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Over the past three decades, new off-grid electrification infrastructures – as micro-grids and other solar solutions – have moved from innovative initiatives, conducted by NGOs and private stakeholders, to a credible model promoted by international organizations for electrification of rural areas in developing countries. Multiple conditions support their spread: major technological advances in the field of renewable energies (panels, batteries), intensive Chinese industrial production allowing lower prices, institutional reforms in Africa including these solutions in major national electrification programmes, and, finally, an opening to the private sector as a supposed guarantee of the projects’ viability. However, while the development of this market calls for significant investments, a vast set of calculations and a strong “micro-capitalist” doctrine, all involved in their design, experts admit that a large proportion of projects hardly survive or even fail.

This chapter investigates these failures by exploring the ecology of such infrastructures, designed for “the poor.” It discusses “thinking infrastructures” in terms of longevity by focusing on economic failures risks. The authors argue that the ecology of the infrastructure integrates various economic conversions and exchanges chains expected to participate in the infrastructure’s functioning. By following energy access solutions for rural Africa in sub-regions of Senegal and Madagascar, from their political and technical design to their ordinary life, the authors examine the tensions and contradictions embedded within the scripts of balance supposed to guarantee their success.

Through the example of a “regulatory ranking” – an index produced with the aim to regulate the pharmaceutical market by pushing companies in the direction of providing greater access to medicine in developing countries – this chapter focuses on indexing and ranking as infrastructural processes which inscribe global problem spaces as unfolding actionable territories for market intervention. It foregrounds the “Indexal thinking” which structures and informs regulatory rankings – their aspiration to align the interests of different stakeholders and to entice competition among the ranked companies. The authors detail the infrastructural work through which such ambitions are enacted, detailing processes of infrastructural layering/collage and patchwork through which analysts naturalize/denaturalize various contested categories in the ranking’s territory. They reflect on the consequences of such attempts at reconfiguring global topologies for the problems these governance initiatives seek to address.

Indigenous-state relations in Chile are being reconfigured around a political rationality and productive logic of “calculative choice,” through the government-run participatory development program Programa Orígenes. Financed by the Chilean state and the Inter-American Development Bank, Orígenes is broadly designed to address productive development, bilingual education, health care, and public services in rural indigenous communities. The technologies of Orígenes include participatory planning, planning tables, and audit. I argue that bureaucrats and indigenous peoples who participate are subjected to subject-making technologies that are integral to a rationalizing and transformative neoliberal assemblage of legal and policy instruments and practices.

Social media stage online patterns of social interaction that differ remarkably from ordinary forms of acting, talking and relating. To unravel these differences, we review the literature on micro-sociology and social psychology and derive a shorthand version of socially-embedded forms of interaction. We use that version as a yardstick for reconstructing and assessing the patterns of sociality social media promote. Our analysis shows that social media platforms stage highly stylized forms of social interaction such as liking, following, tagging, etc. that essentially serve the purpose of generating a calculable and machine-readable data footprint out of user platform participation. This online stylization of social interaction and the data it procures are, however, only the first steps of what we call the infrastructuring of social media. Social media use the data footprint that results from the stylization of social interaction to derive larger (and commercially relevant) social entities such as audiences, networks and groups that are constantly fed back to individuals and groups of users as personalized recommendations of one form or another. Social media infrastructure sociality as they provide the backstage operations and technological facilities out of which new habits and modes of social relatedness emerge and diffuse across the social fabric.

Ongoing discussions of the paradox of embedded agency may benefit from considering embedded agency from the perspective of the actors themselves. Drawing upon opinions of school principals who are encouraged to take initiative in their spheres of authority and yet still are subject to centralized performance assessments, the author redefines embedded agency as a matter of orientation. Secondly, the author presents a new typology for the notion of embedded agency and the way it is practiced in daily life. Finally, the author considers the tension that is inherent to the modern workplace, which is agentic and yet highly structured. From the perspective of school principals, the author shows how the professional role identity of mid-level managers is scripted and thus dictates the domains in which they can present a sense of agency.

Purpose – The purpose of the current research is to enhance our understanding of how nouveaux pauvres consumers use consumption to cope with their life situations. We use the term nouveaux pauvres to represent middle-class consumers who experience a decrease in sociocultural status relative their previous situation.

Methodology – The data for this study were collected over a four-year period in Sweden, Turkey, and the United States. Various qualitative data collection and analysis methods were used, such as phenomenological and ethnographic interviews, as well as ethnographic observation.

Findings – We identify three different ways that nouveaux pauvres consumers experience their loss of status. Some experience feelings of shame and guilt, others are left in a vacuum and some grieve their lost identity position. We then propose three different strategies that nouveaux pauvres consumers might choose to cope with the loss of status. Some engage in inventing a new consumer role for themselves, others choose a more reluctant strategy of opting out of social circles and isolating oneself, and finally there are those that engage in straightforward reconstruction of their old identity. Furthermore, each of the three consumption strategies links to a specific kind of downward movement – from unfamiliar/familiar to familiar/unfamiliar social spaces – for each individual.

Originality/value of paper – The consumer experience of downward status transformations has been curiously neglected in consumer culture theory. Since contemporary consumer cultures are increasingly characterized by liquidity and movement, it is likely that the experience of descending in status will be more common in the future and therefore of utmost importance to understand more fully.

Across all kinds of organizations, including schools, a prevailing discourse values leadership that pursues new ideas, new knowledge, and new practices that promise to improve performance and service. Educational leadership is, accordingly, being pressed to reshape itself to become more entrepreneurial and to promote the idea of the “enterprising self.” Profound challenges to the purpose of educational leadership are bound up with this, however. They include questions of both meaning and values around the ideas and practice of entrepreneurial leadership. This chapter examines the discourse of enterprise and entrepreneurialism, and then considers the scope for responding to and shaping this discourse and the nature of entrepreneurial leadership through the ideas underpinning democratic entrepreneurialism and adaptive strategies. Implications for principal preparation and development are suggested, including the importance of problematizing entrepreneurial leadership and engaging leaders and aspiring leaders in dialogue around the diverse varieties and progressive possibilities of entrepreneurialism.