Similarly, in sub-Saharan Africa, Orange has invested in building and running training centres, describing them in a way that similarly foregrounds its regional legitimacy and responsibility. In the case mentioned above, in Senegal, the ‘practical’ pedagogy involves materially implementing the ‘great discourse’ of the growth of the middle-class in Africa, a mission that is clearly presented as a prerogative of this great French conglomerate (albeit not an exclusive one):
We have an educational focus: we’re fairly legitimate, for example, with our coding schools, and we work with players in France [...]. Today there is a shortage of talent and skills. And our responsibility is to put in place the tools that will enable this ecosystem to be nourished. Qualified labour, the middle class, that’s all of interest to us.
Conclusion
Our research charts the emergence and extension of the use of both endogenous and exogenous social financing platforms. It illustrates the eforts made to supposedly guarantee the growth of endogenous initiatives in this domain (and beyond) when this has proved impossible through existing financial players. It also explains the proliferation of public and para-public apparatuses that ofer ‘flexible’ guidance and support. These processes, along with ‘great discourses’, and a set of strategic actions, allow not only the difusion of ideological productions (and to a certain extent their adaptation to diferent national contexts), but the training and organization of the various workers of the intermediation platforms.
These ‘grand discourses’ themselves are principally of two orders. Firstly, they promote a process of economic homogenization which depends on the emergence of what the Orange representative called the ‘solvent middle class’, and on its integration into an ideal globalization made possible by increased bank usage by local populations, ‘good governance’ and a new model of economic development in which public power takes a back seat to ‘ecosystem building’, within which crowdfunding must be fully integrated. The following passage gives a good summary of this discourse, all the more so if we replace the term ‘firm’ with ‘player’, so including all of the diferent participants mentioned above:
Firms that successfully access the monetary and non-monetary benefits of crowdfunding are found to be more competitive and more sustainable, which would be a boon for African and emerging market startup ecosystems. (InfoDev 2015: 15)
Globalization and the Logics of Capitalism
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