Making Good Loans and Creditworthy Women: Relational Work in India’s Microfinance Industry

• In Event: 4445 - Culture and Service Work: Relationships, Identities, Inequalities

Abstract

As small, uncollateralized loans targeting women have become integrated into the global financial system, microfinance institutions (MFIs) have become a key conduit of global finance capital. Yet, we understand little about how MFIs integrate previously uncreditworthy groups into the global financial system. This paper focuses on everyday interactions between MFI clients and their employees in India, the world’s largest commercial microfinance market. I argue that the work of making good loans and creditworthy women underpins the continued growth and expansion of global finance. This relational work—simultaneously social and economic, intimate and procedural—allows us to understand microfinance as neither inherently empowering nor inherently exploitative. Rather, MFI organizational procedures, in conjunction with their employees’ ad-hoc navigation of clients’ complex social worlds, together accomplish relational work. MFI workers establish relationships of trust, reciprocity, and familiarity while also successfully extracting timely repayment. Drawing on ethnographic work and interviews, I identify the standardized, audited procedures that MFIs create to establish trust between clients and fieldworkers, as well as the ways in which fieldworkers and clients leverage intimate knowledge of one another to skirt standard procedures when needed. These twin processes suggest that the expansion of microfinance in India is embedded in relationships of trust and mutuality built between clients, MFI staff, and financial institutions, with implications for our theorizations of global finance.

Author

• Smitha Radhakrishnan, Wellesley College