TY - JOUR
T1 - ‘That’s Witchcraft’
T2 - community entrepreneuring as a process of navigating intra-community tensions through spiritual practices
AU - Cucchi, Carlo
AU - Lubberink, Rob
AU - Dentoni, Domenico
AU - Gartner, William B.
N1 - Funding Information:
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This paper was developed as part of the Organising business models for SMAllholder REsilience (OSMARE) project funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Partnerships for Scaling Climate-Smart Agriculture (P4S) Project. This work was implemented as part of the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS).
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2021.
PY - 2021/7/28
Y1 - 2021/7/28
N2 - This paper theorizes the spiritual processes of community entrepreneuring as navigating tensions that arise when community-based enterprises (CBEs) emerge within communities and generate socio-economic inequality. Grounded on an ethnographic study of a dairy CBE in rural Malawi, findings reveal that intra-community tensions revolve around the occurrence of ‘bad events’ – mysterious tragedies that, among their multiple meanings, are also framed as witchcraft. Community members prepare for, frame, cope and build collective sustenance from ‘bad events’ by intertwining witchcraft and mundane socio-material practices. Together, these practices reflect the mystery and the ambiguity that surround ‘bad events’ and prevent intra-community tensions from overtly erupting. Through witchcraft, intra-community tensions are channelled, amplified and tamed cyclically as this process first destabilizes community social order and then restabilizes it after partial compensation for socio-economic inequality. Generalizing beyond witchcraft, this spiritual view of community entrepreneuring enriches our understanding of entrepreneuring – meant as organization-creation process in an already organized world – in the context of communities. Furthermore, it sheds light on the dynamics of socio-economic inequality surrounding CBEs, and on how spirituality helps community members to cope with inequality and its effects.
AB - This paper theorizes the spiritual processes of community entrepreneuring as navigating tensions that arise when community-based enterprises (CBEs) emerge within communities and generate socio-economic inequality. Grounded on an ethnographic study of a dairy CBE in rural Malawi, findings reveal that intra-community tensions revolve around the occurrence of ‘bad events’ – mysterious tragedies that, among their multiple meanings, are also framed as witchcraft. Community members prepare for, frame, cope and build collective sustenance from ‘bad events’ by intertwining witchcraft and mundane socio-material practices. Together, these practices reflect the mystery and the ambiguity that surround ‘bad events’ and prevent intra-community tensions from overtly erupting. Through witchcraft, intra-community tensions are channelled, amplified and tamed cyclically as this process first destabilizes community social order and then restabilizes it after partial compensation for socio-economic inequality. Generalizing beyond witchcraft, this spiritual view of community entrepreneuring enriches our understanding of entrepreneuring – meant as organization-creation process in an already organized world – in the context of communities. Furthermore, it sheds light on the dynamics of socio-economic inequality surrounding CBEs, and on how spirituality helps community members to cope with inequality and its effects.
KW - Africa
KW - Community-based enterprises
KW - Entrepreneuring
KW - rural communities
KW - Spirituality
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85111527185&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/01708406211031730
DO - 10.1177/01708406211031730
M3 - Article
JO - Organization Studies
JF - Organization Studies
SN - 0170-8406
ER -