Dinah Rajak
Biographic Data
| ID | 82027 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dinah Rajak |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dinah |
| FAMILY NAME | Rajak |
| SIGNATURE | RAJAK D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Sussex |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6605-7611 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 239 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
They’re going to have to start becoming”: What inclusive capitalism tells us about the changing face of development
In recent years, business has reimagined corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a proactive market strategy, aligning itself with development orthodoxies of pro-poor and inclusive growth by enrolling the un- and underemployed into new regimes of entrepreneurial labour. Here, we examine this incarnation of “capitalism qua development”, through ethnographic case studies of market inclusion initiatives in Kenya – one spearheaded by a transnational…
Readiness, resilience and the ripple effect: Women-owned enterprise in Kenya and the promise of global inclusion
This article interrogates the promise of inclusive markets as the vehicle of gender empowerment empirically through a case study of a small women-owned enterprise in Nairobi on its journey to inclusion in one of the world’s largest corporate supply chains as part of their empowerment through enterprise initiative. Chronicling the efforts of women entrepreneurs to meet the stringent imperatives of a global retailer and be made ‘ready’ for inclusio…
Ethnographies of Extraction: Anthropology, corporate social responsibility and the resource curse
FORUM: ANTHROPOLOGY OF OIL AND THE RESOURCE CURSE
Aspiring Minds: A Generation of Entrepreneurs in the Making
This article examines how corporate, state and donor interests have converged in attempts to craft South Africa's youngsters into an army of entrepreneurs as the last frontier for creating growth in a post-job world. We investigate the apparatus designed to engineer this entrepreneurial revolution and the actors hoping to seed enterprising aspirations in school-age kids. Our ethnographic findings show that while the ideology of entrepreneurial ed…
Neglected Transportation Infrastructure: Corporate Social Responsibility and the Russian State in a Small Siberian Oil Town
Verkhnemarkovo, a small Siberian town located on an oil field in Russia’s Irkutsk region, is plagued by bad roads and limited mobility. This article explores the relationship between corporate social responsibility and the wellbeing of individuals and communities, with a focus on transport and mobility infrastructure. Some oil companies, such as Irkutsk Oil Company, are tied to the sustainability standards of international financial institutions.…
Bringing the state back in: Corporate social responsibility and the paradoxes of Norwegian state capitalism in the international energy sector
This theme section brings the state back into anthropological studies of corporate social responsibility through the lens of Norwegian energy corporations working abroad. These transnational corporations (TNCs) are expected by the government to act responsibly when "going global." Yet, we have observed that abroad, Norwegian corporations backed by state capital largely operate like any other TNCs. We argue that the driver for the adaptation to gl…
Waiting for a deus ex machina: Sustainable extractives' in a 2°C world
In recent years the oil industry has shifted from climate change denialism to advocacy of the Paris Agreement, championing sustainability in an apparent assertion (rather than rejection) of corporate responsibility. Meanwhile growth forecasts continue unabated to finance the industry's enthusiasm for upstream ventures in uncharted territories. How do extractive companies, and those who work in them, square this contradiction? Fieldwork among oil …
Corporate Social Responsibility
Corporate social responsibility ( CSR ) came into focus in the 1990s in response to mounting pressure from global‐, national‐, and local‐level institutions for corporations to be held accountable for moral failings—from financial scandals and environmental devastation to human rights abuses. It emerged as a platform to deliver sustainable development and address environmental and community development issues vis‐á‐vis commercial enterprise. CSR i…
Rethinking access: Key methodological challenges in studying energy companies
Speculative futures at the bottom of the pyramid
Celebrated as creative, flexible catalysts of inclusive capitalism, urban youth are central to bottom-of-the-pyramid (BoP) models of development, which set out to repurpose the jobless as entrepreneurs in the making. We explore the multiple (at times conflicting) temporalities - the practices, technologies, and representations of time - which figure in a BoP initiative offering entrepreneurial opportunities to unemployed youth in Nairobi's slums:…
The Anthropology of Corporate Social Responsibility
The Anthropology of Corporate Social Responsibility explores the meanings, practices, and impact of corporate social and environmental responsibility across a range of transnational corporations and geographical locations (Bangladesh, Cameroon, Chile, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, India, Peru, South Africa, the UK, and the USA). The contributors examine the expectations, frictions and contradictions the CSR movement is generating a…
The Anthropology of Extraction: Critical Perspectives on the Resource Curse
Attempts to address the resource curse remain focussed on revenue management, seeking technical solutions to political problems over examinations of relations of power. In this paper, we provide a review of the contribution anthropological research has made over the past decade to understanding the dynamic interplay of social relations, economic interests and struggles over power at stake in the political economy of extraction. In doing so, we sh…
Remaking Africa's Informal Economies: Youth, Entrepreneurship and the Promise of Inclusion at the Bottom of the Pyramid
In recent years, the quest for 'inclusive markets' that incorporate Africa's youth has become a key focus of national and international development efforts, with so-called bottom of the pyramid (BoP) initiatives increasingly seen as a way to draw the continent's poor into new networks of global capitalism. SSA has become a fertile frontier for such systems, as capital sets its sights on the continents' vast 'under-served' informal economies, harn…
Hope and Betrayal on the Platinum Belt: Responsibility, Violence and Corporate Power in South Africa
This article considers the resurgence in state-backed violence against mineworkers in South Africa, which reached its apogee at the Marikana platinum mines in August 2012, in relation to the rise of corporate social responsibility (CSR) within the post-revolutionary political economy. I explore a paradox of CSR, which has emerged more strongly than ever in the wake of Marikana, whereby mining companies have been able to use CSR to dispense with (…
Introduction: Labour, Insecurity and Violence in South Africa
struggles are not unique to South Africa.Yet the centrality of violence to South Africa's labour arrangements -both underpinning and feeding off them -is a striking feature of the country's history. 4 The 'precarious liberation' 5 of post-apartheid South Africa has produced its own vulnerabilities and frustrations, giving way to a new era of protest and claim-making.At the same time, Marikana focuses attention not only on the forms of violence an…
Expectations of Paternalism: Welfare, Corporate Responsibility, and HIV at South Africa's Mines
This article focuses on HIV/AIDS management at Anglo American, the world's third-biggest mining company, the largest private-sector employer in South Africa and across the continent, and the first company to provide antiretroviral therapy (ART) "free of charge" to its workforce in a context of little or no access to state health care. Through the lens of HIV management, the article considers what happens when human care and welfare is refracted t…
Corporate Memory: Historical Revisionism, Legitimation and the Invention of Tradition in a Multinational Mining Company
In the world of neoliberal corporate capitalism the corporation is commonly represented as both asocial and ahistorical, as little more than the sum of its shareholders. But even within volatile capital markets, the need to project a corporate image of stability and confidence makes the narrative and performative aspects of corporate practice increasingly important. In Anglo American, one of the world's largest mining companies, that story has be…
Credit Apartheid, Migrants, Mines and Money
Migrant life has long required a careful balancing of responsibilities. Migrants travel to earn a wage in a capitalist economy while saving resources and honouring obligations that arise in a seemingly less-than-capitalist one. Various agents - rural patriarchs, traders, government authorities, appliance retailers - have used techniques to keep wages beyond migrants' control. Paradoxically, similar techniques have, on occasion, been eagerly embra…
The gift of CSR
Platinum City and the New South African Dream
Much has been written about the persistence of economic apartheid, inscribed in the geography of South Africa's cities, producing spatial configurations that are reminiscent of the old order of segregation while simultaneously embodying the particular inequities and divisions of the new neo-liberal order (Turok 2001; Harrison 2006). Through an ethnographic study of Rustenburg, the urban hub of South Africa's platinum belt (once labelled the 'fast…
In Good Company: An Anatomy of Corporate Social Responsibility
In Good Company chronicles a transnational mining corporation's pursuit of corporate social responsibility, exploring what lies behind the movement's marriage of moral imperative and market discipline.
Theatres of virtue
In recent years transnational corporations have become major players in the development arena. The rise of corporate social responsibility (CSR) elevates corporations as leaders in a new orthodoxy of business-led development that promotes empowerment through "the market" as the panacea for global poverty. This vision has recruited support from disparate actors, turning combatants into collaborators. This article is based on thirteen months of mul…
HIV/Aids is our business: The Moral Economy of Treatment in a Transnational Mining Company
This article is concerned with the moral economy of HIV treatment in a transnational mining company. Based on multi-sited ethnography in the world's third biggest mining company, I explore how relations between employer and employee are being transformed as a result of corporate HIV programmes, creating connections between the personal realm of sexual conduct and family life and the political economy of global corporate capitalism. I argue that c…
Remaking Africa's Informal Economies: Youth, Entrepreneurship and the Promise of Inclusion at the Bottom of the Pyramid
In recent years, the quest for 'inclusive markets' that incorporate Africa's youth has become a key focus of national and international development efforts, with so-called bottom of the pyramid (BoP) initiatives increasingly seen as a way to draw the continent's poor into new networks of global capitalism. SSA has become a fertile frontier for such systems, as capital sets its sights on the continents' vast 'under-served' informal economies, harn…
The Anthropology of Extraction: Critical Perspectives on the Resource Curse
Attempts to address the resource curse remain focussed on revenue management, seeking technical solutions to political problems over examinations of relations of power. In this paper, we provide a review of the contribution anthropological research has made over the past decade to understanding the dynamic interplay of social relations, economic interests and struggles over power at stake in the political economy of extraction. In doing so, we sh…
Speculative futures at the bottom of the pyramid
Celebrated as creative, flexible catalysts of inclusive capitalism, urban youth are central to bottom-of-the-pyramid (BoP) models of development, which set out to repurpose the jobless as entrepreneurs in the making. We explore the multiple (at times conflicting) temporalities - the practices, technologies, and representations of time - which figure in a BoP initiative offering entrepreneurial opportunities to unemployed youth in Nairobi's slums:…
Credit Apartheid, Migrants, Mines and Money
Migrant life has long required a careful balancing of responsibilities. Migrants travel to earn a wage in a capitalist economy while saving resources and honouring obligations that arise in a seemingly less-than-capitalist one. Various agents - rural patriarchs, traders, government authorities, appliance retailers - have used techniques to keep wages beyond migrants' control. Paradoxically, similar techniques have, on occasion, been eagerly embra…
Corporate Memory: Historical Revisionism, Legitimation and the Invention of Tradition in a Multinational Mining Company
In the world of neoliberal corporate capitalism the corporation is commonly represented as both asocial and ahistorical, as little more than the sum of its shareholders. But even within volatile capital markets, the need to project a corporate image of stability and confidence makes the narrative and performative aspects of corporate practice increasingly important. In Anglo American, one of the world's largest mining companies, that story has be…
Platinum City and the New South African Dream
Much has been written about the persistence of economic apartheid, inscribed in the geography of South Africa's cities, producing spatial configurations that are reminiscent of the old order of segregation while simultaneously embodying the particular inequities and divisions of the new neo-liberal order (Turok 2001; Harrison 2006). Through an ethnographic study of Rustenburg, the urban hub of South Africa's platinum belt (once labelled the 'fast…
Waiting for a deus ex machina: Sustainable extractives' in a 2°C world
In recent years the oil industry has shifted from climate change denialism to advocacy of the Paris Agreement, championing sustainability in an apparent assertion (rather than rejection) of corporate responsibility. Meanwhile growth forecasts continue unabated to finance the industry's enthusiasm for upstream ventures in uncharted territories. How do extractive companies, and those who work in them, square this contradiction? Fieldwork among oil …
Theatres of virtue
In recent years transnational corporations have become major players in the development arena. The rise of corporate social responsibility (CSR) elevates corporations as leaders in a new orthodoxy of business-led development that promotes empowerment through "the market" as the panacea for global poverty. This vision has recruited support from disparate actors, turning combatants into collaborators. This article is based on thirteen months of mul…
Hope and Betrayal on the Platinum Belt: Responsibility, Violence and Corporate Power in South Africa
This article considers the resurgence in state-backed violence against mineworkers in South Africa, which reached its apogee at the Marikana platinum mines in August 2012, in relation to the rise of corporate social responsibility (CSR) within the post-revolutionary political economy. I explore a paradox of CSR, which has emerged more strongly than ever in the wake of Marikana, whereby mining companies have been able to use CSR to dispense with (…
HIV/Aids is our business: The Moral Economy of Treatment in a Transnational Mining Company
This article is concerned with the moral economy of HIV treatment in a transnational mining company. Based on multi-sited ethnography in the world's third biggest mining company, I explore how relations between employer and employee are being transformed as a result of corporate HIV programmes, creating connections between the personal realm of sexual conduct and family life and the political economy of global corporate capitalism. I argue that c…
Introduction: Labour, Insecurity and Violence in South Africa
struggles are not unique to South Africa.Yet the centrality of violence to South Africa's labour arrangements -both underpinning and feeding off them -is a striking feature of the country's history. 4 The 'precarious liberation' 5 of post-apartheid South Africa has produced its own vulnerabilities and frustrations, giving way to a new era of protest and claim-making.At the same time, Marikana focuses attention not only on the forms of violence an…
Rethinking access: Key methodological challenges in studying energy companies
Bringing the state back in: Corporate social responsibility and the paradoxes of Norwegian state capitalism in the international energy sector
This theme section brings the state back into anthropological studies of corporate social responsibility through the lens of Norwegian energy corporations working abroad. These transnational corporations (TNCs) are expected by the government to act responsibly when "going global." Yet, we have observed that abroad, Norwegian corporations backed by state capital largely operate like any other TNCs. We argue that the driver for the adaptation to gl…
Expectations of Paternalism: Welfare, Corporate Responsibility, and HIV at South Africa's Mines
This article focuses on HIV/AIDS management at Anglo American, the world's third-biggest mining company, the largest private-sector employer in South Africa and across the continent, and the first company to provide antiretroviral therapy (ART) "free of charge" to its workforce in a context of little or no access to state health care. Through the lens of HIV management, the article considers what happens when human care and welfare is refracted t…
Readiness, resilience and the ripple effect: Women-owned enterprise in Kenya and the promise of global inclusion
This article interrogates the promise of inclusive markets as the vehicle of gender empowerment empirically through a case study of a small women-owned enterprise in Nairobi on its journey to inclusion in one of the world’s largest corporate supply chains as part of their empowerment through enterprise initiative. Chronicling the efforts of women entrepreneurs to meet the stringent imperatives of a global retailer and be made ‘ready’ for inclusio…
Aspiring Minds: A Generation of Entrepreneurs in the Making
This article examines how corporate, state and donor interests have converged in attempts to craft South Africa's youngsters into an army of entrepreneurs as the last frontier for creating growth in a post-job world. We investigate the apparatus designed to engineer this entrepreneurial revolution and the actors hoping to seed enterprising aspirations in school-age kids. Our ethnographic findings show that while the ideology of entrepreneurial ed…
HIV/Aids is our business: The Moral Economy of Treatment in a Transnational Mining Company
This article is concerned with the moral economy of HIV treatment in a transnational mining company. Based on multi-sited ethnography in the world's third biggest mining company, I explore how relations between employer and employee are being transformed as a result of corporate HIV programmes, creating connections between the personal realm of sexual conduct and family life and the political economy of global corporate capitalism. I argue that c…
In Good Company: An Anatomy of Corporate Social Responsibility
In Good Company chronicles a transnational mining corporation's pursuit of corporate social responsibility, exploring what lies behind the movement's marriage of moral imperative and market discipline.
Theatres of virtue
In recent years transnational corporations have become major players in the development arena. The rise of corporate social responsibility (CSR) elevates corporations as leaders in a new orthodoxy of business-led development that promotes empowerment through "the market" as the panacea for global poverty. This vision has recruited support from disparate actors, turning combatants into collaborators. This article is based on thirteen months of mul…
Platinum City and the New South African Dream
Much has been written about the persistence of economic apartheid, inscribed in the geography of South Africa's cities, producing spatial configurations that are reminiscent of the old order of segregation while simultaneously embodying the particular inequities and divisions of the new neo-liberal order (Turok 2001; Harrison 2006). Through an ethnographic study of Rustenburg, the urban hub of South Africa's platinum belt (once labelled the 'fast…
The gift of CSR
Corporate Memory: Historical Revisionism, Legitimation and the Invention of Tradition in a Multinational Mining Company
In the world of neoliberal corporate capitalism the corporation is commonly represented as both asocial and ahistorical, as little more than the sum of its shareholders. But even within volatile capital markets, the need to project a corporate image of stability and confidence makes the narrative and performative aspects of corporate practice increasingly important. In Anglo American, one of the world's largest mining companies, that story has be…
Credit Apartheid, Migrants, Mines and Money
Migrant life has long required a careful balancing of responsibilities. Migrants travel to earn a wage in a capitalist economy while saving resources and honouring obligations that arise in a seemingly less-than-capitalist one. Various agents - rural patriarchs, traders, government authorities, appliance retailers - have used techniques to keep wages beyond migrants' control. Paradoxically, similar techniques have, on occasion, been eagerly embra…
The Anthropology of Corporate Social Responsibility
The Anthropology of Corporate Social Responsibility explores the meanings, practices, and impact of corporate social and environmental responsibility across a range of transnational corporations and geographical locations (Bangladesh, Cameroon, Chile, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, India, Peru, South Africa, the UK, and the USA). The contributors examine the expectations, frictions and contradictions the CSR movement is generating a…
The Anthropology of Extraction: Critical Perspectives on the Resource Curse
Attempts to address the resource curse remain focussed on revenue management, seeking technical solutions to political problems over examinations of relations of power. In this paper, we provide a review of the contribution anthropological research has made over the past decade to understanding the dynamic interplay of social relations, economic interests and struggles over power at stake in the political economy of extraction. In doing so, we sh…
Remaking Africa's Informal Economies: Youth, Entrepreneurship and the Promise of Inclusion at the Bottom of the Pyramid
In recent years, the quest for 'inclusive markets' that incorporate Africa's youth has become a key focus of national and international development efforts, with so-called bottom of the pyramid (BoP) initiatives increasingly seen as a way to draw the continent's poor into new networks of global capitalism. SSA has become a fertile frontier for such systems, as capital sets its sights on the continents' vast 'under-served' informal economies, harn…
Hope and Betrayal on the Platinum Belt: Responsibility, Violence and Corporate Power in South Africa
This article considers the resurgence in state-backed violence against mineworkers in South Africa, which reached its apogee at the Marikana platinum mines in August 2012, in relation to the rise of corporate social responsibility (CSR) within the post-revolutionary political economy. I explore a paradox of CSR, which has emerged more strongly than ever in the wake of Marikana, whereby mining companies have been able to use CSR to dispense with (…
Introduction: Labour, Insecurity and Violence in South Africa
struggles are not unique to South Africa.Yet the centrality of violence to South Africa's labour arrangements -both underpinning and feeding off them -is a striking feature of the country's history. 4 The 'precarious liberation' 5 of post-apartheid South Africa has produced its own vulnerabilities and frustrations, giving way to a new era of protest and claim-making.At the same time, Marikana focuses attention not only on the forms of violence an…
Expectations of Paternalism: Welfare, Corporate Responsibility, and HIV at South Africa's Mines
This article focuses on HIV/AIDS management at Anglo American, the world's third-biggest mining company, the largest private-sector employer in South Africa and across the continent, and the first company to provide antiretroviral therapy (ART) "free of charge" to its workforce in a context of little or no access to state health care. Through the lens of HIV management, the article considers what happens when human care and welfare is refracted t…
Corporate Social Responsibility
Corporate social responsibility ( CSR ) came into focus in the 1990s in response to mounting pressure from global‐, national‐, and local‐level institutions for corporations to be held accountable for moral failings—from financial scandals and environmental devastation to human rights abuses. It emerged as a platform to deliver sustainable development and address environmental and community development issues vis‐á‐vis commercial enterprise. CSR i…
Rethinking access: Key methodological challenges in studying energy companies
Speculative futures at the bottom of the pyramid
Celebrated as creative, flexible catalysts of inclusive capitalism, urban youth are central to bottom-of-the-pyramid (BoP) models of development, which set out to repurpose the jobless as entrepreneurs in the making. We explore the multiple (at times conflicting) temporalities - the practices, technologies, and representations of time - which figure in a BoP initiative offering entrepreneurial opportunities to unemployed youth in Nairobi's slums:…
Bringing the state back in: Corporate social responsibility and the paradoxes of Norwegian state capitalism in the international energy sector
This theme section brings the state back into anthropological studies of corporate social responsibility through the lens of Norwegian energy corporations working abroad. These transnational corporations (TNCs) are expected by the government to act responsibly when "going global." Yet, we have observed that abroad, Norwegian corporations backed by state capital largely operate like any other TNCs. We argue that the driver for the adaptation to gl…
Waiting for a deus ex machina: Sustainable extractives' in a 2°C world
In recent years the oil industry has shifted from climate change denialism to advocacy of the Paris Agreement, championing sustainability in an apparent assertion (rather than rejection) of corporate responsibility. Meanwhile growth forecasts continue unabated to finance the industry's enthusiasm for upstream ventures in uncharted territories. How do extractive companies, and those who work in them, square this contradiction? Fieldwork among oil …
Neglected Transportation Infrastructure: Corporate Social Responsibility and the Russian State in a Small Siberian Oil Town
Verkhnemarkovo, a small Siberian town located on an oil field in Russia’s Irkutsk region, is plagued by bad roads and limited mobility. This article explores the relationship between corporate social responsibility and the wellbeing of individuals and communities, with a focus on transport and mobility infrastructure. Some oil companies, such as Irkutsk Oil Company, are tied to the sustainability standards of international financial institutions.…
Ethnographies of Extraction: Anthropology, corporate social responsibility and the resource curse
FORUM: ANTHROPOLOGY OF OIL AND THE RESOURCE CURSE
Aspiring Minds: A Generation of Entrepreneurs in the Making
This article examines how corporate, state and donor interests have converged in attempts to craft South Africa's youngsters into an army of entrepreneurs as the last frontier for creating growth in a post-job world. We investigate the apparatus designed to engineer this entrepreneurial revolution and the actors hoping to seed enterprising aspirations in school-age kids. Our ethnographic findings show that while the ideology of entrepreneurial ed…
Readiness, resilience and the ripple effect: Women-owned enterprise in Kenya and the promise of global inclusion
This article interrogates the promise of inclusive markets as the vehicle of gender empowerment empirically through a case study of a small women-owned enterprise in Nairobi on its journey to inclusion in one of the world’s largest corporate supply chains as part of their empowerment through enterprise initiative. Chronicling the efforts of women entrepreneurs to meet the stringent imperatives of a global retailer and be made ‘ready’ for inclusio…
They’re going to have to start becoming”: What inclusive capitalism tells us about the changing face of development
In recent years, business has reimagined corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a proactive market strategy, aligning itself with development orthodoxies of pro-poor and inclusive growth by enrolling the un- and underemployed into new regimes of entrepreneurial labour. Here, we examine this incarnation of “capitalism qua development”, through ethnographic case studies of market inclusion initiatives in Kenya – one spearheaded by a transnational…
Mining and Resource Management (14 works) · Political science (14 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Business (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Corporate social responsibility (8 works) · Economics (8 works) · Politics (8 works) · Public relations (8 works) · Innovation and Socioeconomic Development (7 works)