The Social Regulation of Markets: Why Microcredit Fails to Promote Jobs in Rural South India

There is growing evidence that microcredit does little to support self‐employment. Two main explanations are typically emphasized: from a microeconomic perspective, the poor have been argued to lack the skills, resources and motivation to start their own businesses; from a macroeconomic perspective, local markets are often saturated. This article uses first‐hand data from rural South India to explore a third explanation which focuses on the social regulation of markets. Drawing on a household survey, the authors show that self‐employment and microcredit are uncorrelated, and that women and lower castes have a significantly lower chance of starting up a business. The businesses they do start tend to be smaller, less profitable and based in very specific sectors. Qualitative insights into the workings of local economies show that caste and gender‐based social regulations influence local markets determining who can produce or sell what, to whom, and at what price. The authors observe that real markets are affected by power relations and structured through social institutions rather than being the sum of interactions between free and competitive individuals. These findings show the importance of integrating self‐employment programmes into broader policies for transforming the social regulation of markets and for eradicating discrimination against women and lower castes.     

Global Strategies Compared: Firms,Markets and Regions

This paper explores the disembedding effects of globalization upon regional social ties as proposed in the relevant literature. It then asks questions about the limitations of such disembedding in relation to the prospects for new social movements. The analysis proposed offers an understanding of globalization as a societal, historical process. It shows that firms adopt diverse and distinctive strategies for going global which structure the overall process in question. These developments have organizational and spatial-regional effects which create tensions in the globlization process.     

Reading In,Looking Out: Hermeneutics by Implication in an Early Fifteenth-Century Anthology

This article investigates aspects of mise-en-page in British Library Add. MS. 27261, an anthology of twenty-three texts on mixed subjects produced for Eskandar Soltān (d. 818/1415), grandson of Timur and self-styled ruler of territories in southern Iran during the early fifteenth century. It examines the juxtaposition of literary and scientific texts together with images in Add. MS. 27261, and explores the correlations that these juxtapositions create. It concludes that the London anthology should be seen as a coherent intellectual enterprise, and as an interpretative project designed to feed Eskandar’s experiments with different forms of knowledge.