Technologies of Micro-Enterprise for Women: The Limits of Neoliberal Development

• In Event: The Globalization of Microfinance and the Promise of "Change"?

Abstract

Our panel as a whole takes a critical approach to how communication as technology is expected to contribute to social change, but ends up falling short. My own discussion will focus micro-enterprise discourses of programs in South Asia. Within the rubric of globalization I will also highlight the challenges of neoliberal conditions, limiting the way we think about gender, as well as how we envision communication as an entrepreneurial tool in development discourse on micro-enterprise. First, I explore the narrative of micro-enterprise interventions that employ communications as tools to resolve problematic conditions women face as victims of poverty, enabled through the heroic actions of men administrating formal finance institutions. This analysis is not meant to suggest that women are indeed victims or that men are necessarily heroes, but to consider how gender differentiates roles for women and men in the construction of social change. Next I consider how success is defined conceptually through these interventions, typically in terms of fighting poverty and promoting empowerment. The nature of evidence is then considered in light of broader conditions as well as unintended consequences. This chapter concludes by considering this development agenda as a contribution to neoliberal triumphs, in that through micro-enterprise capitalist systems are justified and sustained, with women’s roles reduced to that of consumers and small-scale entrepreneurs who perpetuate free-market systems.

Author

• Karin Gwinn Wilkins, U of Texas - Austin