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In recent years, the Grameen (rural) Bank of Bangladesh gained international fame for successfully organizing grassroots microenterprises for productive self-employment and social change. The Grameen Bank provides collateral-free loans and various social services for the poor, charging 20% interest on capital' and yet maintaining a 99% loan recovery rate. Many of the bank's I. 9 million members, of whom 94% are women, attribute their present well-being to its ameliorative qualities. Using multiple theories (coorientation, concertive control, and critical feminist theories), we analyze the Grameen Bank's programs to explicate the dialectic between control and emancipation in organizing for social change. By examining the Grameen Bank's organizational processes from multiple theoretical perspectives, we draw insights about theory and praxis in organizing for social change.

The Grameen (rural) Bank of Bangladesh offers poor people credit without collateral, and various other services, to help them undertake productive microenterprises and improve their socioeconomic conditions. Currently, an estimated 12 million men, women, and children benefit from the Bank's integrated financial and social-promotional services. In this paper, I analyze Grameen's microcapitalistic philosophy and practice, its approach to organizing microenterprises, and its adaptability as a model to different cultural contexts, reviewing two of its international replication experiences. Grameen's microcapitalism seeks freedom of individual thought and action for the poor by giving them access to credit as a fundamental human right. Grameen's combined organizing approach allows its employees and clients to create and share norms that prompt them to pursue concertive action for change. The two international replication experiences described here underline the adaptability of the Grameen model to different cultures and the centrality of cultural dynamics to the shaping of organizational communication policies and practices. he modernization programs of the 1960s proved to have belated trickle-down effects on the socioeconomic conditions of the subalterni poor and to be problematic because they required large amounts of investment capital and hardly involved the poor in the reconstructing of their lives. In reaction, scholars and practitioners have critiqued, proposed, tried, and adopted or rejected a potpourri of development recipes -most of which have been problematic in some way or other. Scholars and practitioners, however, have justifiably advocated and experimented with grassroots participatory approaches to subaltern development (e.g., Chambers

Despite many decades of efforts to alleviate rural poverty, the number of rural poor in developing countries is steadily rising. Amid the general gloom and doom of failed poverty-focused programs, one bright spot is the experience of the Grameen (rural) Bank in Bangladesh. The Grameen Bank represents a radical institutional innovation because it provides collateral-free loans and various social services to poor Bangladeshis yet maintains a loan recovery rate of 98 percent. Founded as an action research project in 1976, the Grameen Bank has diffused to 50 of Bangladesh's 64 districts. The bank now has over one million members, 92 percent of whom are women. Over the past 16 years, the Grameen Bank has created a formidable knowledge base and expertise to combat rural poverty. The present article investigates the process through which this new knowledge base was created, and how it has diffused in Bangladesh to alleviate poverty.

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