In To Be an Entrepreneur, Julia Qermezi Huang focuses on Bangladesh's iAgent 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.

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.

Reviews

To Be an Entrepreneur is an important, though academic, read. Both fascinating and disturbing, it is a cautionary tale on how not to do international development.

* The Marketplace Magazine *

To Be an Entrepreneur offers a nuanced assessment of disruption in development through careful ethnographic attention. In her ethnography, Huang's attention to these young women works to undo some of this erasure by focusing on their rich and complex lives and words.

* The Journal of Asian Studies *



Book Information
ISBN 9781501749551
Author Julia Qermezi Huang
Format Paperback
Page Count 324
Imprint Cornell University Press
Publisher Cornell University Press
Weight(grams) 907g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 22mm