The DOI matches its Crossref record; 1 of the 1 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
THE JANUS FACE OF INSURANCE IN SOUTH AFRICA: FROM COSTS TO RISK, FROM NETWORKS TO BUREAUCRACIES
Abstract
This study examines the consequences of the rapid and unprecedented expansion of insurances for the poor in South Africa. Over the last ten years, South African insurance companies established a myriad of policies in order to incorporate the previously excluded, mostly African, poor and lower middle classes. While poverty, violence and AIDS put state institutions and social relations under pressure, insurances enable people to manage risks in hitherto unthinkable ways. The article examines the development of this new regime of risk as a Janus head, after the Roman god of opening and closing. At the heart of access to insurance were the incongruencies that were caused by the ‘translation’ of risk into the seemingly neutral concept of costs and the inability of brokers and intermediary organizations to navigate these translations successfully. Access to insurance – here not defined as having an insurance policy but as making a successful claim when confronted with the insured risk – was fraught with the contradictions of complex high-tech bureaucracies and the poor's social networks.
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“Once again, a reliance on strategies of copying, freeriding, eliminating competing informal players, and shifting costs and risks onto local agents and poor customers produces a form of frugality that looks more like adverse incorporation and accumulation by dispossession than complementarity or genuine inclusion (Bahre 2012;Da Costa 2013).”
From Cannibalizing the Informal Economy: Frugal Innovation and Economic Inclusion in Africa (2018) · cites this paper as Bahre 2012
In the citing paper
“It has also been noted that pressures to 'tap individual's social networks' for marketing goods through personal ties places growing stress on informal social support networks (Bahre 2012;Dolan and Scott 2009).”
From Cannibalizing the Informal Economy: Frugal Innovation and Economic Inclusion in Africa (2018) · cites this paper as Bahre 2012
In the citing paper
“In contrast to claims of complementarity, recent ethnographic studies of micro-insurance, micro-credit, and other branded products and services have highlighted the aggressive appropriation of social networks and informal institutions to access informal labour and consumer markets on the cheap, at little benefit to informal actors.”
From Cannibalizing the Informal Economy: Frugal Innovation and Economic Inclusion in Africa (2018) · cites this paper as Bahre 2012
In the citing paper
“Moreover, Bahre (2012) found that costs are often downloaded onto networks of local insurance agents, who work on commission and are required to pay for petrol and phone calls, while contracts and bureaucratic rules are used to limit space for representing the economic interests of agents or customers.”
From Cannibalizing the Informal Economy: Frugal Innovation and Economic Inclusion in Africa (2018) · cites this paper as Bahre 2012
In the citing paper
“Indeed, a downward flow of benefits is often checked by the use of formal contracts, bureaucratic complexities and other forms of corporate discipline to 'align incentives' and protect corporate profits (Bahre 2012;Dolan and Rajak 2016;Hietelahti and Nygren 2011).”
From Cannibalizing the Informal Economy: Frugal Innovation and Economic Inclusion in Africa (2018) · cites this paper as Bahre 2012
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Citations
Cites
Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism
(2001) · doi:10.1215/9780822380184 · Cited by 954
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Cited by
Cannibalizing the Informal Economy: Frugal Innovation and Economic Inclusion in Africa
Meagher, K. (2018) · The European Journal of Development Research · doi:10.1057/s41287-017-0113-4 · Cited by 175
Metadata
- Authors
- Bähre, E.
- Venue
- Africa
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Published
- 2012-01-19
- Volume
- 82
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 150-167
- ISSN
- 0001-9720
- 1750-0184
- Cited by
- 27
- References
- 1
- Language
- en
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
