Bankers at the gate: Microfinance and the high cost of borrowed logics
165 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In this paper we examine how the interaction between influences of commercial banking and poverty alleviation shaped the evolution of modern microfinance. Using institutional theory as a lens, we observe that the commercial banking logic increasingly displaced the microfinance field's foundational poverty alleviation and development principles over time. We argue that this process of displacement can occur inadvertently as organizations that embody multiple logics draw disproportionately on only one of those logics when developing legitimating accounts of their activity to stakeholders. Furthermore, we introduce the concept of permeability – the extent to which the elements of a logic are ambiguous and loosely coupled – to explain why some logics may be more or less open to the influence of other logics. We conclude by discussing implications for entrepreneurship and poverty alleviation more generally.
Subfields: Business and International Management, Economics and Econometrics, Management Information Systems
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e8ab362e359b36972ae838fd080183900e9bf3dd
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In Business and International Management
In Economics and Econometrics
In Management Information Systems
Citations in the corpus
- Microfinance and the business of poverty reduction: Critical perspectives from rural Bangladesh (2017, background): “It is reasonable to ask what would the situation have been if no microfinance was available? Would individuals have been pushed further into poverty? Randomized trials and field experiments with economic, social and environmental indicators are needed to answer this question but such studies are rar”
- Developing entrepreneurship in Africa: investigating critical resource challenges (2017, background): “Kent and Dacin (2013) affirm that without adopting an entrepreneurial approach in the supply and use of credit, this credit is unlikely to deliver the desired results such as job creation and poverty reduction in developing countries.”
- Micro-entrepreneurship and subjective well-being: Evidence from rural Bangladesh (2019, background): “Critics question the ability of microcredit to deliver prosperity, pointing to indebtedness, erosion of social capital and exacerbation of economic vulnerabilities as its major problems, especially in poor, traditional contexts such as rural Bangladesh (Banerjee and Jackson, 2017; Bateman and Chang,”