Dialectic of control and emancipation in organizing for social change: a multitheoretic study of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh.

Dedicated to helping the poorest of the poor obtain the financial means to become productively self-employed, the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh is founded upon the belief that credit is a fundamental human right and that development should be measured according to the per capita income of the bottom 50% of the population. The bank provides collateral-free loans and social services for the poor, charging 20% interest on capital, all the while maintaining a 99% loan recovery rate. The bank has 1.9 million members, 94% of whom are women, and has successfully organized grassroots microenterprises for productive self-employment and social change. The authors use the coorientation, concertive control, and critical feminist theories to analyze the bank's programs in an effort to explain the dialectic between control and emancipation in organizing for social change. Examining the bank's organizational processes from multiple theoretical perspectives allows insights to be drawn about theory and praxis in organizing for social change. The Grameen Bank has effectively demonstrated that development is an organized process of education, environmentally sound productivity, and improvement in the quality of life for the poorest of the poor.

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