Veranstaltungsprogramm

For a long time, development sociology had a special status. While mainstream sociology focussed on the societies of the North Atlantic, development sociology conducted research in the Global South and in the transition states across different continents. The original field of study, the question of development, was supplemented by new perspectives beginning in in the 1980s. These are now highly topical in the current sociological debate: the critique of the concept of development and the development industry, a global sociology, the critique of global inequality with a view to post-colonial structures or competing epistemologies. This seems to be a very good starting point for the future of development sociology. Nevertheless, development sociology does not really seem to be attractive. Why? The current critical de- and post-colonial debates are politically charged. They primarily pose conceptual questions and, unlike development sociology, aim less at empirical research. The representatives of a global sociology are only beginning with empirical research. Their research interest is focussed primarily on the sub-fields of sociology. The societies of the global South as a whole are less of a topic. In classical development research, the critics of the development concept and those associated with development practice have hardly any connection with each other. A look at these separate debates reveals an essential characteristic of developmental sociology. As long as only a small group of sociologists were interested in the global South, this was the unifying element across very different topics and approaches. This is precisely why, in addition to individual research topics, societies as a whole were always in focus. This is (or was) a holistic approach which, precisely because of its openness, has enabled new approaches and insights. It would be very exciting to maintain this broad focus, but this requires a great deal of openness and flexibility from all involved researchers. Whether this will be possible as specialisation continues to increase is questionable.

Around the world, working people are increasingly taking up financial products to ensure livelihoods and wellbeing, while financial institutions find in household reproduction new frontiers of speculation and accumulation. The deepening financialisation is partly achieved through governing technologies aimed at molding suitable forms of personhood, especially the “investing subject”, which is autonomous, individualised, financially literate and self-disciplined, and partly the reorientation of social provisioning towards the financial markets. The household has become a set of financial exposures to be managed through investment, debt accumulation and risk assumption. As the household is the site of labour reproduction, such changes are also connected to the turning of labour into a form of capital. Financial products such as consumer credits or mortgages extract value from labour’s future wages, at the same time that financialised restructuring reduces wages and increases work insecurity. Yet, when working people put their wages into securitized loans, mortgages and credits, they are participating in both the circulation of money and the production of risk. Their greater willingness to take on financial risk helps to produce risk as an object of exchange central to current regimes of accumulation.

This paper reviews existing anthropological and sociological studies of finance in working lives and, drawing on classical anthropological writings, governmentality theories and world system theories, puts forwards a conceptual framework for analyzing the growing implications of financial risk for the relationship between labour, capital and the state. I propose the notion of politics of risk to refer to the entanglement and tension between the rationalities of actors involved in the production, management and governance of risk, including the state, financial institutions, and the household. My working assumtion is that these actors participate in the production and distribution of risk from differing power positions to achieve differential outcomes from financialization. In particular, the working household, having to address the risks of precarious labour to ensure wellbeing, is likely to bear the greater costs of the increased systemic risk even as its needs and aspirations provide the very material basis for the financial system.

Dieser Kongressbetrag zu der Session « Development Sociology in Transition » bezieht sich auf die Ergebnisse eines von der Europäischen Kommission geförderten Projekts ManaGlobal. Das Projekt, das von mir an der Universität Rennes 2, Frankreich koordiniert wurde, sah Research and Innovation Staff Exchange vor. Forscher und Unternehmer aus Senegal, Kamerun, Ghana und Marokko sowie Großbritannien, Belgien und Frankreich nahmen an diesem Projekt teil.

Entwicklungsforschung und -kooperation bemühen sich seit Kurzem die Nischenökonomie der formellen Unternehmen in Afrika zu verstehen, und zwar zwischen globalem Managementdiskurs und lokalen Managementstrukturen, die von Unternehmern eingeführt werden, die den globalen Diskurs sowie die lokale Unternehmenskultur kennen und neue Unternehmenslösungen finden können, die Erfolg versprechen.

Der Vortrag soll die wesentlichen Aspekte des Projekts zwischen einer Nord-Süd Kooperation vorstellen, die zwar eine Nischenökonomie untersucht, die aber die Transition einer informellen Wirtschaftsstruktur zu einer formellen Wirtschaft aufzeigt, die von einer jungen Mittelschicht, die häufig in Universitäten des Globalen Südens oder Globalen Nordens ausgebildet wurde, vorangetrieben wird. Eine Nischenökonomie, die auf die lokale Kultur zurückgreift und Elemente des globalen Managementdiskurses in den rezenten Unternehmensprojekten erfolgreich realisiert. Häufig sind dies kleine bis mittelgroße Unternehmen, die in den kommenden Jahren weitere Unternehmensgründungen nach sich ziehen werden, unterstützt durch die nationale Politik (DER im Senegal), aber auch die internationale Entwicklungskooperation (Afd). Die Feldstudien und Publikationen ManaGlobals (www.managlobal.hypotheses.org/) zeichnen ein Bild, das sich stark von dem der traditionellen Entwicklungssoziologie unterscheidet. Sie stellen junge UnternehmerInnen vor, die lokale und globale Elemente mit einer Arbeitsethik verbinden, die Erfolg verspricht und es ihnen erlaubt, zukunftsweisende Wege mit ihren Unternehmen im IT-Bereich, in Dienstleistungen bzw. im Kosmetikbereich einzuschlagen.

Like sociology and academic knowledge production in general, development sociology has been criticised for eurocentric stances and not adequately reflecting inherent power relations. Although these debates are often conducted in retrospect, and thus somewhat unfair, it is indispensable to include theoretical production from southern sociologies and related disciplines. However, a kind of mere recount of southern theoretical approaches or use of buzzwords is not enough, being actually often a superficial appropriation of concepts without proper reflection of broader meanings and inherent logics. An example is the use of Spivaks reflections on the subalterns’ positions, continuously apprehended in a distortioned manner.

Here we can retake development sociology’s stance to be aware of how theory production is linked to specific social contexts and embedded in empirical insights often based in the everyday presence of specific phenomena (an example being southern approaches to diversity and/or to the position of persons living in “in between situations”), highlighting the importance of an exchange between different perspectives from diverse backgrounds and social positions. This can be mutually enriching, if the respective epistemological backgrounds are taken into account.

However, we have to be aware of common traps like essentialism or fundamentalist views in a juxtaposition with external perspectives, accused of being per se eurocentric and positivist. Hence we should revisit classical elements of development sociology, as well as considering classic works and newer contributions by southern thinkers.

This can enable the production of pluriversalistic, probably transmodern, theoretical approaches to (globally entangled) processes of social change taking into account diversities, colonial legacies etc., thus fostering the creation of shared perspectives based on the acceptance of diverse knowledge systems, enhancing the communication between different epistemologies. For northern development sociology, this offers an opportunity to overcome our own epistemological captivity. Hence development sociology can create an overarching space for sound theorising, taking into account approaches and perspectives from different parts of the world and from diverse social positions or lugares da fala (loci of enunciation).

As the extractivist model of organizing space, political structures, and social relations pushes commodity frontiers further, resistance among local populations is growing in response to the deterioration of socio-natural environments and livelihoods (Chagnon et al. 2022; Bebbington & Bury 2013). Environmental justice movements worldwide mobilize against the making of new frontiers and the proliferation of extractivism (Kröger 2020; Conde & Le Billon 2017), yet scholarly focus remains centered on regions shaped by European colonization, particularly in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

This paper contributes to political ecological research by examining environmental justice resistance in the previously understudied post-Soviet region, focusing on the highly contested gold mining project at Amulsar Mountain in Armenia. Although gold frontier-making at Amulsar has been ongoing for nearly two decades, extraction has not begun, due not least to sustained resistance. Emerging with the start of mine construction, the movement has evolved into a heterogenous coalition of local residents and environmental NGOs, employing a wide range of strategies and tactics — from blockades and direct action to pressure on financial institutions and building solidarities with other civic initiatives.

The paper pursues two objectives. First, it compares the Amulsar movement to forms of environmental justice activism as theorized by political ecologists, including their strategies and the development alternatives they promote. This would situate the Armenian movement within the global map of environmental justice struggles. Second, the paper contextualizes this resistance within Armenia’s broader history of civic mobilization, including its relationship with the liberal-democratic movement that led to the 2018 Velvet Revolution — a political transformation that scholars interpret as signaling authoritarian decline (Broers, Ohanyan, 2021).

Overall, this paper will shed light on the specificities of resistances to extractivism in former Soviet countries.

Between the provincialization of Eurocentric development paradigms which global scholars calls and the practice of China’s state-led industrial transition, remains inadequate theorization of the Global South agency in reconstructing the industrial transition. While German frameworks which emphasize technological innovation and civic participation in the transition works, the role of local factors like socialist legacies, techno-politics negotiation is neglected to some extent, where this paper addresses the gap. How does the production of local knowledge in Wuhan’s (an important industrial city in the Central part of China) industrial transition, with the assumptions of transition theories from the Global North, especially the model of Ruhr Valley? This paper proposes to the non-linear logic of industrial transition beyond the Eurocentric modernity. Combined ethnography, life-history interviews of workers and discourse analysis of polices and other archives in Wuhan, the mixed methods represent different layers or polyvocal narratives of industrial transition in Wuhan, where the industrial symbiosis contrasts with the Eco-restructuring modernization of Ruhr. The study preliminarily finds that, local knowledge and discourses from the Global South contributes to an indigenization narrative of industrial transition involving indigenized tacit knowledge and the resilience among state, market and society; and the socialist legacies (unit system) sustained the social cohesion in the industrial transition, contrasting with the individual prioritization in the Germen models of Ruhr. The study attempts to provincialize the theory of Eurocentric industrial transition through theorizing a case from the Global South, in order to challenge hierarchical epistemologies, inform Sino-German dialogues on global transition and ‘Industry 4.0’, and contribute to the future research on the transnational knowledge hierarchies in technology adoption and indigenization.