Stanford University Press Blog

Inclusive Capitalism

Advice for entrepreneurs on alleviating poverty from the grassroots up.

by TED LONDON

 

In 1989 I traveled to Malawi, hoping to put my MBA and engineering skills to work as a Peace Corps volunteer. Over the course of two years I was tasked with advising some of poorest people in the world on how to enhance their business enterprises. The Peace Corps had always stressed that its volunteers would learn more than they would teach—and that was certainly true in my case. My Malawian colleagues were very smart and very creative, and though I’d come to help them and tell them what they should do to grow their businesses, beyond a little training in marketing, costing, or cash flow, they didn’t necessarily need me to tell them what they should do. The biggest impacts, I discovered, came from jointly innovating to create solutions that neither I, nor they, could have come up with or implemented on their own.

By the early millennium certain people, including my friend and advisor, Stuart Hart, started thinking about the role that profitable, scalable, impact enterprises could play in alleviating poverty. He and C.K. Prahalad wrote an influential article discussing the dormant entrepreneurial and commercial potential of the world’s 4 billion poorest people, who constitute the base of the economic pyramid. Their work highlighted an “invisible opportunity” to create a more inclusive capitalism and they called upon multinational corporations to reassess the assumptions they’d made about these markets as viable business prospects.

Today, the debate around the base of the pyramid has changed—we’re no longer asking Should we be doing this?, but rather, How can we do this better?

Rebel, Rebel?

Revisiting the radical legacy of Michel Foucault via David Bowie.

by MITCHELL DEAN

"Michel Foucault, painted portrait" and "David Bowie, painted portrait" by Thierry Ehrman. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr (images have been edited into a composite).

In order to understand any major thinker and their legacy, it is important to consider their context—a truism that is very hard to put into practice, especially when the thinker in question belongs both to the recent past but is still very much a part of our present. In part, this explains the wealth of discussion swirling around the recent passing of a certain protean pop icon who left behind a singular era-defining legacy. It’s also for this reason that another standout cultural figure of the seventies—a certain French philosopher—has become so difficult to situate in our contemporary moment.

I speak, of course, of David Bowie and Michel Foucault whose political projects paralleled one another in intriguing ways. Whether in the intellectual works of the philosopher, or the records and performances of the artist, both men were concerned with questions of identity, whether sexual or personal; both focused on the persona or the construction of subjectivity rather than the more fixed humanist subject; both supported and even celebrated the marginal—whether incarnated as Bowie’s space alien or Foucault’s “abnormals” produced through disciplinary knowledges; and both made the experience of madness, transgression and intensity part of their art or thought. Both would also go on to develop an aesthetics of the self, turning life and ultimately death into a work of art or self-transformation. Blackstar, Bowie’s last album, was released days before he succumbed to cancer and Foucault’s final two volumes of History of Sexuality were published in the weeks preceding his death. With these swan songs, the pop star and the intellectual celebrity each died with a flourish and left us with work that spoke to and beyond their own deaths. Indeed, like this album, Foucault’s very last lectures, delivered when he surely suspected his condition was terminal, meditate on death and demise.

Whether in the intellectual works of the philosopher, or the records and performances of the artist, both men were concerned with questions of identity, whether sexual or personal; both focused on the persona or the construction of subjectivity rather than the more fixed humanist subject; and both supported and even celebrated the marginal.

A Presidential Affair

What the arrest of 5 Chinese booksellers reveals about the sexual politics of China.

by ELANAH URETSKY

The 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. After this 2012 meeting, an unprecedented anti-corruption campaign, spearheaded by President Xi Jinping, commenced to root out abuse of power and other excesses in the Chinese government. Public domain via Wikipedia.

In January of 1998 news leaked that President Bill Clinton had engaged in ‘improper’ relations with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. People around the country debated whether a man with such moral character was fit to run the country. This carried over into Congressional hearings and Clinton eventually became the second president to be impeached, charged with perjury and obstruction of justice. He was later acquitted in the Senate, served out the rest of his term in the White House and went on to become a popular former president known for doing good around the world.

Now imagine the same scenario in China of a president having an affair with a woman outside his marriage, news being leaked to the media, and popular debates ensuing about his ability to rule the country. Having a hard time with that image? That’s probably because the Chinese government would never allow such a scenario to develop. Surely the president may have an affair but the government will go to any length, as we are now witnessing, to prevent the news from being leaked.

The individual in China is still expected, first and foremost, to be loyal to the state with expectations for representatives of the government and the Party to serve as moral role models.

Last fall five men connected with Hong Kong publisher, Mighty Current, and their affiliated bookstore, Causeway Bay Books, went missing—all are now confirmed to be in police detention in China. The publishing house, which is known for releasing books critical of the Chinese government, is thought to have been working on a tell-all book that would reveal sensitive information about Xi Jinping’s love life before he became president. The Chinese government has gone to great lengths to cover up any allegations that could be revealed in the book—crossing over sovereign territory into Hong Kong and Thailand to abduct these men, two of whom now hold citizenship with European countries, and clandestinely bringing them back to China. Sure, Clinton tried to cover up his relationship with Lewinsky—he knew, after all, that admitting to it would raise eyebrows and damage his political career. But as far as we know, he never committed a crime, impinged upon the rights of individuals, or disregarded international norms to cover up or erase his indiscretion. The stakes were also a lot lower for Clinton—despite social and personal fallout, ultimately he retained his role as president. Xi Jinping or any Chinese leader, on the other hand, would certainly face the end of their career, and maybe more, upon the exposure of an extramarital affair.

The Truths Fiction Tells

What literary invention can reveal about the reality of the Iranian Revolution.

by ROXANNE VARZI

Iranian theater, 2006. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikipedia.

Thirty-seven years ago on February 11, 1979, on my eighth birthday, Iran, my country, went through a radical shift. My family left Iran a year after the Revolution, and I have been trying either to understand what happened or to explain it ever since. My latest attempt is Last Scene Underground, an ethnographic novel of life in contemporary Iran.

What’s real? They want to know where the boundary lies (literally “lies” in a non-truth-telling sense) between fiction and non-fiction.

If the Q&A at book readings is anything to go by, when you’ve written a book that’s both a novel and an ethnography, the question on most people’s minds is: What’s real? They want to know where the boundary lies (literally “lies” in a non-truth-telling sense) between fiction and non-fiction. Ethnography and literature have in common a very fluid boundary between the real and the fictive. Even in science fiction, a writer creates a work of fiction based on his or her own understanding of human relations, impulses, and desires from lived experiences and factual knowledge that feeds the imagination.

If an anthropologist were to set-up a camera and begin to record a “scene” of life somewhere, the very decision of where to place the camera frames the scene with a subjective and therefore not fully honest view. This does not mean that what was recorded is not real or the “truth,” but in excluding major parts of the scene, it skews and changes “reality.” If I focused my camera on one section of students in a lecture where only men are sitting, one may have the mistaken impression that only men take my anthropology class. The camera recorded “reality,” but it was not an honest representation of the class. When we social scientists translate and write about an “objective world” through our subjective positions, we may be factual but not necessarily honest about all the ways in which we are creating a new meaning or a fiction, possibly even a fantasy.

Who Writes Iran?

Better US-Iranian relations could usher in more diverse portrayals of Iran—in popular literature and scholarship.

by AMY MOTLAGH

A mural at the former US Embassy in Tehran. Photo by Ninara—CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

With the signing of a nuclear agreement between Iran and the U.S., years of sanctions on Iran have ended and I hope a new era in U.S.-Iran relations begins, an era which will enable both Iranian and American scholars to complicate their notions of the other nation through fieldwork and research. Up to now, it has been very difficult for non-Iranians to visit Iran, let alone spend time there as researchers, creating a peculiar situation in which the majority of Iran scholars in the U.S. are first- and second-generation Iranian immigrants. While these scholars have produced some excellent research, we must nonetheless acknowledge the strange nature of a field in which citizenship (or parents’ citizenship) in the country is a necessary credential.

Scholarship in the first twenty years following the revolution was principally concerned with why the revolution happened. It was primarily authored by Iranians who left during the revolution, or learned (while in graduate school in the U.S.) that they could not return. This scholarship, while often excellent, also often reflected a (strong) political bias. In time, those discourses began to change. For better or worse, the past ten years have been defined by what we might call the “autobiographical turn,” best symbolized by Azar Nafisi’s controversial Reading Lolita in Tehran. Reading Lolita’s incredible commercial success enabled the publication of a spate of other memoirs, which capitalized on similar themes, traded in similar stereotypes, and generally promulgated the idea of Iran as a place that was mysterious and foreign. Critics accused Nafisi of promoting a neo-conservative agenda. This was, of course, in the wake of the invasion of Iraq, when Washington insiders were bandying about phrases like “Real men want to go to Tehran” and fear of an imminent invasion of Iran was running high.

If one’s degree of “Iranianness” is now inevitably part of Iran scholarship, is there a way to be reflective about it without becoming autobiographical in all the ways that offend scholarly notions of objectivity?

Who Gets To Speak For Iran?

On questions of access, authenticity, and authority in ethnographic research.

by PARDIS MAHDAVI

A mural at the former US Embassy in Tehran. Photo by Ninara—CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

Over the years, anthropology’s position on which type of ethnographer has the most advantageous position has shifted. During the 1970s and 1980s it was thought that only a non-native anthropologist, or a “true outsider,” would be able to objectively study the natives of a culture. This perspective hailed from the colonial roots of the discipline and predominated during a period wherein non-native anthropologists were the primary researchers featured within the discipline. This was certainly true for the anthropological study of Iran. Prior to 1978, non-Iranian Iran scholars such as Mary Hegland, Michael Fischer, William O. Beeman, and Erica Friedl authored many of the ethnographies that received wide circulation and attention, but shifting approaches in anthropology coalesced with the 1979 Revolution to drastically change the ethnographic terrain in Iran, raising methodological questions about access, authenticity, and authority.

Following the post-colonial turn, some wondered if native anthropologists actually had the more advantageous position due to their “intimate” knowledge of their interlocutors and in the years after the revolution native Iranian scholars, including Shahla Haeri and Ziba Mir-Hosseini, gained prominence within the ethnographic literature. During the Khatami era, those of us entering Iran to conduct ethnographic fieldwork were “halfies” or “somewhat native” anthropologists; Whereas the natives were Iranian-born, halfies were foreign-born but still claimed strong ties to Iran. What placed people like myself in this later group was a combination of having some Iranian heritage (my parents were born and raised in Iran and only migrated to the U.S. shortly before I was born), a somewhat native command of Persian (for me it was my first language, despite the fact that I was raised in the U.S.), and, for many of us, Iranian passports, which were crucial in gaining entry to Iran.

Following the post-colonial turn, some wondered if native anthropologists actually had the more advantageous position due to their “intimate” knowledge of their interlocutors.

Tunisia’s Periphery Rises Up Again

Tunisia, still facing massive unemployment, is wracked by another flare up of protests.

by JOEL BEININ

A 2011 French protest in solidarity with Tarek Mohamed Bouazizi, "the Hero of Tunisia." The desperate economic and social discontent among Tunisians that motivated Bouazizi's self-immolation have only intensified since his death, leading to another tragedy and more demonstrations. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikipedia.

On January 16, 28-year old Ridha Yahyaoui, an unemployed college graduate from Tunisia’s impoverished Kasserine governorate, learned that his name was suddenly removed from a list of seventy-five candidates for government jobs. They had been approved for employment six months earlier by Kasserine’s governor and first delegate. In desperation, Yahyaoui climbed atop a utility pole where he was electrocuted. Whether or not he intended to commit suicide is uncertain.

Demonstrations have apparently subsided since January 26 but whether or not protests resume, Tunisia is in a precarious state.

Solidarity protests targeting unemployment immediately erupted in Kasserine. A sit-in at the governorate headquarters began on January 18. On January 19 two unemployed graduates threatened to jump to their deaths from the roof of the government building. The next day protests against unemployment reached the coastal cities of Tunis and Sousse.

The protests in solidarity with Ridha Yahyaoui and the demand of the youth of Kasserine for employment reprises events in the neighboring, and only minimally less miserable, governorate of Sidi Bouzid, five years ago. On December 17, 2010 a street vendor who had been harassed and insulted by the police while attempting to earn a minimal livelihood, poured gasoline on his body and ignited himself in front of the governor’s office. Tarek Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation sparked solidarity protests featuring demonstrators chanting, “A job is a right, you pack of thieves!” This protest movement ultimately toppled former president Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali on January 14, 2011 and inspired uprisings throughout the Arab world. In 2016 protestors in Kasserine and beyond chanted “Work, Freedom, Dignity.”