Paromita Sanyal

"From Credit To Collective Action: Microfinance, Women's Group-Based Mobilizations and Implications for Social Capital"

Tuesday, September 11, 2007 
Room  MC3-570  Time: 12:30 -- 2:00 pm

Speaker: Paromita Sanyal, is a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Her main research interest is in economic development and its social ramifications, particularly its influence on gender relations. She is currently completing her dissertation on the impact of microfinance programs on women’s agency in India. Her other areas of research interests include gender and work, culture, economic sociology, social capital, participatory democracy and decentralized governance, and nonprofit organizations
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The social embeddedness of economic actions in pre-existing social ties has been linked to various positive and negative economic consequences for economic institutions and groups of people. But the social consequences of economic ties have received comparatively less scholarly attention. Microfinance groups provide the ideal setting for exploring this relationship. These are small-scale credit and savings groups formed to provide the poor with uncollateralized loans through a “peer-group” based lending strategy. In developing countries these groups are formed primarily of women. The collective social behavior of these groups may have important social consequences for these less privileged women and their communities. I use in-depth empirical data from interviews with four hundred women participating in fifty-nine microfinance groups in India. I examine instances of group-based collective mobilizations undertaken by these women to protect their gender interests and further their pragmatic interests. I explain how these mobilizations become possible in a socially conservative setting and argue that the economic ties, being structured into a concrete group and participation in the associational activities of these groups create the potential of positively influencing the collective social behavior of microfinance groups. These findings provide theoretical insights for refining our understanding of social capital.

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