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...
