In recent years, disruption has become a buzzword in the world of business. Coming from Silicon Valley, information and communication technologies have disrupted everything from the way in which we hail a cab to how we book a holiday. In Julia Qermezi Huang's book, we encounter such disruption of development in rural Bangladesh. The ethnography traces the lives of iAgents—young women from poor villages who provide various kinds of services and information—and the effects of these new entanglements of people, organizations, and technologies.
Bangladesh has long served as a testing ground for NGO-led development programs. To Be an Entrepreneur offers a nuanced assessment of disruption in development through careful ethnographic attention. The iAgent model is expected to disrupt not only the practices of development, by bringing health and financial technologies to poor communities, but also social norms around gender. Against the expectations of empowered entrepreneurial workers, Huang shows how the young women working as iAgents must contend with relational work at home and work that is deeply embedded in existing hierarchies of power.
The book is divided into three parts, and each section is foregrounded with a narrative written by an iAgent. We are given insight into lives of three young women who detail their triumphs and struggles. These narratives structure and enliven the ethnography in a way that foregrounds the voices of the young women and their lives.
The first part of the book examines how the iAgent model disrupts existing ethical models. While it has enabled women to work outside the home, as Huang demonstrates in chapter 1, this has not led to radical empowerment. Even in their new employment, the young women have to manage relational obligations to family and extended networks. Ethical personhood for the iAgents was achieved not by market participation, but by how they “pursued their household's interests and fulfilled family roles” (p. 72).
In chapter 2, Huang explores how the young women confront the idea of “being digital” (p. 93). As Huang argues, being digital is not simply a matter of being online or technologically savvy, but of being a new, modern subject. Being digital, however, also affords the iAgents new ways to connect. In particular, we see how wrong-number friends—cases in which men call random phone numbers in the hope of meeting women—have given the young women alternative paths to marriage and relationships.
The second part of the book examines the practices of the iAgent model. Chapter 3 focuses on “market devices in the making and unmaking of entrepreneurs” (p. 130). The iAgent model is meant to empower poor women by turning them into social entrepreneurs. In practice, however, the young women and their families are drawn into new forms of indebtedness. As with other social businesses, including microfinance, the iAgent model expands the reach of capital through indebtedness, while foregrounding the narrative of the successful entrepreneur.
While iAgents are meant to collect income by providing various kinds of services or selling products, this is not done in socially empty contexts. In chapter 4, Huang shows how iAgents must navigate various forms of gendered and classed relationships in order to make money. From striking deals with local doctors to navigating kinfolk who make demands on their equipment, iAgents often find their position to be quite vulnerable and insecure.
The final part of the book zooms out to the institutions that structure the iAgents. Chapter 5 examines how middle-class projects in Bangladesh shape the practices and ideologies of NGOs such as Technological Innovation for Empowerment (TIE). Huang highlights the contested views of NGO urban elites and the more local organizations and workers by contrasting Adnan—the head of TIE—with Rohan, an iAgent leader. While for the former, “the dominant aesthetic of a social enterprise model was one of disconnection after initial investment,” the latter “viewed the network through an ethics of social work” (p. 202). Here the desire of an NGO elite like Adnan to be recognized in an international forum is pitted against the interests of Rohan, who seeks to be known locally. Yet these differences also tell of shifting patterns in NGO-based patronage politics, as new practices decenter the local middle classes from their positions of power and influence.
In the final chapter, Huang considers how the social enterprise is viewed by different actors, from foreign documentary makers to international companies looking for new channels to sell their products. Describing an event in which iAgents were introduced to these different foreign visitors, Huang shows how the concerns of the young women are often obscured through the demands of various representations: they must be seen as poor and vulnerable, while also empowered and market-savvy, with limited ability to shape their own narrative. In her ethnography, Huang's attention to these young women works to undo some of this erasure by focusing on their rich and complex lives and words.
