Microenterprise development, industrial labour and the seductions of precarity

Abstract

Microenterprise development is underpinned by an ideology that the solution to poverty is the integration of the poor into market relations.

Precarious Bodies: Occupational Risk Assemblages in Bolivia and Trinidad

“…Employers profit from externalising the risks of fluctuating demand from foreign and local buyers onto the workers themselves. These workers soon find themselves responsible for the costs of electricity and a secure workspace for storing the sewing machines, and also the opportunity cost of idleness when there is no work to do (Prentice, 2017).…”

Towards an anthropology of global inequalities and their local manifestations: social anthropology in 2017

“…In other situations, state policies work through omission or wilful neglect. For example, Prentice () argues that the introduction of micro‐enterprises in Trinidad has significantly reduced and undone the labour protection and human rights of workers that were fought for under Fordist regimes of production. And Kalir and Van Schendel () have shown that states often knowingly refrain from recording certain people and their activities to relieve state authorities of their duties: in an era of ‘neo‐liberalism as creative destruction’ (Harvey in Kalir and Van Schendel : 6), when the rule is retraction of the caring state and intensification of the coercive state, non‐recording is an increasingly effective state policy for disowning populations that the state categorises, and treats, as undeserving, undesired and unproductive.…”

“…), austerity (Forbess and James ) and public‐sector cuts (Bear and Knight ), and post‐Fordist reforms (Susser ). Precarious living conditions are matched on a global scale by the ongoing effects of neoliberal reforms (Kar ), labour exploitation (Campbell ; Prentice ) and financialisation (Bear ). Add to this the global environmental crisis (Bhan and Trisal ; Pia ), earthquakes (Bock ; LaHatte ; Newberry ), ever‐increasing waste production (Harvey ; Hylland Erikson and Schober ) and health epidemics, like Ebola (Lipton ) and HIV/AIDS (Powers ; Wardlow ), and you end up with a picture of multiple crises.…”

“…For example, historical and comparative ethnographic perspectives serve as an important reminder that neo‐nationalisms in Europe or North America have long‐standing roots in the history of nation‐state building and the ‘late nationalisms’ that those states have produced (Argenti ). And in the global south, processes of structural adjustment and ‘austerity’ politics have been ongoing for decades, creating heightened inequalities between rich and poor (Bhan and Trisal ; Lanzas and Whittle ; Prentice ). And yet, at a time when economic, political, social and environmental precarities are proliferating, the anthropological study of global inequalities becomes an ever‐pressing agenda for research.…”

Introduction: Labour, Insecurity and Violence in South Africa

“…As Prentice argues, the precaritisation of work is reconfigured as an opportunity for 'empowerment' and self-actualisation, in which the precariat are 'free to author their own destinies while negating the histories of struggle that have made this framing possible'. 88 Drawing on powerful ideals of choice and freedom, a discourse of self-sufficiency leaves the majority with the experiences of insecurity already discussed.…”