Ghazal Mir Zulfiqar

Extant research on dirty work—occupations involving physical, social, or moral taint, which affect worker identities—has been read primarily through the lens of social identity theory (SIT). There are two notable shortcomings that emerge as a consequence of dirty work being too heavily reliant upon the precepts of SIT, which we seek to remedy in this article: (1) the overemphasis on the symbolic to the detriment of the material has led to false optimism regarding the ability for subjects doing dirty work to exercise agency in constructing their own sense of selves, and (2) the failure to substantively account for the role of identity differences suggests that empirical research on the phenomenon is devoid of proper historical and cultural contextualization. Drawing on a qualitive study on low-caste toilet cleaners in Pakistan, our findings were largely incongruous with the scholarly conceptualization of dirty work that has been propagated to date. We explicate the embedded role of power and context in dirty work, which are not adequately considered using SIT alone. Repudiating the overly romanticized version of the concept, we argue that SIT’s account of dirty work ought to be complemented by status construction theory going forward.

Ajnesh Prasad and Ghazal Zulfiqar had the opportunity to interview Professor Cynthia Enloe — feminist, social justice activist and the plenary speaker for the Critical Management Studies division at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management. The contents of the interview are presented in this article. The interview is based on an initial set of preliminary questions that Ajnesh and Ghazal posed to Cynthia over multiple email exchanges between 22 May and 3 June 2020 as well as a nearly three‐hour interview on 9 June 2020, which was recorded and transcribed into verbatim text. As the three individuals involved were located in different parts of the world during the ongoing global pandemic — Cynthia was in Boston (United States), Ajnesh was in Victoria (Canada) and Ghazal was in Lahore (Pakistan) — the interview was organized virtually using Zoom. The thought‐provoking interview covers a wide range of topics, from current debates over race and COVID‐19 to feminist solidarity...

This essay describes a hybrid form of contemporary colonization that involves the fusion of digital and financial realms to explore new frontiers in profit generation, governance, and control. While early research has explored this dual mode of financialization and surveillance capitalism, it primarily employs Western frameworks assuming a universalism that does not account for the coerced lived experiences of the digitally colonized across the Global South. Organization, with its commitment to providing critical epistemic space to non-Western subjectivities, should lead this quest by shining a light on the colonization of everyday spaces in the Global South, with the new technologies of empire.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed global capitalism’s fault lines and the deep vulnerabilities built into its functionings. This article investigates how Pakistan’s informally employed women homeworkers, who labor at the bottom of global production networks (GPNs), fared during the first year of the pandemic. It empirically demonstrates how the GPN’s disruption wiped out the limited livelihoods of women homeworkers, which significantly jeopardized the social reproduction of their households, devastating entire communities. Through all of this, women homeworkers’ agency was evident in the everyday practices of social reproduction. The pandemic also revealed a collective solidarity that had community and extended family dimensions. The struggles and solidarities should be viewed as agentic acts of survival, against the economic and socio-political conditions of dispossession that come out of laboring in the Global South, as informal workers.

This case documents the challenges faced by the Kashf Microfinance Bank (KMFB) in 2012, when it was a relatively new entrant in a financial industry established by the 2001 Microfinance Institutions Ordinance. The case documents the difficulties KMFB faced in establishing itself as a microfinance bank, moved away from the unregulated NGO sector where its parent company, Kashf Foundation, was situated. As a microfinance bank KMFB faced the simultaneous challenge of surviving the start-up stage and adapting to the stringent banking regulations placed on it by the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP). The latter required learning to strike a balance between the sometimes conflicting banking and development institutional logics, a typical problem for hybrid institutions with a social mission. As KFMB grappled with trying to meet the SBP’s requirements on capital adequacy, it faced a repayment crisis originating from its parent company, wiping out a significant portion of its equity. The case fo...

This article uses the site of a residential community within a gated university complex to examine a new urban wage model of domestic labor in Punjab, Pakistan. In a socio-historical context where employer–employee relations have traditionally been shaped by asymmetric reciprocal relations and kinship bonds based on class, caste, and gender hierarchies, the rise of a depersonalized wage system exposes women domestic workers to new insecurities and vulnerabilities. The findings from this ethnographic study show how notions of dirt and foreignness are employed symbolically and militarized surveillance employed in concrete terms to control worker bodies and enforce the wage model. This is enabled by spatial segregation between the intimate, feminized residential space and the private masculinized outer space encircling it within the walled complex. The women workers are, thus, caught between pre-capitalist forms of coercion and a market-based wage model. The study broadens existing sch...

The Clayton-Mathews and Wilson 2003 analysis of Massachusetts’ expenditures of state and federal dollars to address family homelessness documented a serious system misalignment of public resources: that is, 80% of state and federal resources were tied up in shelter provision, while only 20%, including rental assistance, were designated for homelessness prevention (Clayton-Matthews and Wilson, 2003). Their analysis demonstrated what many had long suspected: if homelessness is to be ended in Massachusetts, fundamental changes would be needed to shift the state system from shelter-oriented toward prevention-oriented. Both the Romney and the Patrick administrations have clearly prioritized this objective with broad-based support and involvement from public, philanthropic, business and nonprofit stakeholders. This essay begins with an overview of the system redesign components being implemented by the state administration, as well as those proposed by the Governor which require legislati...

While the feminist literature on social reproduction is broad and diverse, one area that has remained relatively under-explored relates to the linkages between social reproduction and finance, particularly between social reproduction and household debt. In our contribution to this Special Issue, we seek to document and to analyse the structural linkages between social reproduction and debt, with a specific focus on pawnbroking in early modern England and contemporary Pakistan. We have four main aims in this article. Our first aim is to contribute to feminist theorizing about social reproduction by showing both how the daily and generational reproduction of households has relied upon historically specific forms of credit and how these social relations of credit/debt have been central to the development and reproduction of capitalism in different times and places. Second, we show how particular forms of ‘everyday finance’ are gendered and, specifically, how they are feminized. Our thi...

... The first of these, an introductory essay by Günseli Berik and Yana van der Meulen Rodgers (two of the book's editors), provides a comprehensive review ... while legislation from the pre-ISI era did protect mothers in Chile during the ISI stage via paid maternity leave and daycare ...

This study examines how Pakistani microfinance banks’ (MFBs) collateralised microcredit arrangements take advantage of the cultural centrality of gold in women’s lives. In so doing, it contributes to the wider debate on financial inclusion and financialization. The product, processes and narratives examined are a local manifestation of global finance’s emphasis on engaging commercially viable means to bring previously ‘unbanked’ populations within its fold. Based on fieldwork in Lahore and Karachi, two of Pakistan’s largest cities, this paper highlights how the ‘financial inclusion’ agenda of microfinance has effectively financialized
the lives of poor Pakistani women. Our analysis finds that Pakistani MFBs
draw on patriarchy’s hierarchical norms and the precariousness of low-income living in ways which bolster their own financial positions. This is supported by the country’s central bank, which has granted collateralized microfinance products a ‘risk-free’ rating, easing the path to the financialization of jewellery, which in a South Asian context is directly associated with women’s social standing and economic security. The outcome is a deepening of deep-seated vulnerabilities.

This symposium is a critical assessment of how globalization has turned production, service delivery and governance into the private domain of non-state actors. Some of the means through which this is achieved are analyzed in this symposium and they include global production networks, the political corporate social responsibility of multinational corporations, and the collaborative global policy networks of knowledge, aid and finance. The processes through which private actors deliver public goods, apoliticised norms and values, and public policy are fraught with power asymmetries. Each of the four presentations in this symposium analyze how power is divided between local and global, public and private, corporate and non-corporate actors. Following the presentations, Banu Ozkazanc- Pan and Marjo Siltaoja will serve as the discussants to provide the theoretical implications of the presentations and lead an interactive group discussion.

In just 30 years microfinance has transformed from a credit-based rural development scheme that has claimed to reduce poverty and empower poor women, to a $70 billion financial industry. In the process, the traditional NGO-led model has given way to commercialized institutions, resulting in an increased emphasis on profitmaking. This has also led to confusion in the sector around its mission: is it to alleviate poverty and empower poor women or simply to provide the "unbanked" with access to formal sources of finance? This research considers the main debates in microfinance with regard to its mission and presents empirical evidence on the effectiveness of microfinance.
The study is based on the Pakistani microfinance sector, which provides an ideal opportunity for a comparative analysis of two distinct models of microfinance - the nonprofit microfinance institutions (MFI) and the microfinance banks (MFB). The research compares the depth of outreach, mission, practice, and borrower experiences of MFIs and MFBs, employing a political economy framework. The data includes 140 interviews with policymakers, donors, senior, mid and low-level microfinance officers, and their clients; as well as observations of practitioner-client interactions, including the process of disbursement and collection, group meetings, and field visits with loan officers in urban Pakistan. It also comprises two district-level surveys: the microfinance outreach survey from the Pakistan Microfinance Network (PMN) and the Government of Pakistan's Social and Living Standards Survey (PSLM). The surveys are analyzed econometrically to test whether district-level socioeconomic differences affect patterns of outreach.
This study broadens our understanding of the extent to which the local political economy shapes the outcomes of a market-based intervention, such as microfinance. It also provides an insight into the evolution of microfinance, specifically as framed by the global development discourse and subsequent public policy choices. Finally, the study provides an authoritative account of how institutional structure affects microfinance's effectiveness as a tool for poverty alleviation, empowerment and financial access.

The Clayton-Mathews and Wilson 2003 analysis of Massachusetts’ expenditures of state and federal dollars to address family homelessness documented a serious system misalignment of public resources: that is, 80% of state and federal resources were tied up in shelter provision, while only 20%, including rental assistance, were designated for homelessness prevention (Clayton-Matthews and Wilson, 2003). Their analysis demonstrated what many had long suspected: if homelessness is to be ended in Massachusetts, fundamental changes would be needed to shift the state system from shelter-oriented toward prevention-oriented. Both the Romney and the Patrick administrations have clearly prioritized this objective with broad-based support and involvement from public, philanthropic, business and nonprofit stakeholders. This essay begins with an overview of the system redesign components being implemented by the state administration, as well as those proposed by the Governor which require legislative approval. Following this overview are the research team’s perspectives on these changes, grounded in what is known about effective homelessness prevention strategies and what has been learned through the project team’s other analytical work. The essay ends with the research team’s recommendations.

Based on a sample of 67 interviews with borrowers and their family members as well as interviews with 25 microfinance practitioners this study analyzes gold collateralized microcredit. Since 2011 Pakistan's microfinance banks (MFBs) have extended loans against gold jewelry. The jewelry belongs to women of poor and lower-middle income households, is the only asset they can consider theirs and is passed down from one generation of women to the next. We find that collateralizing gold jewelry in microcredit arrangements coopts patriarchal norms that determine a complex form of gold ownership at the household level. This puts women at the risk of intergenerational asset depletions, which in turn compromises their autonomy. BACKGROUND