Actually Existing Neoliberalism and Enterprise Formation in the Informal Economy: Interrogating the Role of Mediating Social Enterprises in India and South Africa

Abstract

Scholarship on social entrepreneurship primarily reduces social enterprises in the Global South to geographic variations of an idealized concept of combining commercial imperatives with social missions. In the article, I see social enterprise practice in economies of the Global South, namely India and South Africa, as channels to engage in the ongoing theorization of the field. The article draws on the frame of actually existing neoliberalism, moving beyond macroperspectives and policy imperatives on social entrepreneurship to show how neoliberal rationalities are mobilized and regulated by emancipatory rationalities and agendas. The empirical focus is on social enterprises mediating enterprise formation to address employment concerns in the informal, noncapital domains of India and South Africa. I draw on data from the ethnographic fieldwork on mediating social enterprises collected during my doctoral research. The lived realities of practice of the two intermediaries considered in the article, Dhwani in India and EntShare in South Africa, show mediating social enterprises in ongoing negotiations with capital and noncapital domains. Understanding the negotiations explains the convergences and divergences in how neoliberal economic rationalities align with progressive and emancipatory agendas and values across India and South Africa. In doing so, the article provides an opportunity to enrich conceptual registers of postcolonial economic geography by tracing and articulating mediation processes between neoliberal and nonneoliberal rationalities not solely from one site but across contexts.

Key words:

• social entrepreneurship
• neoliberalism
• postcolonial economies
• enterprise formation
• South Africa
• India

Acknowledgments

I thank my Ph.D. supervisors, Shari Daya and Ruchi Chaturvedi, for guiding my doctoral research, which is the basis for the article. I thank the organizers of the 2021 “Social life of skills” workshop, University of Melbourne, the Society of South African Geographers (SSAG) Writing Workshop, and Shari Daya for suggestions on earlier versions of this article. I am also thankful for the thoughtful editorial support from Prof. Jane Pollard and the incisive feedback from two anonymous referees on my article. The research for this article was supported by the Ph.D. Fellowship (2017-2019) of the Faculty of Science, University of Cape Town.

Notes

1 All names of organizations and individuals have been changed for reasons of anonymity.

2 In 2013, India modified its Companies Act. Section 135 of the Companies Act of 2013 mandates corporations to spend 2 percent of the average net profits on philanthropic efforts (Shirodkar, Beddewela, and Richter 2018).

3 Townships are defined as areas that were designated under apartheid legislation for exclusive occupation by people classified as Blacks, coloreds, and Indians. Townships have a unique and distinct history, which has had a direct impact on the socioeconomic status of these areas and how people perceive and operate within them (Donaldson 2014).

4 Design-thinking and human-centered design are methodological frameworks used for innovation and entrepreneurship. The frames advocate the idea that thinking like a designer, especially when the end users of a design or solution are kept at the center of the design process, leads to creative and novel ideas. These ideas then are prototyped and piloted with the communities of practice to understand their applicability and areas of improvement.

5 A combination of education and finance with technology to enhance service delivery in the respective domains.

6 The National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) in India, defines a producer organization (PO) as a legal entity formed by primary producers, viz. farmers, milk producers, fishermen, weavers, rural artisans, craftsmen. A PO can be a producer company, a cooperative society, or any other legal form that provides for sharing of profits/benefits among the members. The main aim of a PO is to ensure better income for the producers through an organization of their own. Small producers do not have the volume individually (both inputs and produce) to get the benefit of economies of scale. Besides, in agricultural marketing, there is a long chain of intermediaries who very often work nontransparently leading to the situation where the producer receives only a small part of the value that the ultimate consumer pays. Through aggregation, the primary producers can avail the benefit of economies of scale. They will also have better bargaining power vis-à-vis the bulk buyers of produce and bulk suppliers of inputs (NABARD 2015).

7 Figures shared by my interlocutors.

8 Lack of economic opportunities and development in South Africa have been analyzed by scholars as a key reason for high crime, with marginalized areas like townships considered to be areas of high concentration (Govender 2015).