid (BoP) initiatives increasingly seen as a way to draw the continent's poor into new networks of global capitalism. SSA has become a fertile frontier for such systems, as capital sets its sights on the continents vast 'under-served' informal economies, harnessing the entrepreneurial mettle of youth to create new markets for a range of products, from solar lanterns and shampoo to cook stoves and sanitary pads. Drawing on ethnographic research with youth entrepreneurs, we trace the prcesses of individual and collective 'transformation' that the mission of (self-) empowerment through entrepreneurship seeks to bring about. We argue that, while such systems are meant to bring those below the poverty line above it, the 'line' is reified and reinforced through a range of discursive and strategic practices that actively construct and embed distinctions between the past and the future, valuable and valueless, and the idle and productive in Africa's informal economies

Objectification and Standardization: On the Limits and Effects of Ritually Fixing and Measuring Life

Modes of objectification—different ways of producing and quantifying entities through categories and classes—are part of the cultural infrastructure of any society and any epoch. But we are now in an era that displays a passion for objectification and quantification unparalleled since the beginning of statistics. This volume identifies the most prominent contemporary forms of objectification: in the arts, medicine, finance, identity management, the rhetoric of science as well as the everyday. Different chapters show how these modes of objectification, measurement, and standardization shape the main dimensions of social life: meaning and representation, morality, and notions of thinghood and personhood. Moreover, quantification, measurement, and standardization are not simply ways of organizing pre-given entities. Rather, they are performative and generative technologies which create institutional objects, give rise to forms of objectivity and carry with them a range of normativities. Hence, the chapters also elaborate on the enduring link between forms of objectification and ritualism. At times, objectification is accomplished and fortified by ritualization. But ritual may also help disrupt the objectified, quantified world which meets resistance in the encounter with the actual fuzziness, flux, and capaciousness of reality. While the volume highlights the growing objectification and standardization of social life on the one hand, on the other it describes resistance to this trend

Local discourse and global competition: production experiences in family workshops of the Brianza

One of the most important consequences of post-Fordist global restructuring has been the 'deterritorialization' of capital and its increasing geographic expansion. Another and quite different view emphasizes the fact that capitalist activity can be organized by means of localized or territorially based systems of specialized production. In this article my purpose is to show how these two disciplinary discourses are actually not mutually exclusive. Developed local economies are not immune from concerns of deterritorialization, nor should their economic achievement gloss over the glitches that are emerging at the local level due to stiffer global competition. These two aspects become immediately apparent as I illustrate the local discourse that emerges among workshop owners within an industrial district of the Brianza in the Italian region of Lombardy. After a discussion about the origin and the characteristics of this regional economy, I illustrate by way of ethnographic examples how innovation and competitiveness within and outside this industrial district mask forms of exploitation and contradictions amidst family-run workshops. In discursive terms, exploitation is articulated in various ways, but two in particular seem to be most recurrent in the narrative of small entrepreneurs of this region. One is the ideology of 'hard work' and the other, more recently heard of, is the ideology of 'high quality product'. In the brief concluding section I will stress the point that these two discourses emerging from exploitative social relations of production are to be viewed as responses to the concerns regarding the possible deterritorialization of some factories and the increasing competition with crossboundary markets. Copyright (c) Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003.