In To Be an Entrepreneur, Julia Qermezi Huang focuses on Bangladesh’s i Agent 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.
Table of Content
Introduction: Disruptive Development in Bangladesh
i Agent Megh’s Story
1. Women’s Work: The Arena of Disruption
2. Digital Technology: The Problems of (and Solutions to) Connectivity
i Agent Deepti’s Story
3. The Making and Unmaking of Entrepreneurs
4. A Diversified Basket of Services
i Agent Ayrin’s Story
5. Middle-Class Projects and the Development Moral Economy
6. The Ambiguous Figures of Social Enterprise
About the author
Julia Qermezi Huang is a Lecturer in Anthropology of Development at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Tribeswomen of Iran. Follow her on X @Juli_Q_Huang.
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