Development@Manchester Seminar: 'Platinum dreams: Corporate Social Responsibility and the ultimate entrepreneur' Dr Dinah Rajak, University of Sussex
| Dates: | 20 November 2013 |
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| Times: | 16:30 - 18:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Environment, Education and Development |
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| Who is it for: | General public |
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| Speaker: | Dinah Rajak |
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The celebration of private sector development has been reconfigured in recent years, shifting its focus from the concentrated might of transnational corporations to the mass appeal of inclusive markets, bottom of the pyramid (BoP) enterprise and micro-entrepreneurship. As the tantalizing mantra in the squatter camps of South Africa’s platinum belt goes: ‘In the new South Africa, everyone can be a businessman’. Though it may have been rebranded as BoP business, as opposed to the 1960’s American Dream speak of ‘democratising markets’, this celebration of grass-roots capitalism is certainly not new. What is of particular interest now is that here it is the goliath of corporate capitalism that, we are told, will deliver on this promise to the David’s of petty enterprise. As a proselytizing project that claims to spread market discipline as the source of social mobility it is here, that we hear the battle-cry of a capitalism that presents itself as liberator of the economically disenfranchised; a capitalism which, as Comaroff and Comaroff put it, offers itself up as a ‘gospel of salvation’ (2000: 292). Drawing on ethnographic research on South Africa’s platinum belt, this paper explores practices of ‘empowerment through enterprise’ and in particular the relationship between big business and micro-entrepreneurship, that has become a mainstay of development discourse promoting inclusive markets as the panacea to poverty.
Speaker
Dinah Rajak
Role: Senior Lecturer Social Development
Organisation: University of Sussex
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
Lecture Theatre G6
Humanities Bridgeford Street
Manchester
