My research addresses the fundamental question of why certain socio-economic development projects take hold in a given context among competing alternatives. The dissertation investigates the emergence and expansion of Islamic businesses, which represent one of the fastest growing moralized markets globally, along with Fair Trade and other secular analogues. Most scholarly (and public) attention has focused on the emergence of Islamist political projects, while far less attention has been devoted to the growing tendencies of Islamism in the economy. Whereas existing scholarship on Islamic business and finance in countries such as Turkey, Malaysia and the Gulf states depict the Islamic economy as a product of state-driven developmental projects, I argue that diverse sets of market actors articulate competing ideals of how Islam should inform economic action. I draw concepts from economic and political sociology to demonstrate that the Islamic economy is not merely a state-led development project, and instead that competing factions of entrepreneurs, certification agencies, and even religious authorities contest the state’s nation-centric discourse on Islam and development. With the support of the Aga Khan Foundation and a Hazeltine fellowship from the Business, Entrepreneurship and Organizations Program at Brown University, I conducted over fifteen months of fieldwork in the Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan in 2012-2013 academic year. I examined why and how state officials in these former Soviet republics turned to the “alternative” model of socioeconomic development offered by Islamic business in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008. In further addressing the gap in the existing research, my project examined how entrepreneurs and other market actors imagine better futures, and work to enact these cognitive frames, which I call moral futures, through legal and political means.
Botoeva, Aisalkyn,
"Moral Futures: The Emergence of Islamic Businesses in the Post-Soviet Economy"
(2017).
Sociology Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0NZ863G
