Papers by Stefanie Mauksch
Anthropology of Work Review, 2025
The transition to industrial regimes has produced new categories of people deemed "unfit" for lab... more The transition to industrial regimes has produced new categories of people deemed "unfit" for labor. Even if these boundaries are more porous nowadays, contributions to this Special Issue reveal continuities in how people struggle for a place in domains of work that are ill-shaped to accommodate their diverse bodyminds. Drawing on disability/chronicity cases from India, Germany, Mexico, Turkey, Brazil/Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States, authors in this issue study how people navigate and reshape the boundaries between labor, care, and recognition. Based on these insights, this introduction calls for scholarly engagement with visions of work as they emerge from what Faye Harrison calls ex-centric sites, i.e., viewing the margins of normative labor regimes as analytical loci for knowledge creation. We consider work not only in the context of how capitalist and biomedical systems produce debilitation and moral distinction but also as a transformative sphere, irreducible to predominant categories of employment and productivity. Bridging between medical/disability anthropology, critical disability studies, and the anthropology of work, we call for an expansive understanding of work and theory-building from neglected positionings within labor economies.
Organization, Feb 8, 2023
Social enterprises play an increasing role in providing employment opportunities for disabled peo... more Social enterprises play an increasing role in providing employment opportunities for disabled people. This paper examines the implications of social enterprises’ market-based approach to disability inclusion, which is characterized by viewing disability as an asset rather than a limitation. Taking our inspiration from critical disability scholars who have pointed out that inclusion agendas produce disability as a distinct social reality, we use a performative lens to examine how social enterprises variously “do disability,” for instance, by defining where the potentials of disabled people lie and how best to promote them. Drawing on an ethnographic study of Magic Fingers, a Nepal-based enterprise that employs blind people as massage therapists, we identify entrepreneurial “doings” of disability that were guided by ideals of empowerment but that ultimately produced new and subtle forms of exclusion. By closely examining the case organization’s founding phase, as well as its practices of advertising, recruitment, and day-to-day management, we show how Magic Fingers commodified disability in novel ways, reinforced the notion of disability as a negative condition that must be “overcome” through work, and introduced new market-oriented evaluative distinctions between “more able” and “less able” disabled individuals. By exploring and evaluating these effects, this paper draws attention to the ways in which social enterprises, while challenging deficit-oriented representations of disability, can paradoxically solidify disability as something profoundly “other.”
Disability & Society, 2021
In this article, I investigate how social enterprises identify the talents of groups of disabled ... more In this article, I investigate how social enterprises identify the talents of groups of disabled people and match them to a market demand. Through the study of a blind massage enterprise in Nepal, I undo the workings of an ambivalent form of entrepreneurship that presents disabled people as gifted. I explore shifts that evolve from the selective inclusion of individuals based on stereotyped qualities associated with their bodily condition-in this case, blindness and an exceptional sense of touch. While the therapists cultivated tropes of overcoming, they also used their elevated social position to engage in new forms of imagining that transcended negative framings of blind people in Nepal. The case invites a nuanced critique of selective integration that considers how individuals redistribute their gained advantages at a collective level. My research produces knowledge on inclusive employment in the Global South, illustrating how entrepreneurial interventions impact on perceptions of disability.
Routledge Companion to Anthropology and Business, 2020
This review chapter engages with ethnographic conceptions of “the event” (as a public performance... more This review chapter engages with ethnographic conceptions of “the event” (as a public performance) held in the two disciplines of Anthropology and Organization Studies. What is it that marks events as distinct from the everyday? What do scholars hope to learn when studying trade fairs, religious rituals or management meetings? How do these occasions relate to broader social and organizational contexts? Such comparative view on the question “what is an event” reveals that scholars across these disciplines divergently frame events as (1) as windows into society, (2) as agentic tools, (3) as global forms, (4) as spaces of practice, and/or (5) as processes. My aims with this chapter are two-fold. First, the review carves out deeper assumptions and epistemological premises behind different ways of “seeing” events. Such reflexivity on a particular stance towards events is crucial for attending to the worldview that it carries within itself. Second, the chapter enables interdisciplinary dialogue by developing insight into interlinkages between certain historical moments in the Anthropology of Events and contemporary philosophical treatments of events in Organization Studies, such as viewing events as representations, as reflexive spaces, or as hidden power games. The chapter thus draws attention to parallels in lines of thinking about events and renders these philosophies more open to comparison, critique and reflection.
Organization, 2016
This article sheds light on public performances as important yet neglected sites for social entre... more This article sheds light on public performances as important yet neglected sites for social entrepreneurship's discursive expansion as a fashionable model for social transformation. It approaches the strategic considerations behind presentations aimed at 'enchanting' social entrepreneurship through sophisticated investments in spiritual, aesthetic and bodily involvement, and the impressive staging of Muhammad Yunus as a global hero. On a first analytical layer, these ethnographic insights broaden the explanatory basis for social entrepreneurship's rising popularity. In academic literature, its recent prominence is either accepted as a given fact or critically explored through the theoretical lens of language effects, while modes of conviction that invest in the 'extra-textual' are largely ignored. Addressing this gap, the article portrays how organisational actors charged presentations with aesthetic significance, emotional fervour, spiritual dynamism and sensual pleasure to produce holistic experiences that allow people to connect the concept of social entrepreneurship to a felt sense of being-in-the-world. On a second layer, the analysis problematises the enchantment debate's tendency to construct a secular–spiritual binary, that is, to perceive enchantment as arising either from powerful acts of managerial manipulation or from a deeply human desire to fill a religious void. Complicating this distinction, the article frames enchantment work in the social entrepreneurship field as an ambiguous 'dance' between the secular and the sacred—a paradoxical activity of amalgamating neo-rational considerations with the spiritualised pursuit of a global vision.
Handbook of Economic Anthropology
In response to the failure of capitalism to serve all people’s needs, we witness a rise of talk o... more In response to the failure of capitalism to serve all people’s needs, we witness a rise of talk of ethics in the corporate world and a growing movement for alternative economic practices. This chapter is concerned with anthropological responses to emerging trends in economic “ethicizing” by which actors codify, advocate or implement particular sets of ethics to create positive change. Ethicists develop agendas for improvement and realize new principles of production, work, trade and consumption. Anthropologists study the motivations and ideologies of ethicists, their embodied practices, and the social, material and political effects they produce. This strand of research complements anthropology’s concern with moral economies by engaging with fields of action in which ethics describe a professional category and specialized domain rather than a quotidian morality. The chapter focuses on three fields of inquiry into ethical practices: CSR and fair trade, ethical consumption, and social entrepreneurship.
Social Entrepreneurship: An Affirmative Critique , 2018
In this chapter I suggest a shift in the empirical-analytical perspective towards an in-depth eng... more In this chapter I suggest a shift in the empirical-analytical perspective towards an in-depth engagement with the ways in which social entrepreneurial ideals and the formation of subjects are enacted within and through human action and encounter. This alternative critical operation understands social entrepreneurship as a socially situated and temporarily renewable process of identification. To illustrate this envisioned shift in attention towards performative practices that create emergent identities, I ground my analysis in an ethnographic study of social business events as spaces in which a particular social entrepreneurial vision is staged and rendered accessible, and gains appeal as a realisable approach. Collective social business performances, as I show here, render obsolete the distinction between discourse and subject, because they constitute a mode of practice that simultaneously signifies and (bodily) enacts social entrepreneurial ideals. Formats like competitions, pitches, workshops, start-up weekends, global gatherings, and consultancies emerge from this study as important, yet neglected, stationary points on the road to becoming social entrepreneurs.
Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, Nov 2014
This article examines the role of anthropological research in highly reflective development setti... more This article examines the role of anthropological research in highly reflective development settings. What is the character of fieldwork among policy makers and entrepreneurs, who wish to improve the economic position of poor people through the implementation of welfare or empowerment programs? In this text, we analyze research dialogues between anthropologists and development experts from India and Nepal and the paradoxes, moral predicaments, structural contradictions, and practical improvisations they articulate. Thereby, we unpack processes of shared sense-making between researchers and research subjects, and show how dialogue produces new insights about social practice and feeds back into the recursive remaking of social worlds. We conclude about those cultural practices through which development professionals navigate between constructing meaning and implementing policy as intersecting activities that shape emerging futures.
Social Enterprise Journal, 2017
As a critical and intimate form of inquiry, ethnography remains close to lived realities and equi... more As a critical and intimate form of inquiry, ethnography remains close to lived realities and equips scholars with a unique methodological angle on social phenomena. This long editorial explores the potential gains from an increased use of ethnography in social enterprise studies. We develop the argument through a set of dualistic themes, namely (1) the socio-economic dichotomy and (2) the discourse/practice divide as predominant critical lenses through which social enterprise is currently examined, and suggest shifts (3) from visible leaders to invisible collectives and (4) from case study-based monologues to dialogic ethnography.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2020
Africans were persistently pathologized as a collective body that was assimilated to a disease ec... more Africans were persistently pathologized as a collective body that was assimilated to a disease ecology, both requiring large-scale management. In the Dutch East Indies, a witty and unconventional sociological investigation of Indo-Europeans revealed the paradoxical and contradictory ways in which perceptions of status, poverty, and interaction were layered into the racialization of porous and shifting 'groups'. Jean-Paul Bado (chap. 5) also suggests that an implicit racialization of cancer as 'White' long impeded its visibility among 'Black Africans'. Chapter 2, by Antje Kühnast, which is set in German Nauru under 'company administration', and chapter 3, by Jean Mitchell, which follows entomological malaria research in the New Hebrides in the 1920s and during the Second World War, reflect on just how tightly demands for labour were woven into the racialization of the vitality and vulnerability of indigenous and migrant workers. Chapters 6 and 7, by, respectively, Maria Letícia Galluzzi Brizzo and Barbara M. Cooper, look -more closely than other essays -at how norms (racialized, gendered, and associated with specific forms of productive labour) not only generated epistemological categories of difference, but also legitimized embodied inequalities, such as the lower calorie consumption among Asians, and the spatial and gendered distribution of malnutrition in French West Africa. These four chapters also demonstrate how 'experts' skilfully manipulated categories of difference to avoid addressing structural inequalities head-on. While clearly suggesting that material and political inequalities resulted in variations in health, the authors might have more explicitly reflected on how such embodied inequalities were not only justified but also materially (re)produced as a result of the deployment of racial and cultural categories. As emphasized in the introduction, the volume also coheres around a methodological thread: a close attention to documentary practices as generative of ideas and materializations of distinction. This thread is clearest in Samuël Coghe's essay on medical demography in interwar Angola (chap. 8), exploring how the production of aggregate figures modulated debates on responsibility for, and intervention into, infant mortality and fertility. The volume closes in this vein with a brief and characteristically elegant afterword by Warwick Anderson on racial paper trails.
South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Jan 1, 2015
Sammlungsinstitutionen im 21. Jahrhundert, 2000
Social Enterprise Journal, 8(2), Aug 2012
""Purpose – This paper aims to contribute a qualitative analysis of practitioners' accounts to il... more ""Purpose – This paper aims to contribute a qualitative analysis of practitioners' accounts to illuminate alternative approaches to social enterprise that tend to be neglected by predominant academic representations.
Design/methodology/approach – By analysing qualitative interviews, the paper examines the ways social entrepreneurs in Germany coproduce and reproduce the prevailing theoretical notions of social enterprise. The main themes of the interviews are elaborated upon to accentuate certain critical aspects that until now have not been the focus of attention in research. Alternative perspectives of the empirical data are developed which indicate patterns that are currently excluded from narrative practices of academia.
Findings – There are several insightful perspectives represented in the interview data: the (conspicuous) absence of managerialism as a dominant motivational feature; the complexity of the local political and social realm in which social entrepreneurs think and act in spontaneous, often “non-rational” ways; and personal and biographical accounts of social entrepreneurs as an important self-defining feature. The findings demonstrate the explanatory power of qualitative empirical accounts as a starting point to veer away from reductionist drawing-board concepts of social enterprise.
Originality/value – These articulations of social entrepreneurs' own realities are important as they are sometimes at odds ideologically with managerial approaches to social enterprise which emphasize cost-efficiency reasoning and financial independence.""
Journal of Social Entrepreneurship, 2020
The term ‘social innovation’ has come to gather all manner of
meanings from policymakers and poli... more The term ‘social innovation’ has come to gather all manner of
meanings from policymakers and politicians across the political
spectrum. But while actors may unproblematically unite around a
broad perspective of social innovation as bringing about (positive)
social change, we rarely see evidence of a shared vision for the
kind of social change that social innovation ought to bring about.
Taking inspiration from methods that recognise the utopian thinking
inherent in the social innovation concept, we draw upon Erik
Olin Wright’s concept of ‘real utopias’ to investigate the moral
underpinnings inherent in the public statements of Ashoka, one
of the most prominent social innovation actors operating in the
world today. We seek to animate discussion on the moral principles
that guide social innovation discourse through examining
the problems that Ashoka is trying to solve through social innovation,
the world they are striving to create, and the strategies
they propose to realise their vision.
Business & Society, 2014
In recent years, the public sector in many countries has had difficulty keeping abreast of social... more In recent years, the public sector in many countries has had difficulty keeping abreast of social problems due to restricted financial resources and limited organizational capacities. As a consequence, entrepreneurs have started to address social welfare issues that the public sector has been unable to tackle with an innovative approach called social enterprise. The authors present research on the future prospects of social enterprise as a sustainable business model for industrialized countries. As there is a lack of historical and current data, the authors aim to contribute to and structure the debate about the potential of the concept. Therefore, the authors provide initial data from a Delphi survey on the future development of social enterprise in a multistakeholder environment. Experts from academia, business, nongovernmental and governmental organizations, social enterprise investors, and social entrepreneurs evaluated 16 projections for the year 2030. Based on these results, the authors present comprehensive scenarios of four different possible developments of the future of social enterprise in Germany.
Contemporary Issues in Entrepreneurship Research, 2016
sin la crítica al concepto de "ciencia" (sobre todo el positivista) que tuvo lugar durante los añ... more sin la crítica al concepto de "ciencia" (sobre todo el positivista) que tuvo lugar durante los años anteriores a su eclosión. En este artículo nos hacemos eco de dos de sus formulaciones continentales más relevantes (K. Jaspers, M. Heidegger) para, a partir de la comprensión de su sentido, concluir que la bioética está llamada a ocupar el espacio que dicha crítica abre. Así, a consideración de una razón más plural y comprometida con los profundos motivos antropológicos y existenciales que animan las preguntas del saber, también el científico, se alza casi como un imperativo para su futuro.
Drafts by Stefanie Mauksch
Handbook of Economic Anthropology, 3rd Ed
In response to the failure of capitalism to serve all people's needs, we witness a rise of talk o... more In response to the failure of capitalism to serve all people's needs, we witness a rise of talk of ethics in the corporate world and a growing movement for alternative economic practices. This chapter is concerned with anthropological responses to emerging trends in economic "ethicizing" by which actors codify, advocate or implement particular sets of ethics to create positive change. Ethicists develop agendas for improvement and realize new principles of production, work, trade and consumption. Anthropologists study the motivations and ideologies of ethicists, their embodied practices, and the social, material and political effects they produce. This strand of research complements anthropology's concern with moral economies by engaging with fields of action in which ethics describe a professional category and specialized domain rather than a quotidian morality. The chapter focuses on three fields of inquiry into ethical practices: CSR and fair trade, ethical consumption, and social entrepreneurship.
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Papers by Stefanie Mauksch
Design/methodology/approach – By analysing qualitative interviews, the paper examines the ways social entrepreneurs in Germany coproduce and reproduce the prevailing theoretical notions of social enterprise. The main themes of the interviews are elaborated upon to accentuate certain critical aspects that until now have not been the focus of attention in research. Alternative perspectives of the empirical data are developed which indicate patterns that are currently excluded from narrative practices of academia.
Findings – There are several insightful perspectives represented in the interview data: the (conspicuous) absence of managerialism as a dominant motivational feature; the complexity of the local political and social realm in which social entrepreneurs think and act in spontaneous, often “non-rational” ways; and personal and biographical accounts of social entrepreneurs as an important self-defining feature. The findings demonstrate the explanatory power of qualitative empirical accounts as a starting point to veer away from reductionist drawing-board concepts of social enterprise.
Originality/value – These articulations of social entrepreneurs' own realities are important as they are sometimes at odds ideologically with managerial approaches to social enterprise which emphasize cost-efficiency reasoning and financial independence.""
meanings from policymakers and politicians across the political
spectrum. But while actors may unproblematically unite around a
broad perspective of social innovation as bringing about (positive)
social change, we rarely see evidence of a shared vision for the
kind of social change that social innovation ought to bring about.
Taking inspiration from methods that recognise the utopian thinking
inherent in the social innovation concept, we draw upon Erik
Olin Wright’s concept of ‘real utopias’ to investigate the moral
underpinnings inherent in the public statements of Ashoka, one
of the most prominent social innovation actors operating in the
world today. We seek to animate discussion on the moral principles
that guide social innovation discourse through examining
the problems that Ashoka is trying to solve through social innovation,
the world they are striving to create, and the strategies
they propose to realise their vision.
Drafts by Stefanie Mauksch