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Together with Rick Delbridge (Cardiff University, Wales), Markus Helfen (University of Innsbruck, Austria), Andi Pekarek (Melbourne University, Australia) and Charlene Zietsma (Pennsylvania State University, USA), I am co-organizing the upcoming Organization Studies Summer Workshop on the topic “Organizing Sustainably: Actors, Institutions, and Practices”.
Our main aim is to go beyond the common mantra of contemporary management scholars and practitioners that there is a ‘business case’ for sustainability towards examining what alternative forms of organizing can contribute to the sustainable usage of environmental, social, and economic resources in ways that avoid their degradation and exhaustion. While such models already do exist, they often do not spread or scale up, remaining exploitative business practices untouched on a larger scale.
The submission system is now open, and the full call can be found here: https://osofficer.wixsite.com/osworkshop?fbclid=IwAR3bV80vSvxpbVMF-IWiOiPYmR5Vv022ganthYq2xj6MBACe6R_Uxf2xvdE
We will also use this workshop to reflect about sustainable forms of organizing in our own scholarly community. As a temporary team of organizers meeting a long-standing routine of highly productive summer workshops, we are ourselves directly faced with the challenge of being unable to meet the “triple bottom line” of environmental sustainability (these are typically bad, because academics fly to conferences), social and economic impacts on the local community and employees (these in our case are good, because the venue has strong sustainability policies), and economic/academic “performance” (the summer workshops are usually seen as a highly productive meeting format). We will use the direct experience of this contradiction to reflect about our own scholarly practices during our workshop to hopefully develop some ideas for more sustainable forms of scholarship.
Excerpt from “The Political Economy of Microfinance: Financializing Poverty”, Introduction, A Framework for Engaging Microfinance.
Concepts and Euphemisms
There is often confusion about some terms that are commonly used in discussions about microfinance. Before the substantial chapters begin, an explanation of terminological choices which affect the analysis [in this book] is essential.
Microfinance vs. microcredit – There is no consensus definition of microfinance. We may stick to a condensed version of CGAP’s definition [1], following which microfinance is “financial services for poor and low-income people, offered by different types of service providers, most of which designate themselves as microfinance institutions”.
Yet some readers might be irritated by the usage of the term “microfinance” in a book which pays relatively little attention to services such as microsavings or microinsurance. Though I differentiate clearly between microfinance and microcredit in a historical frame – where “microcredit” was the dominant term during an earlier period, while thereafter “microfinance” fell into favour – the term “microfinance” is used otherwise throughout this book to refer to the entire system, even where my analysis focuses on the credit dimension.
Why? First, even though “microfinance” is a relatively recent term – Seibel (2005) claims to have coined it in 1990 – hardly anyone now speaks of “microcredit”, let alone “microenterprise finance”, which was used mainly in the 1990s. The fact that “microfinance” is the dominant term may already be reason enough to use it. But, second, (a) microinsurance and (b) microsavings are more hype than reality. They are practically nowhere standalone businesses, while microcredit often is. Credit was, and remains, the essential element of microfinance, as the most profitable and prominent element.
governancexborders.com 