Presenter: Dr Rekha Krishnan, Associate Professor of International Business and Entrepreneurship
Institution: Simon Fraser University, Canada
Title: Economic Underlife of Total Institutions: How Stigma-shedding Shapes Competition and Cooperation among Entrepreneurs in Tanzanian Refugee Camps
Abstract
Sociologists have long been fascinated by the social construction of reality within total institutions - organizations such as prisons, asylums, military training camps, labor camps, and refugee camps, where similarly situated individuals are separated from the outside world for a considerable period of time, and are subject to bureaucratic constraints on their freedom and sense of self (Goffman, 1961). We know from prior research that individuals who find themselves in total institutions seek to reclaim their self and a sense of control by mutually engaging in unauthorized economic exchanges that often give rise to a clandestine market, which, according to Goffman, constitutes the underlife of total institutions. While maintaining a self that is distinct from the one imposed on them requires individuals to cooperate with fellow economic participants, solidarity resulting from such cooperation might require them to forgo their sense of control to the collective. We explore this tension in the economic underlife of a prototypical total institution—the refugee camp. We conducted a multi-sited ethnography across three large refugee camps in western Tanzania.
Our ethnographic findings reveal that within the clandestine market populated by fellow refugees, market participants shed their stigmatized refugee identity and sought to rebuild their self-respect by embracing an entrepreneurial identity. The economic underlife of the refugee camps we studied was characterized by duality, where refugees revealed their identity as deference seeking entrepreneurs only to fellow refugees and projected an outward identity as nameless refugees to the institutional actors, such as UNHCR and NGOs. Maintaining this duality helped them procure scarce resources from institutional actors to build their businesses while judiciously using those resources to differentiate themselves from market participants. Although their quest for deference among peers resulted in intense competition among established businesses, market participants exhibited a generalized solidarity towards each other that helped them conceal their trade from camp officials and further their individual aspirations in the market. At a deeper level, we witnessed pockets of bounded solidarity within each established business as members engaged in covert bonding rituals to plot against their rivals in the market. Our findings show that the social order characterizing the economic underlife of total institutions is much more complex than eliciting the cooperation of fellow economic participants. As individuals sought to alter their social realities in these clandestine markets, solidarity and fellow feeling were limited to the realms of the market where their entrepreneurial identity might be threatened.
Presenter Bio
Rekha Krishnan is an associate professor of international business and entrepreneurship at the Beedie School of Business of Simon Fraser University in Canada. Her research examines the emergence, evolution, and consequences of social order in organizations, markets and society. In her current work, she studies the emergence of new social order and the disruption of existing social order in markets through two research streams. Using ethnography and field experiments, her first stream examines the role of interaction rituals in emergence and sustenance of micro social order in nascent entrepreneur communities in technologically intensive regions in the west (Silicon Valley and Canada) and in the fringes of mainstream markets in emerging economies (underground markets in refugee camps in Tanzania and tribal villages in India). Using archival data in population level studies based in India, her second stream examines the interaction between social movements and entrepreneurs in creating, maintaining, and disrupting social order in a society.
Her PhD dissertation won the prestigious Richard N Farmer Best Dissertation award sponsored by the Academy of International Business. Besides, she was one of the finalists for the Gunnar Hedlund Best Dissertation award and the BPS outstanding dissertation award. Her research has been published in top-tier management journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Management and Journal of Management Studies and in high impact inter-disciplinary journals such as, Resources, Conservation and Recycling. Some of her articles have appeared as lead articles in journal issues or have the won best article award. Her research is supported by SSHRC Standard Research Grant, which has been granted to her twice over the past few years. She has spent her sabbaticals as a visiting scholar at the Institute of Research on Social Sciences at Stanford University.