Pilot Project B - Entrepreneurial Citizenship

Pilot Project B:
Entrepreneurial Citizenship:
New Economies and the Respatialisation of Citizenship in China, India, and Europe
Funding period: 2014-2016

Principal Investigators:

Prof. Dr. Sabine Hess (Institute for Cultural Anthropology/ European Ethnology, University of Göttingen).
Prof. Dr. Srirupa Roy (Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen).
Prof. Dr. Peter van der Veer (Max Planck Institute for Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen).

Project Summary

Two key themes of "the new economy” and "the new citizen,” have anchored the idea of newness and shaped the "politics of the new” in different historical periods. This project will investigate discourses and practices of a new (neoliberal) economy, particularly those of enterprise / entrepreneurship, are reshaping structures, ideals and spaces of citizenship across the globe in the contemporary historical conjuncture. The specific focus is on how the growing symbolic and material prominence of the "entrepreneurial citizen” has respatialised relations of power and sovereignty in three different regional configurations of new economic order: the "emerging markets” of India and China and the "restructuring economies" of Europe.

In the wake of recent transformations in global capitalism and geopolitical order, the ideal of the national citizen-worker that shaped nationalist ideologies and guided the formation of social policy in these three regions since at least the middle of the twentieth century has been replaced by a new model of entrepreneurial citizenship. To what end? What are the political and social consequences, costs and opportunities of the entrepreneurial citizenship model? What are the political technologies and rationalities that it draws upon and realizes, ranging from policy interventions to cultural-ideological formations? What are the spatial politics and spatial implications of entrepreneurial citizenship: how does it reconfigure relations between state, territory and citizen; how does it rework national and regional expressions of state sovereignty? These are the research questions that inform our collaborative project.

Departing from existing scholarship on the individualizing effects and intentions of entrepreneurial ideologies and projects—the widely held view that enterprise capitalism promotes "possessive individualism"—we examine instead how contemporary entrepreneurial projects in India, China, and Europe constitute a "New Social” in which relations between states and citizens and among citizens, and the spaces of state sovereignty and citizenship, are restructured in novel and often unexpected ways.

Our preliminary research leads us to speculate that entrepreneurial citizenship is enabling the emergence and consolidation of a distinctive phenomenon of "market statism” across diverse world regions. Drawing upon the anthropologists Comaroff and Comaroff's discussion of “millennial capitalism” in contemporary Africa (2001), where capitalism and its agents are invested with the salvational power to restore and renew impoverished and war-torn societies (and to thus fulfill the failed promises of the postcolonial state to its citizens), we suggest that market institutions and agents are assuming state-like authority and prominence and the organization and reproduction of social order is increasingly secured by the visible hand of market intervention. In order to understand the phenomenon of "markets (and market actors) acting like states,” project researchers will examine the different ways in which free-market capitalism and other vectors of the new economy are routinely hailed as the solution to national, social problems: i.e. how the promise of entrepreneurship and the new economic order is configured in social rather than individual terms in India, China, Europe and Africa.

The project will examine the structural or programmatic as well as practical or lived dimensions of entrepreneurial citizenship, mapping in fact the alliances and disjunctures between citizenship as project and as practice. "Citizenship as a project” will be studied through a focus on two distinct but related policy/political arenas that are central to defining and delimiting the bounds and content of citizenship: migration policy and "anti-poverty” social policy (also described as "inclusive growth” policies). Thus migration policy through its delineation of inside/outside or citizen/foreigner determines who is the bearer of citizenship rights (and where such rights can be exercised), while social policy determines the content and meaning of such rights. Anti- poverty policies with their focus on how to ensure essential subsistence and human dignity provide a further delineation or specification: they mark the bare minimum or the ground zero of citizenship on which more elaborate edifices of rights can be built. Together then, the foreigner and the poor mark the limits of citizenship; the emergence of the "new citizen” can thus be understood by documenting the changing valence of these two political subjects.

Our preliminary research suggests that both migration policy and anti-poverty policies have been radically revised in recent years in India, China and Europe, around a new normative vision of the entrepreneurial citizen as the ideal citizen, and entrepreneurship as the dominant modality of citizen formation. Researchers will examine these new visions of citizenship in close detail, focusing in particular on the policy regimes that introduce and implement projects of "slum enterprise” and "migrant entrepreneurialism”. The latter implies not so much the phenomenon of burgeoning "migrant entrepreneurs” in host countries, but the emergence of a new regime of enterprise-promoting migration policy that mobilizes diasporas and reshapes labour markets and relations within and across nation-states (thus, the opening of EU labour agencies in African countries). The specific focus will be on how the idea of the entrepreneurial citizen works to reshape and restructure state sovereignty, whether (1) through the elevation of "the market” as a state-like formation in terms of its "sacral power” or legitimacy and influence over the form and experience of citizenship; and (2) through the production of new spaces, transregional/transnational as well as sub-national, where the command of the national territorial state is reworked, suspended, or even rejected.

The second part of the project will explore the practices of entrepreneurial citizenship, or how the various anti-poverty and migration policy formations mapped by the project are actually produced and engaged with by individuals and social groups. Here, we are interested in seeing how the expectations of entrepreneurial citizenship are extended, modified, and reversed "on the ground.” To this end, researchers will conduct ethnographic and sociological studies of the different kinds of "entrepreneurial agency” that have been enabled by the new entrepreneurial policy formations of migration and poverty alleviation/inclusive growth (for e.g. the "micro-lender” and the "migrant labour contractor”).

The overall research design is comparative, whereby we grasp the complexities of global processes through examining their specific manifestations in different regional contexts. Thus, we expect to find similarities as well as differences across the projects and practices of entrepreneurial citizenship in India, China, and Europe. The excitement as well as the challenge of our trans-regional project is to pay attention to both, and to develop a theory of entrepreneurial citizenship that is neither assimilationist nor incommensurable.


Postdoctoral Projects

Nellie Chu, CETREN Postdoctoral Fellow
Risks and Desires: The Making of Transnational Migrant Entrepreneurialism in Guangzhou, China

The contemporary post-Cold War period has witnessed the intensification of China’s participation in the global capitalist economy. China’s rise to economic prominence has sparked scholarly debates on the history and future of transnational capitalism. Specifically, diverse groups of scholars in sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, and geography have begun to address China’s roles in bridging the post-colonial and post-socialist worlds through financial investments, as well as migration and trading strategies initiated by the Chinese people across the global south. Their insights into these south-south linkages have challenged conceptualizations of culture and nation-states as bounded and discrete entities. They emphasize the connections of people and objects across geographically distant places.

My research draws from these analytic inquiries in order to explore the transformations of post-socialist factory spaces, relations of labor, and entrepreneurial identities in China as the nation increasingly draws links along the transnational chains of commodity production and exchange. Specifically, my CETREN-funded project is a comparative study on how Senegalese, Nigerian, and Korean non-elite migrant entrepreneurs who live and work in Guangzhou serve as the intermediary links through which the global commodity chains for fast fashion articulate with China’s post-socialist transformations of urban spaces and social relations of labor. Their business activities in Guangzhou deserve scholarly attention, because they have redefined the terms of trade between China and the post-colonial world. They are also increasingly determining the speed, routes, and means through which people and commodities move across national boundaries. For example, shortly before the opening of China’s markets to foreign investment in the late 1970s, traders from across Africa, East Asia, and the Middle East relied on British colonial ties with Chinese and Indian contractors and outsourced suppliers in Hong Kong in order to obtain China-made household goods, embroidered fabrics, and electronics that were made available at the historic Canton Fair.

Today, transnational migrant entrepreneurs from the global south have replaced these market intermediaries in Hong Kong by establishing direct relations with manufacturers on the Mainland and producing dynamic relations through cross-cultural market exchange. Many diasporic groups learn Mandarin Chinese, settle in Guangzhou, and establish familial ties there so as to bridge trans-regional networks of commodity trading. I argue that this cross-ethnic and historically specific convergence of diasporic commodity networks in Guangzhou produce trade relations among transnational migrants, which enable them to redefine for themselves the neoliberal ideals of freedom, risk, and entrepreneurship. In sum, this study asks: how have their direct encounters with China’s post-socialist city spaces and labor relations transformed their ideas of transnational entrepreneurship, which are increasingly defined by unequal relations of global commodity production and exchange? What kinds of cross-cultural collaborations or contestations have these transnational migrant entrepreneurs from the post-socialist and post-colonial worlds engendered?

My project is based on my dissertation research, which analyzes the fast fashion sector in Guangzhou. This industry that serves as an exemplary case study into how global commodity chains link and de-link various production and consumption networks across the globe. A study of fast fashion sheds light on precisely what it purports to deliver: that is, the constant and speedy supply of fashion objects and the rapid influx of new styles. The industry’s quick responses to consumers’ ever-changing demands have been mediated by multinational corporations which outsource manufacturing capacities and low-wage labor to countries across the Pacific Ocean, including China. Foreign direct investments and demands for low-cost labor have facilitated the mushrooming of small-scale enterprises throughout the coastal areas of China.

During my research, I have learned that the majority of these various participants are undocumented migrants from China’s lower-tiered cities and the countryside who operate alongside these corporate players. Across the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region of southeastern Guangdong, in particular, millions of migrants who have flooded Shenzhen and the surrounding Special Economic Zones (SEZ) during the initial years of economic reform have become small-scale entrepreneurs in their own right. With modest amounts of starting capital, they have gathered the technical skills and business acumen of “just in time” garment manufacturing processes from their bosses, many of whom are based in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Through their participation in the transnational links of fast fashion manufacture and exchange, migrant wage workers and entrepreneurs in Guangzhou have begun to forge ties with traders from Korea, Senegal, Nigeria, Russia, and Dubai. Collectively, the traders’ experiments in fast fashion exchange link and produce novel relations of trade. These practices predominantly entail the rapid turnover of cash-based, low volume, and small-scale production of designer-inspired fashions. The “just in time” delivery of fashion commodities, in many ways, mirror what observers describe as processes of flexible accumulation, or the speedy mobilizations of labor, land, and natural resources, for consumption and profit-making. These manufacturing processes, in turn, shape China’s post-socialist transformations in property ownership, commodity exchange, rural-urban relations, and experiences of factory labor.

In light of these developments, my research seeks to advance CETREN’s key inquiries under the broader theme, “The Politics of the New.” It does so by tracing the emergent figure of the transnational migrant entrepreneur within the context of fast fashion in China, a sector that relies on the constant turnover of new styles and fashion objects. By drawing on anthropological theories of temporality, commodity aesthetics, race, and place-making, I examine how transnational migrants situate their racial, gender, and class identifications within the city spaces of Guangzhou through their engagements with the consumer-driven linkages of fast fashion exchange. Specifically, I highlight the mutual construction of their temporal and spatial orientations, as well as their racial identifications in shaping how members of Guangzhou’s diasporic groups negotiate their cosmopolitan aspirations and senses of cultural belonging with their displacement or their feelings of being out of place.

Dr. Nellie Chu (2014-2016)
CETREN Postdoctoral Researcher in the project "Entrepreneurial Citizenship"
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Website
Email

Bio
Nellie Chu is a post-doctoral researcher in CETREN’s pilot program, “Entrepreneurial Citizenship.” As a cultural anthropologist from the University of California, Santa Cruz (2014), Nellie explores the intersection between culture and the economy within post-socialist contexts. Drawing from the subfields of economic anthropology and feminist anthropology, she examines how transnational commodity chains are created and linked through post-socialist transformations of city spaces, gendered labor, and worker identities. By pushing against theories of globalization and neoliberal governmentality that tend to homogenize market practices, her work emphasizes the diversity of people’s placed-based engagements with commodity production and exchange.

Her current book project, Anchors of Desire: The Crafting of Transnational Entrepreneurship in Southern China, draws from ethnographic research she conducted in Guangzhou from 2010-2012. There, she traced the emergence of migrant entrepreneurs within Guangzhou’s fast fashion sector as a case study into how Chinese citizens from the nation’s vast countryside attempted to become urbanized, desiring subjects through their experiments in fast fashion manufacture and trade. More broadly, her research analyzed the spatial and temporal dimensions of “the factory” within home-based workshops. There, workers’ experiences of labor refigured the politics of work that once served as sources of collective belonging. In the contemporary period, temporary factory workers saw their wage labor as intermediary stepping stones to becoming enterprising, self-employed agents.

Nellie’s new research project at CETREN investigates the role of transnational migrant entrepreneurs in linking the commodity chains of fast fashion in Guangzhou. She plans to trace the family and business relations of Korean, Nigerian, and Sengalese diasporic groups whose members live and work in Guangzhou. She examines how transnational migrants’ direct encounters with China’s post-socialist city spaces and labor relations transform their ideas of transnational entrepreneurship, which are increasingly defined by unequal relations of global commodity production and exchange. By observing these encounters, she analyzes the cross-cultural collaborations and contestations that these transnational migrant entrepreneurs from the post-socialist and post-colonial worlds have engendered.


Gerda Heck, CETREN Postdoctoral Fellow
Congolese Migration, Religion and Entrepreneurship

From 2010 to 2012, I investigated, within the scope of the international and interdisciplinary research project “Global Prayers – Redemption and Liberation in the City,“ the role of the new revival churches on the routes of migration. I conducted a multi-sited ethnographic research in Berlin (Germany), Kinshasa (DRC), Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), Istanbul (Turkey) and Paris (France). During my research particularly in Istanbul but also in Paris and Kinshasa, the entanglement of the religious and commercial, as well as the importance of the “suitcase trade” [1] in the establishment of local Congolese communities became apparent. Congolese traders from Kinshasa, but also from Johannesburg, Paris, Liverpool or Brussels, travel frequently to Istanbul and Guangzhou to buy garments or electronic devices. In the course of these travels, Congolese communities have been established in Guangzhou in recent years.

In “Flexible Citizenship” Aihwa Ong (1999) shows how individuals as much as governments create concepts of belonging, citizenship and sovereignty as strategies towards accumulating capital and power. Ong develops her concept on the situation of transnational wealthy Chinese families who distribute their business activities, domiciles and families depending on the requirements of global capital in Hong Kong, California, Canada or Australia. It might also be useful to apply Ong’s notion of citizenship to the situation of those who are using flexibility not as a means to accumulate capital, but also to survive, improve living conditions, and support their families.

Drawing on the concept of “flexible citizenship” I would like to analyze the ways in which Congolese migrants and traders in Guangzhou try to establish themselves locally but also in their respective cities of residence (in Europe or Africa) and gain rights. With my research on Congolese migrants in Guangzhou, I would be able to expand on my previous research on the Congolese diaspora. Furthermore, it would be an important contribution for migration studies, pointing to the fact that migration from Africa does not exclusively lead to European countries, but increasingly creating new migration routes across Latin-America, the Middle East as well as Asian countries.

[1] Suitcase trade is a term generally used to describe transnational unregulated and unregistered commerce.

Dr. Gerda Heck
CETREN Postdoctoral Researcher in the project "Entrepreneurial Citizenship"
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Heinrich-Düker-Weg 14, 37073 Göttingen, Germany
+49 (0)551 39 21246
Website
Email

Bio
Gerda Heck is a post-doctoral researcher in CETREN’s “Entrepreneurial Citizenship” project. Her main research interests are focused on migration and border regimes, urban studies, transnational migration, migrant networks, self-organizing, religion and new concepts of citizenship. She is a member of “kritnet ”, Network for Critical Migration- and Border- Regime Research (kritnet.org).

She received her PhD in Sociology in 2006. In her dissertation she discussed the phenomenon of undocumented immigration in Germany and the US, and mainly focused on the development of the migration regime in both states, the public discussion on the subject and the influencing thereof by relevant initiatives.

From 2006 until 2010 she conducted research in Morocco on the shifting of EU migration policy towards North African countries and the strategies of sub-Saharan migrants on the migration routes towards Europe. For this purpose she undertook several field research trips to Morocco as well as to the Spanish exclaves Ceuta and Melilla.

Within the scope of the international and interdisciplinary research project “Global Prayers – Redemption and Liberation in the City“ (http://globalprayers.info) she has been investigating since 2010 the role of the new revival church communities on the migration routes in different cities with regard to Congolese migration. To this end she conducted a multi-sited ethnographic research in Berlin (Germany), Istanbul (Turkey), Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of Congo), Paris (France) and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). In this research she showed how Congolese migrants establish themselves as Christians in the urban context on the migration routes: how transnational mobility, religious networks, religious belief, sacred spaces and informal economy are used by the migrants to establish themselves (temporarily) as sub-Saharan Christians in the various cities.

With her new research at CETREN she extends her previous work on the entanglement of the religious and commercial, as well as the importance of the “suitcase trade” within the Congolese diaspora. Drawing on the concept of “flexible citizenship” (Ong 1999), she will investigate the ways in which Congolese migrants and traders in Guangzhou try to establish themselves both locally and in their respective cities of residence (in Europe or Africa) and gain rights.