Banking is for Others
Contradictions of Microfinance in the Ghanaian Market
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12433253 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Irene Pang (John Brown University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 22 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 510-541 |
| Publication date | 2016-08-16 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of World-Systems Research (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1076-156X • E-ISSN: 1076-156X |
| Publisher | University Library System, University of Pittsburgh (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.5195/jwsr.2016.640 |
| OpenAlex | W2518309482 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 22 |
Recent literature on microfinance has observed that commercial microfinance programs that achieve financial sustainability largely fail to reach the poor (Hulme 2000; Mayoux 2000; Cull, Demirgüç-Kunt, and Morduch 2007). Most studies rely on institutional explanations for this failure (Battilana and Dorado 2010; Pache and Santos 2010; Canales 2011). Using a Braudelian conceptualization of a fragmented, three-tiered capitalist world-economy, this study examines how Ghanaian market women finance their businesses within the bottom layer of the capitalist world-economy, and why, despite the availability of commercial microfinance, they continue to rely on informal finance. I argue that commercial microfinance is structurally constrained by contradictions between the profit-driven logic of the upper layers of the capitalist world-economy and the socially-embedded and subsistence-driven logic that organizes the market in which market women operate. I also show that, to the extent that commercial microfinance partially penetrates the market, it disrupts the circulation of financial resources and weakens existing social and economic networks within the community
Business · Conceptualization · Economic growth · Economics · Financial services · Financial system · Market economy · Microfinance · Subsistence agriculture · Sustainability · Microfinance and Financial Inclusion · Finance
Economic Action and Social Structure
Peer Monitoring and Credit Markets
Building Sustainable Hybrid Organizations
Onions Are My Husband
Spaces of Capital
Economic Action and Social Structure
The Sources and Consequences of Embeddedness for the Economic Performance of Organizations
Pathways to empowerment? Reflections on microfinance and transformation in gender relations in South Asia
Who takes the credit? Gender, power, and control over loan use in rural credit programs in Bangladesh
Imperfect Substitutes
Impact Assessment Methodologies for Microfinance
Group lending, repayment incentives and social collateral
Group-lending
Symbiosis vs. crowding-out
Financial performance and Outreach
Rule bending, sociological citizenship, and organizational contestation in microfinance
Cooperation in Microcredit Borrowing Groups
From Credit to Collective Action
Great Transformation
Embeddedness and the Intellectual Projects of Economic Sociology
| Highly cited | No |
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