Journal ArticleDOI
Phatic labor, infrastructure, and the question of empowerment in Cairo
TLDR
In this paper, the outcomes of Egyptian women's practices of sociality are analyzed in the context of economic empowerment of women via finance, and they are shown to serve as an economic infrastructure for projects oriented around the pursuit of profit.Abstract:
In this article, I draw on ethnographic research in Cairo to analyze outcomes of Egyptian women's practices of sociality. In Cairo, “phatic labor” creates a social infrastructure of communicative channels that are as essential to economy as roads, bridges, or telephone lines. Projects to empower Egyptian women via finance made these communicative channels visible as an economic infrastructure for projects oriented around the pursuit of profit. A social infrastructure that had functioned as a kind of semiotic commons became visible as a resource that could be privatized or formatted as a public good.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure
TL;DR: In this article, the authors trace the range of anthropological literature that seeks to theorize infrastructure by drawing on biopolitics, science and technology studies, and theories of technopolitics.
Journal ArticleDOI
Migration Infrastructure
Biao Xiang,Johan Lindquist +1 more
TL;DR: Based on the authors' long-term field research on low-skilled labor migration from China and Indonesia, this article established that more than ever labor migration is intensively mediated, and that the interplay between different dimensions of migration infrastructure make it self-perpetuating and self-serving, and impedes rather than enhances people's migratory capability.
Journal ArticleDOI
Mobile Money: Communication, Consumption and Change in the Payments Space
TL;DR: The emerging field of mobile money is explored in this article, where mobile phone-enabled systems for value transfer and storage, primarily in the developing world, are heralded as signal intervention.
Book
The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Finance
Karin Knorr Cetina,Alex Preda +1 more
TL;DR: The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Finance as discussed by the authors provides a comprehensive coverage on a variety of topics related to the role of finance in a globalized world, and its historical development.
Journal ArticleDOI
Next Practices: Knowledge, Infrastructure, and Public Goods at the Bottom of the Pyramid
TL;DR: Prahalad as mentioned in this paper argued that best practices cannot move us beyond an industrial system that has brought us, and our planet, to the brink of disaster, and instead, managers and business leaders should turn their attention to "next practices" among the poorest of the poor.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
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TL;DR: This final installment of the paper considers the case where the signals or the messages or both are continuously variable, in contrast with the discrete nature assumed until now.
Journal ArticleDOI
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors propose a method to use the information of the user's interaction with the service provider in order to improve the quality of the service provided to the user.
Book ChapterDOI
Knowledge as a Global Public Good
TL;DR: The notion of global public goods was introduced by Thomas Jefferson as discussed by the authors, who argued that knowledge is not only a public good but also a global or international public good, and that the international community has a collective responsibility for the creation and dissemination of one global public good -knowledge for development.
Journal ArticleDOI
Surplus possibilities: postdevelopment and community economies
TL;DR: The post-development discourse is aligned with the long leftist tradition of critical analyses that accompanied the global consolidation, immediately after the Second World War, of a hegemonic mainstream development project.
Journal ArticleDOI
Demystifying Micro-Credit The Grameen Bank, NGOs, and Neoliberalism in Bangladesh
TL;DR: In this article, an ethnographic study of the effects of micro-credit on gender relations in rural Bangladesh is presented, focusing on the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner, the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh and three other leading non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the country.