The DOI matches its Crossref record; 1 of the 1 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The 100th object: Solar lighting technology and humanitarian goods
Abstract
At the end of 2010, the British Museum unveiled the final artefact in their exhibition ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’: a portable solar-powered lamp designed for and sold to people living without access to mains electricity in Africa and Asia. Solar-powered lights have become iconic objects of social entrepreneurship in Africa and Asia and this article explores the work involved in producing them as humanitarian goods. Following the 100th object from its conception in a Stanford University classroom to points of sale and use in rural India, the article explores how it has been made to materialise both an ethic of care and an ethic of commercial interest. Drawing from traditions in the social study of technology and the conceptual vocabulary of Michel Callon, the author argues that the significance of objects like the ultra-affordable solar lamp lies in their capacity to make and define markets at the ‘bottom of the pyramid’.
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“The combination of chronic impermanence and lack of jobs is seen to open novel possibilities for the private sector to fill the void, offering consumable products in place of services or infrastructure (for example solar lamps instead of power lines) and entrepreneurial opportunities in place of jobs for those willing to sell them (Cross, 2013;Redfield, 2012;Dolan and Roll, 2013).”
From Remaking Africa’s Informal Economies: Youth, Entrepreneurship and the Promise of Inclusion at the Bottom of the Pyramid (2016) · cites this paper as Cross, 2013
In the citing paper
“Yet, alongside the commonplace fear of slums as a threat to social and political order, we find a contrary representation of informal settlements as sites of market opportunities, created precisely through their abandonment by formal development processes.”
From Remaking Africa’s Informal Economies: Youth, Entrepreneurship and the Promise of Inclusion at the Bottom of the Pyramid (2016) · cites this paper as Cross, 2013
In the citing paper
“BoP enterprises circulate objects of both moral and commercial value, ranging from portable water filtration systems, nutrition supplements, and cook stoves to cosmetics, shampoo and Coca-Cola (Cross, 2013).”
From Remaking Africa’s Informal Economies: Youth, Entrepreneurship and the Promise of Inclusion at the Bottom of the Pyramid (2016) · cites this paper as Cross, 2013
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Citations
Cites
Appadurai, A. (2006) · Public Culture · doi:10.1215/08992363-18-1-15 · Cited by 144
Research works printed but not linked: 35
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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
Dolan, C., & Rajak, D. (2016) · The Journal of Development Studies · doi:10.1080/00220388.2015.1126249 · Cited by 144
Rosenberg-Jansen, S. (2022) · Journal of Refugee Studies · doi:10.1093/jrs/feac026 · Cited by 21
(2022) · doi:10.1016/j.erss.2022.102779 · Cited by 21
Metadata
- Authors
- Cross, J.
- Affiliations
- University of Edinburgh, UK
- Venue
- Journal of Material Culture
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2013-08-21
- Volume
- 18
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 367-387
- ISSN
- 1359-1835
- 1460-3586
- Cited by
- 88
- References
- 1
- Language
- en
- Licence
- journals.sagepub.com/page/policies/text-and-data-mining-license (tdm)
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Data sources
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.
