Papers presented by Daniel Wadhwani since 2019

2024 Providence, Rhode Island

"Reinventing Social Impact: The Evolution of Socially Oriented Finance in Modern America"

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Current research on social entrepreneurship and impact investing typically traces the rise of social mission-driven organizing and investing to the 1980s. In doing so, it not only paints an ahistorical picture of socially motivated enterprise, but a decontextualized one as well. It does so because it fails to account for how the changing forms and meaning of such actives reflect shifting social expectations of enterprise more broadly. This paper addresses this problem by examining how forms of socially oriented finance evolved over the twentieth century, contextualizing these forms within the broader structure of the American financial system. In particular, we examine three waves of investment-oriented social activism during three periods of significant social reform: (a.) limited dividend funds and investment funds that avoided “sin stocks” during the Progressive Era; (b.) shareholder activism during the liberationist movements of the 1960s and 1970s; and (c.) impact investing as a response to neoliberalism and welfare state reform in the late twentieth century. We use annual reports, regulatory records, and the publications of financial journalists to examine the assumptions and values underlying these forms of socially oriented action. Our preliminary findings based in initial research emphasize the way in which contemporary impact investing increasingly treats social mission driven finance as a unique asset class, effectively reenforcing the assumptions of shareholder capitalism. The paper aims to contribute both to a growing conversation about social entrepreneurship among business historians (Wong and McGovern 2022, Maclean, Shaw, and Harvey, 2022) and to a growing interest in critically examining the contexts and assumptions of social entrepreneurship and impact investing among management researchers (Dacin, Dacin, and Tracey 2011; Ranville and Barros 2021; Mulloth and Rumi, 2022).

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2023 Detroit, MI, United States

"Ordered Informality: The Economy of Begging in Northwest China"

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Chinese society is structured along a historical urban-rural divide. In the early history of the People’s Republic of China (1950s-1980s), the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cleaved society into two halves— the rural-agricultural and the urban-industrial— and erected institutional barriers to mobility between them. Rural people were deliberately locked in the resource-poor countryside and institutionally constrained from accessing economic opportunities in the cities. However, as actors developed strategies to navigate these controls, new patterns of informal mobility emerged and gave rise to spontaneous orders. Based on a five-year mixed-method study of begging in contemporary Northwest China, this article explores the begging economy as a spontaneous order that emerged from the behaviors of groups of informal actors but not from their conscious designs. Drawing upon a diverse set of data including ethnographic observations, interviews with more than 200 begging people, and a geospatial survey of begging incomes in the city of Xi’an, the article examines the patterned informal behaviors of marginalized rural citizens who creatively circumvent state control to generate incomes through begging. We show in the article that the economy of begging is a well-coordinated spontaneous order on three different spatial scales: national-level, city-level, and neighborhood-level. At the national-level we draw on demographic survey data to show that the economy of begging consists predominantly of farmers from the most impoverished parts of rural China, who circumvent the household registration system to travel to cities to beg in the agricultural off-season. At the city-level, we use our geospatial survey and interview data to demonstrate that begging involves a daily commute from affordable informal accommodations in the outskirts of the city to the city center, where income-generation potential is highest. At the neighborhood level, we describe through ethnographic observations how begging people periodically relocate themselves to evade police violence and detention.

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2023 Detroit, MI, United States

"Welcome"

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Welcome

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2022 Mexico City

"The Moral Valence of Educational Technology in Historical Perspective"

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Technology-enabled entrepreneurship in higher education today is often justified based on claims that it will expand access to education and eliminate inequities in the learning process. But evaluating claims about future consequences of current innovation is impossible. We therefore turn to the history of how education entrepreneurs capitalized new communications technologies and the consequences of these ventures for the long-term development of higher education. We examine three previous technological innovations – the advent of inexpensive printing and distribution through the mail in the 19th century; the introduction of educational radio and television in the mid-20th century, and the rise of the internet in the early 21st century. For each, we consider how the entrepreneurial imaginations of each venture critiqued the status quo in higher education and explore the moral consequences of these ventures on equity and justice in two distinct ways: first, we trace how these new technologies broadened access to higher education for minoritized groups previously excluded from higher education. Second, we explore how these technologies shaped discourse about the means and ends of learning in higher education. We find that, despite their implicit and explicit moral critiques of the status quo, the moral valence of educational technology as emancipatory and liberatory is ambivalent and historically contingent. In other words, the moral consequences of educational technology innovation do not follow from the entrepreneurial imaginations underpinning their founding. Rather, the moral consequences of any adopted educational technology innovation depend on four intersecting historically contingent mediators: the state, through regulation and public policy; the market, through competition within and outside higher education; the academy, for institutional legitimacy and administrative support; and the inequitable ‘pre-existing conditions’ of the social structure. Building from these cases, we offer insights for the contemporary study of educational technology that could illuminate the issues raised through our historical analysis.

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2020 Charlotte, North Carolina

"Producing Entrepreneurs: The Paradox of Entrepreneurship Education in the United States and Germany, 1800-2015"

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Historians and historical social scientists have long emphasized the role of knowledge creation and dissemination in the entrepreneurial process (Cole, 1959; Casson, 2010). Yet, little research has examined how exactly entrepreneurs are “educated” and how educational content, programs, and institutions have changed over time. Extant histories were produced by management scholars focused narrowly on the rapid rise of entrepreneurship classes and programs at American business schools since the 1980s, and adopts a strong “Whig” interpretation on the progress of the field (Katz, 2003; Kuratko, 2005). In this paper we take a longer and broader view of entrepreneurship education, considering its development in the United States and Germany since the early nineteenth-century. We consider the development of courses and programs not only in business schools but also by publishers and other media, business associations, and governments. Our sources include book and magazine publications focused on teaching entrepreneurs both the skills and ethos of entrepreneurship, the archives of several US and German business associations, catalogs and syllabi from business schools, and oral histories. We argue that the evolution of entrepreneurship education has been shaped by a central paradox: while entrepreneurial knowledge and skill was greatly valorized as a cornerstone of capitalist culture, entrepreneurial education often lacked legitimacy because of its seemingly unscientific and uncodified character. This was especially true in universities and business schools that prized expert knowledge and distinct domains of epistemology above learning that was highly subjective, stubbornly non-disciplinary, and that failed to fit the classifications of the labor market. Yet, because there was demand and profit in producing entrepreneurs, a variety of organizations and institutions jockeyed for position in selling entrepreneurship education to meet distinct pecuniary or strategic needs.

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