Microfinance : Battling a Wicked Problem. Business and Innovation ; vol. 15.

Ashta, Arvind:

ISBN 10: 2807600913 / ISBN 13: 9782807600911

Published by Bruxelles, Bern, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Oxford, Wien: Peter Lang, 2016

About this Item

228 pp. ; 22 cm x 15 cm, 320 g. A perfect copy. - A school of thought hails microcredit as a social innovation, a messiah to enable people to help themselves out of poverty through entrepreneurship. An opposing school of thought considers microcredit as a capitalist demon ensnaring the poor in poverty and debt. The layman and the million professionals working in this industry are at a loss to make sense of the stories that circulate about microcredit. This book provides this sense-making, useful for students, professionals, investors and researchers who are attracted to this field. Poverty is a wicked problem, akin to Hydra, the Greek mythological monster with many heads. As microcredit tries to balance multiple objectives to grapple with these multiple heads, it has needed to shift the weapons it uses. The arsenal for this battle has needed new philosophies, changing ethics, differing missions, institutional partnerships, the latest technologies and new products. These rapid innovations have differed in speed across the world, with adaptations in developed and developing countries. This book presents these with many case studies and field research. It is clear that development initiatives, no matter how financial, cross academic disciplines. At the very least, they affect disciplines such as economics, business management, sociology, history, geography, politics, legal systems in place, as well as science, which is evolving at such a high speed. The book provides this multidisciplinary view and motivates future research and practices. - Contents: Chapter 1. Microcredit as a Response to a Wicked Problem -- Responsibility for Wicked Problems -- The Wickedness of the Sustainable Development Problem -- The Origins and Evolution of Corporate Social Responsibility -- Alternatives for Helping the Poor -- Microcredit: An Instrument to Address a Wicked Problem -- Why People Did Not Lend to the Poor -- How Microcredit Solved the Problems -- Is Microcredit a Social Innovation? -- The Evolution of Microcredit -- The Spread of Microcredit -- The Transformation of Microcredit -- The Achilles' Heel of Microcredit -- Outline of the Book -- Chapter 2. Institutional Study of Microcredit: Successes and Failures -- What Made Microcredit Successful? -- Regional Analysis -- Industry Analysis -- Organizational Analysis -- Unsustainable Growth of Microcredit -- The Impact of Financial Crisis on Microcredit -- Ethical Crisis within Microcredit Organizations -- Life Crisis among Microcredit Beneficiaries -- Enabling Institutions to Protect Microcredit -- Usury Legislation -- Transparency -- Religion -- Concluding Remarks -- Chapter 3. Innovations to Make Microcredit a more Powerful Tool -- MIS to Control Operating Costs and Increase Outreach -- MIS Packages and Cross-Purposes Problem -- Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) -- SaaS for Microfinance -- Crowdfunding to Lower Financing Costs and Increase Financing -- Understanding the Peer to Peer Lending Space -- The Role of Trust in Online Funding -- Socio-Ethics as a Barrier to Innovation -- Process Innovations Concerning Risk, Outreach and Impact -- Financial and Time Use Diaries -- Credit Scoring to Reduce Risk and Mission Drift -- Poverty Scoring to Reduce Mission Drift -- Concluding Remarks -- Chapter 4. Other Micro Products and Services to Attack the Problem -- Reducing Stress through Equity -- Microangel Investment Process -- Microequity Movement -- Slow Money and Impact Investments -- Levelling Wicked Problems Through Wages, Insurance and Savings -- Minimum Wage Solution -- Innovating Microinsurance -- Influencing Microsavings Behavior -- Building Entrepreneurial Capacity with Complementary Institutions -- Capacity Building with Microcredit -- Innovative Cooperatives of Entrepreneurs -- What Capacity for the Future -- Concluding Remarks on Motivation for Research. ISBN 9782807600911 Sprache: Englisch Gewicht in Gramm: 320.

Seller Inventory # 1081449

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Microfinance : Battling a Wicked Problem. Business and Innovation ; vol. 15.
• Publisher: Bruxelles, Bern, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Oxford, Wien: Peter Lang
• Publication Date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 2807600913
• ISBN 13: 9782807600911
• Binding: Paperback.
• Condition: Wie neu
• Weight: 320 grams
• Seller catalogs:
  • Wirtschaft

About this title

Synopsis

A school of thought hails microcredit as a social innovation, a messiah to enable people to help themselves out of poverty through entrepreneurship. An opposing school of thought considers microcredit as a capitalist demon ensnaring the poor in poverty and debt. The layman and the million professionals working in this industry are at a loss to make sense of the stories that circulate about microcredit. This book provides this sense-making, useful for students, professionals, investors and researchers who are attracted to this field.

Poverty is a wicked problem, akin to Hydra, the Greek mythological monster with many heads. As microcredit tries to balance multiple objectives to grapple with these multiple heads, it has needed to shift the weapons it uses. The arsenal for this battle has needed new philosophies, changing ethics, differing missions, institutional partnerships, the latest technologies and new products. These rapid innovations have differed in speed across the world, with adaptations in developed and developing countries. This book presents these with many case studies and field research.

It is clear that development initiatives, no matter how financial, cross academic disciplines. At the very least, they affect disciplines such as economics, business management, sociology, history, geography, politics, legal systems in place, as well as science, which is evolving at such a high speed. The book provides this multidisciplinary view and motivates future research and practices.

About the Author

Professor Arvind Ashta, holder of the Banque Populaire Chair in Microfinance at the Burgundy School of Business (ESC Dijon), has degrees in economics, business management, political science and law from prestigious institutions in India and France. He has been teaching and researching microfinance for the last decade, with a prolific publication record in academic and professional journals and books. He has been invited to present courses and seminars on microfinance across the world.