The failures of the socialist model, evidenced by high unemployment, have led France to reorient itself towards more enterprise creation. These entrepreneurial ventures require financing. However, bankers do not want to assume the high risk of newly created enterprises. Moreover, small...

The Information Age, with its new technologies, is accompanied by an accelerating shift in work relations, of which this article focuses on connectivity, interdependence and dynamism. Along with this change in relations, new ethical cultures and responsibilities are evolving at different levels:...

Over the past five years, “peer-to-peer†lending websites have become a new approach to mobilizing funds for on-lending to impoverished people in developing countries (microfinance) and domestic markets. In this paper, the authors review these developments and use the analytical lens...

International capital flows are constrained by a lack of complementary human capital, information asymmetries and transaction costs for small loan sizes. Extant research has provided a myriad of economic and cultural explanations of how microcredit has overcome these. Based on these, the paper...

Little work has been done in the conjunction of Microfinance and Religion. This paper explores the findings of the extant research. It then provides future research directions on a number of subjects within this broad area, available for researchers from a large number of fields: anthropology,...

Type of paper :Exploratory, descriptive, case studyObjectives: In the wake of the global crisis, the role of the financial markets is being questioned and new forms of social innovations focusing on stakeholder governance and cooperation are being experimented. This paper looks into one such...

The paper presents a social innovation as an innovative business model with new social relations and indicates a few short cases to indicate how a social problem was addressed by a social innovation by entrepreneurial actions by microfinance service providers. The cases are from microcredit,...

Slow money, or patient nurturing capital invested locally in food and basic industries, is a new term but an old notion. This paper examines the cases of the CIGALES clubs of microangels in France and the more recent case of the slow money alliance to ferret out the basic principles and...

Microequity may be the key to overcoming stress of micro entrepreneurs who are over-exposed to micro-credit. French microangels are willing to invest small amounts to help people start their own business and move out of poverty. The French microangels invest through syndication in...