Abstract Are managers necessary for organizations? Could organizations function without them? To answer, we must separate between two questions: are top managers necessary? And are middle managers necessary? I argue that larger organizations are prone to need someone to have oversight of the wholeness and to take responsibility for its design and development. Given the dedication and time commitment needed to fulfill that role, it is virtually impossible to have a larger organization without any top management. However, a large organization with top management and frontline employeesâbut no managerial layers in betweenâis already a much more realistic possibility. It typically requires having autonomous, self-managing teams empowered to make all the necessary decisions related to their own work, accompanied by certain structural solutions (often enhanced by ICT) solving key information- and coordination-related tasks that are traditionally taken care of by middle managers. Often specific coach roles also emerge. In principle, if working substitutes are found to all tasks traditionally taken care of by middle managers, an organization can be functional and successful without any managerial layers. I examine a few successful examples of such organizations, Buurtzorg and Reaktor, while also highlighting key boundary conditions for when, where, and how self-managing organizations can succeed. I conclude by distinguishing between structure and hierarchy, arguing that while self-managing organizations are characterized by high levels of decentralization, their functionality is ensured through having enough structure, thus combining low hierarchy with adequate structure to find the most functional form of organizing in a particular context.
Duygu Phillips, Per L. Bylund, Matthew W. Rutherford, Curt B. Moore
How can cryptocurrency gain legitimacy in the eyes of users? Drawing upon the theories of institutional uncertainty and legitimacy, we propose a process model in which legitimacy for cryptocurrencies acquired at the market level via rhetorical strategies (i.e. evasive action) will reduce uncertainty in the formal institutional environment. This reduction in institutional uncertainty will beget additional legitimacy, and thus higher performance for individual crypto firms, on average. This study (1) advances institutional entrepreneurship research by investigating the legitimation process of cryptocurrency; (2) extends our understanding of the evolution of an innovation and its diffusion under institutional uncertainty; (3) contributes to the development of institutional theory by elucidating how cryptocurrencies can change existing institutions, and even create new ones, through evasive entrepreneurship; and (4) provides an overall theoretical rationale for how cryptocurrency can become more widely accepted.
Nadine Ostern, Friedrich Holotiuk, JĂźrgen Moormann
Organizations face manifold implementation barriers in blockchain adoption. Of particular interest is the pre-adoption phase, where knowledge and attitudes guide organizationsâ approaches toward a new technology. This paper examines organizationsâ approaches to blockchain through a sensemaking lens to identify how blockchain prototype development is guided by perceived business value of and sentiments toward the technology. Taking a critical realist perspective, we examine divergences between organizationsâ approaches toward blockchain adoption, i.e., what they do, and why and how they approach blockchain. We differentiate between four types of approaches and provide recommendations how the pre-adoption phase can be considered in academic analyses.
This paper inquires into how token economies come to be, or how they are constituted. In examining this question, we draw on the market-making literature in economic sociology and the literature on social imaginaries. Our point of departure is that instead of a market emerging from a bureaucracy, we investigate a market emerging from a blockocracy, which is a form of organising based on public, permissionless, decentralised, coin-based blockchains. We argue that Ethereum is a blockocracy out of which a token economy comes to be and that the particular form of that token economy is best understood through the notion of an imaginary. We describe the Ethereum imaginary on six dimensions with an associated image for each: technical (the world computer), financial (functional money), political (cypherpunk mutualists), ethical (public goods commonists), organisational (decentralist engineers) and aesthetic (playful creators).
Organizations are utilizing new technologies including distributed ledgers to challenge value accounting within global capitalism. This paper investigates new radical digital accounting practices underpinning this form of organizing and explores the development of new technologies of value accounting practices enabled by distributed ledger technologies, such as generative value accounting. This theory paper makes use of the concept of the sociotechnical imaginary as it offers a framework for understanding how a technologistâs vision of the ideal future influences their design choices in the present with Holochain as a specific case.
This chapter introduces and analyzes IOMâs Constitution and mandate, member state politics, organizational structure, and institutional culture, with a view to understanding the possibility of autonomous action on the part of IOM. First, the chapter explores how IOMâs âpermissiveâ Constitution has enabled its engagement in a remarkably wide range of activities, including in emergency and post-crisis contexts, and the implications of the organizationâs lack of a clear, legally entrenched protection mandate. Second, it provides an overview of IOM member state politics, stressing the clear imprint of the United States on the organization, and the rising influence of member states from the global South. Third, it reflects on the relationship between IOMâs organizational structure and culture, examining the role of the director general; IOMâs decentralization and project-based funding model; and some of the tensions that shape the agency, including those between IOMâs humanitarian-oriented Department of Operations and Emergencies and its Department of Migration Management. It also considers generational differences between âold guard,â operationally-focused staffers and younger cohorts. Despite IOMâs rather unlikely institutional foundations for independently shaping migration governance and, more specifically, humanitarian responses to displacement, this chapter argues that the agency has strategically cultivated its capacity for autonomous action, at the same time as it remains highly deferential to states.
The purpose of this study was to describe social movement meeting organization and to increase the understanding of organized spaces for collective action. This paper contributes to several research streams. Firstly, this study advances a novel research stream conceptualizing social movements as spaces, and particularly as open rather than isolated spaces. Secondly, it raises meetings into the focal point of organizing and offers a multisided examination of meeting organization instead of limiting structure under one label such as network or formal organization. Thirdly, by focusing on organizing based on multiple logics and partial organization this study brings forward the understanding of organizing in the contemporary society as well as organization located in the outskirts of formal organizations. Fourthly, by making a distinction between organizing and mobilizing, this study develops the understanding of how movements can serve as a resource for individual actors and their goals. Finally, the case provides a rare example of a movement born around a nascent digital innovation with possibly considerable impact on society. The research was carried out as a descriptive case study focusing on the meetings of Helsinki Ethereum Meetup, which is a meeting-based organization set up around a nascent blockchain platform, Ethereum. The primary data consisted of eight interviews with the meetup participants. In addition, the case was complemented by an analysis of the groupâs social media accounts and membership data retrieved from meetup.com, through which the group was facilitated. The data was analyzed utilizing a dual approach deploying both open coding and theory-based coding techniques. Meetings and their organization were analyzed from three perspectives: a network, an institution and an organization. Furthermore, the case analysis included identifying the ideological, business and political context of the case and the meetup groupâs relations to other groups in the field of blockchain technologies. The results of the analysis indicate that the meetings can be described as a hybrid of a norm-based institution, a network hub and a partial organization with less than all elements of a formal organization. In practice, all three perspectives are linked to each other and together complement each other to form one entity. However, this study implies that the specific logics can be regarded as analytically separate to arrive at a more pronounced multilevel analysis of meeting organizing. In addition, the case organization was found to be an example of a pioneer group in its own field being the first and only meetup devoted to Ethereum in Finland at the time of the study. Furthermore, the settings and the organization of the meetup were possibly linked to the groupâs position in its field and the nascent developmental state of Ethereum.
Studies of resilience highlight the tension between actions that allow a firm â and a system â to be robust and those that allows it to be flexible. Studies suggest that an entrepreneurial firm will prioritize flexibility, given resource constraints. However, what occurs when a number of firms are embedded in a common socio-technical system and an extreme event affects them collectively? This paper tests whether existing theory about resilience predicts the responses of entrepreneurs in such a system, with reference to an extreme event in the Bitcoin socio-technical system: the much-publicized bankruptcy of Mt.Gox, a key player. It relies on in-depth interviews with 8 entrepreneurs in Europe, triangulated with other data. We find that robustness is the dominant strategy for those interviewed. This is partly because the firms rely on pooled resources supplied by the collective, and partly because robustness builds trust, giving the firms a competitive advantage.
Studies of legitimacy have typically looked at the creation and maintenance of legitimacy by both established and new organisations. This paper looks at how a set of entrepreneurs use the legitimacy of one, Alternative, community as a scaffold to build legitimacy in a more Mainstream one, despite the fact that norms between the two were often contradictory. Studying Bitcoin entrepreneurs in Europe, we find that the distributed, digital community of Bitcoin operates as a kind of MNC: the larger decentralised (and Alternative) community acts as the headquarters, while the local entrepreneurs seeking Mainstream legitimacy behave like subsidiaries. This allow them to rely on the legitimacy of the community at large, while simultaneously distinguishing themselves from the broader Bitcoin community as they seek legitimacy.
Bitcoin is difficult to categorize and indeed has been associated with 112 different labels in the British media (e.g., âprivate money,â âcommodityâ) â most of which poorly describe bitcoin. Specifically, our analyses of 674 media articles, focusing on the relationship between labeling and categorization, identify classification inconsistencies at three levels: within clusters of labels, between labels and categories, and between category attributes. These inconsistencies hamper categorization based on attribute similarity, audience goals, and causal models, respectively. We identify four factors that nurture this categorical anarchy and conclude with a call for research on the socioeconomic revolution heralded by blockchain technology.
The emerging digital cryptocurrency Bitcoin has made waves in mainstream media across the globe, as have the numerous extreme events that have rocked it. One such event, the bankruptcy of a prominent Bitcoin exchange called Mt.Gox, particularly shocked the emerging sociotechnical field. However, it is not clear how the numerous entrepreneurial firms operating in this field survived this shock. \\ \\ Studies of resilience in the face of extreme events have typically examined mature firms, characterised by formal structures and some slack resources. In such studies, the resilience, adaptability and trans-formability of the firm come into view. A new firm in an emergent field, however, is equally driven to survive â but must do so with far more limited resources, without a formal structure and little in the way of organisational learning. In our study, we find that such entrepreneurial firms rely on their col-lective identity in forming resilient responses. Furthermore, one outcome of this shock was a call for regulations and oversight â despite earlier dogmatic rejections of such formal control. \\ \\ Keywords: Bitcoin, Entrepreneurship, Resilience, Extreme Event, Qualitative Study \\
In a sandpile world, decentralization is in the air. For many companies it is rapidly becoming a choice between merely hanging on and survival or thriving in the new world of global connectivity and proliferating complexity. In considering Decentralization 2.0, realization of the enablingand-autonomy paradigm presents three major challenges: designing an enabling organization, creating autonomous groups, and establishing a deep structure or genetic code to integrate these into a meaningful whole. Letâs remind ourselves that Decentralization 2.0 is conceived of in the context of a social-systemic perspective of organizing. In this way of looking at organizations, it is recognized that not only does the system have a purpose, but also the parts of the system and the larger whole containing the system, which both have purposes of their own. In other words, when the organization is that of a firm, both its individual members and the society in which it functions are recognized as having purposes of their own. Although they sometimes forget what they are for, companies, whether banks or health care organizations, do have the function to serve the purposes of the society they are a part of. If they fail to do so, in the long run, their survival is jeopardized. Even more so, sometimes companies find it difficult to recognize that their members are purposeful human beings, meaning that they display will, and even have ideals of their own.
The dramatic subtitle of the classic 1963 book Organizational Choice by Eric Trist and colleagues, which tells the story of the spontaneous bottom-up decentralization into leaderless autonomous groups that occurred in the 1950s in some British coal mines, the subject of our second case study in Chapter 4, is The Loss, Re-Discovery & Transformation of a Work Tradition. This same subtitle would be quite appropriate to a more contemporary story, this time in the home health care business in The Netherlands. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to capture, codify and communicate an implicit changeâmanagement process to embed corporate responsibility and sustainability at the Cranfield School of Management. Design/methodology/approach To explain the (onâgoing) changeâmanagement process, the authors retrospectively applied changeâmanagement literature to the implicit process in which they have, themselves, been intimately involved. Findings The implicit changeâmanagement process had unconsciously mobilized a variety of tactics identified in the changeâmanagement literature; a more explicit articulation of the âasâisâ and âdesiredâ states, and a more explicit, systematic and regular communication of the journey and goal, might have enabled faster progress. However, the nature of a highly autonomous and decentralized organization, such as an academic institution, means that sustainable change management may be slower than in commercial institutions. Research limitations/implications The authors have been closely engaged in the changeâmanagement process they describe and, inevitably, have unconscious biases and partial perspectives. Nevertheless, as a frank and selfâcritical account of a fiveâyearâplus process, it can assist other academic institutions. Practical implications As more business schools seek to embed corporate responsibility and sustainability, the case study identifies a series of potential changeâmanagement tactics. Originality/value The paper applies a changeâmanagement model to examine how one school of management is tackling how to embed corporate responsibility and sustainability into its research, teaching, advisory services and its own operations.
An analysis is made of agencification reform in the Netherlands from the viewpoint of the management of the complex change process. We will present a processual analysis of the complex change process of agencification reform by means of organization science insights on âemergent changeâ and administrative science insights on âcomplex networksâ. The analysis of the process of change events shows that it is not an example of centrally planned and controlled change. The reform is rather an example of âemergent and complex changeâ. The reform is a complex system of different intertwined change processes with many different decentralized actors, which is âmanagedâ by different central âchange agentsâ. The âchange managersâ themselves form a complex system as well. Points for practitioners One of the important reform trends in Dutch central administration is the âagencificationâ of executive government organizations, that is, the increase of managerial autonomy of executive parts of ministerial departments. In this article we analyse how this two-decades-long reform process was âmanagedâ by various central actors like Parliament, the National Audit Office, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Home Affairs, various internal and external advisory committees and supervisory committees. It turned out that the reform can hardly be described as a centrally planned and controlled process. Initiatives for reform, in fact, popped up locally within the various ministries and agencies. The reform process was more a continuous accumulation of local initiatives for agencification. The various central actors tried to exercise some coordinating or supervisory influence, but that was rather indirect, reactive and limited.
Public Policy and Administration Research
Management and Organizational Studies
Innovative Approaches in Technology and Social Development
One of the strategies of the modernization of public services is the decentralization of responsibilities and organizing work in autonomous coâ operative teams with varied tasks. The empowerment of the public service workers in the front line is therefore a strategy in local government in Norway today. Under the assumption that women have ânaturalâ skills in caring, workers on the lowest levels are given responsibility for care and nursing. A study of the decentralization of public care for the elderly in their homes showed that being given interesting tasks and increased responsibility mobilized the efforts of the care workers. However, since the power of resources has been centralized, this has led to an intensification of work. In gendering the relevant discourses by explaining women's experiences of an overâheavy workload as a result of their âmotheringâ and their inability to set limits, women care workers were constructed by their managers as unprofessional and not to be taken seriously. This has made the public care organization a greedy organization for the women care workers.
B. Balamurugan, T. Poongodi, M. R. Manu, S. Karthikeyan ¡ 5 authors
The moving image archive of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) includes a copy of the film The Double Day (1975), cataloged in the series Moving Images Relating to International Development Programs and Activities, 1979â1991, a collection of more than eight hundred titles âcreated to provide information on assistance programs supported by the Agency for International Development (AID).â1 Yet, The Double Day does not, in fact, directly depict or engage with any specific development or aid initiative. Instead, the filmâdirected by US-based Brazilian filmmaker Helena Solberg as part of the International Womenâs Film Project collective and described as âthe first Latin American feminist documentaryââexamines the gendered dynamics of paid and unpaid labor through the testimonies of women from Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Mexico.2 Its presence in the USAID archive is likely a consequence of its funding history, having received support from the Inter-American Foundation, a USAID-affiliated entity; the development agencies of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden; the United Nations Development Program; and US philanthropist Calvin Cafritz.3These transnational funding structures not only enabled the filmâs production but also determined its archival destination, which renders legible its place within the history of international development.4 The Double Dayâs institutional trajectory reflects the shifting configurations of aid, gender, and media during a historic moment when women were being repositioned at the center of what Arturo Escobar has described as developmentâs âregimes of visuality.â5 Especially relevant to The Double Dayâs production and exhibition was the international institutional framework of Women in Development (WID). Emerging in the early 1970s and culminating in United Nationsâ proclamation of 1975 as International Womenâs Year, WID emphasized womenâs participation in the global economy as both an index and mechanism of development. Indeed, The Double Day premiered at the World Conference of the International Womenâs Year, held in Mexico City.6 Within this context, the film forms part of a broader trajectory of media use by international organizations that intensified during the 1970sâas best exemplified by Media Habitat, a collection of 236 documentary films commissioned by the United Nations to represent urban and rural development initiatives for the 1976 Habitat Conference on Human Settlements in Vancouver. As a policy-shaping initiative, Media Habitat primarily featured films from the Global South intended not only to illustrate but also to help codify standardized audiovisual markers of âunderdevelopmentâ that determined access to the emerging global economic order and to international aid.7Framed in relation to these international institutions and their operations, The Double Day could similarly be considered âdevelopment mediaââexemplifying the type of nonfiction media produced and distributed outside of the commercial film circuits whose aspects and subcategories have been variously described in scholarship as nontheatrical, useful, sponsored, institutional, industrial, educational, or nonprofessional/amateur.8 Scholars working in this area have emphasized the institutional contexts of such mediaâs production and exhibition infrastructures as shaping its instrumentalized effects. From a feminist perspective, such an approach is crucial to grappling with the broader question of how âgender impacts [these worksâ] shape, content, and trajectories.â9 Yet we also argue that, taken in isolation, the institutional and infrastructural contexts are insufficient to account for the complex relationship between media and development, potentially not only limiting our understanding of the reach and impact of development but also distorting our interpretive conclusions. For example, to categorize The Double Day as âdevelopment mediaâ is to overlook the filmâs place within Solbergâs directorial oeuvre, as well as within the histories of both transnational womenâs filmmaking and radical Latin American documentary cinema to which it simultaneously belongs. Such exclusive framing is especially limiting given that women globally were disproportionately engaged in nonfiction production throughout the twentieth centuryâsometimes by political choice but more often due to structural exclusions from fiction filmmaking. Even in nonfiction historiography, however, institutional media has remained particularly marginal, reinforcing hierarchies that separate such works from the aesthetic and authorial frameworks through which film history has been constructed.10 This marginalization not only tends to erase womenâs contributions but also presumes a âweakâ or derivative authorship, rendering these films unworthy of the interpretive attention needed to apprehend their aesthetic and political complexity.11 The same dynamic is likely to structure assumptions about âdevelopment mediaâ as well.Categorizing The Double Day exclusively within this category would further prompt us to assume top-down institutional analyses that have been characteristic of both institutional media methodologies and the scholarship on development at large. This, in turn, would risk obscuring this filmâs radical Marxist approach to womenâs labor as well as its concrete contribution to activism and its attendant grassroot structures. In Mexico City, The Double Day became a catalyst for feminist solidarity in practice when one of the filmâs protagonists, Bolivian activist and trade unionist Domitila Barrios de Chungara, was invited to participate in the Tribune of Non-Governmental Organizations held alongside the official UN conference.12 There, Barrios de Chungara challenged Western feminist priorities by reframing the debate around labor, class, and imperialism, helping to articulate a shared Third World feminist agenda that significantly departed from the developmentalist vision of the United Nations and USAID.13 Seen through the lens of activist media, The Double Day helped forge transnational solidarity networks by enabling information exchange across the diverse voices that shaped its makingâfrom the women featured in the film to the activists who circulated itârevealing a considerably more dynamic interplay between institutional and grassroots or contingent media practices.Moreover, the filmâs Latin American contextâreflected in Solbergâs formation in Brazil as the only woman in Cinema Novo, its focus on women from across the region, and its premiere and key reception in Mexico Cityârequires grappling with the regional specificities of the very notion of development in its multiple iterations.14 Far from being an epistemological and political framework imposed solely by the Global North, both the practices of development and the theoretical foundations of developmentalism (understood as a broad and polysemic set of discourses) were shaped through the active participation of Latin American economists.15 Within this iteration, underdevelopment, as a constitutive notion of developmentalism, became central to a distinctly critical strand, which by the late 1960s became known as the dependency theory.16 This same approach is reflected in some of the best-known Latin American radical film manifestos of the time, arising precisely from the same milieus to which Solberg belonged.17These various considerations of the filmâs history illustrate the methodological challenges confronting feminist scholars seeking to assess the impact of development on media projects, theories, and practices. To disregard the developmentalist context of such works by emphasizing their political aesthetics and affects risks reproducing a romanticized narrative of heroic resistance (albeit from a feminist perspective). Yet to engage exclusively with their institutional and material infrastructures risks naturalizing developmentalismâs political and epistemological foundations at the expense of the goals and beliefs of the many women who participated in these projects. The contradictions and ambivalences that animate such histories call for feminist frameworks capable of holding both institutional complicity and radical possibility in view.This challenge resonates with ongoing debates about the politics of the archive and what Allyson Field has termed âthe practice of informed speculation.â18 As she reminds us, feminist, queer, and decolonial methodologies have long taught us to âpress at the limitsâ of the archive to âinoculate our scholarship against our evidenceâs afflictions.â19 The concern that the evidence we draw on in our analysis reproduces the very structures and blind spots of the dominant ideology and therefore shapes and delimits our interpretation becomes particularly urgent when engaging the developmentalist media corpus. Informed speculation offers an alternative by inviting the experimental, creative, and speculative rewriting of history, mobilizing the archive âin a project that runs counter to the original purpose, or the imperative to preserve, or the conditions that led to erasure.â20 Yet, as Field cautions, such speculative gestures must remain grounded in a deep and âintimate familiarity with the archiveâ that we are working with and against. Building on this imperative, we suggest that the developmentalist archive, in particular, demands expansion and critical reconsideration in ways that unsettle the very disciplinary frameworks through which it has been studied as well as the larger institutional contexts for such knowledge production.Our focus on The Double Day in the opening of this introduction thus foregrounds the entanglements of institutional and grassroots forces, local and international contexts, structural and interpersonal relations, and creative and economic factors that have shaped not only this film but the broader ecosystem of development media projectsâand their preservationâover time. Addressing such a constellation involves transgressing methodologically entrenched divisions between political economy and aesthetics, between material infrastructures and affective regimes; reckoning with divergent periodizations across film history and world economics; and situating these within the local specificities of womenâs movements and international institutional programs. It also demands attentiveness to the coexistence of multiple, and sometimes competing, understandings of developmentâeach historically, geographically, and ideologically situated.We imagine this special issue as an opening toward a critical dialogue, not only about how such an approach might be enacted in practice but also about the far-reaching ways development paradigms have shaped both our objects of study and the contours of the field itself. The decision to center institutionally sponsored films across all the essays in this issue is deliberate and enables us to highlight institutional critique as a vital methodological imperative within our analytical framework. Created within the frameworks of international organizations, state agencies, or NGOs, these filmsâ histories make legible the institutional logics that underwrite their production. Yet our critique does not stop at these specific entities. Rather, we argue for a broader interrogation of the political conditions and institutional infrastructures that shape media and knowledge production more generally. This includes contemporary corporations embedded in the digital platform economy, from streaming services to the rapid expansion of AI. Equally critical is a reflexive examination of academia itself, where departments of economics, political science, and centers for development have played a formative role in producing and legitimizing developmentalist theories and policy frameworks. While the humanities and arts have at times offered critical alternatives, they have also frequently mirrored and reinforced many of the same developmentalist assumptions. A feminist analysis of the nexus between development and media must therefore unsettle not only dominant archives but also the institutional and disciplinary foundations of our own scholarly practices.As scholars, we share the complex position of navigating the same tensions between institutional complicity and emancipatory aspiration as many of the media-makers whose work we study. Mirroring our subjects is also the transnational, collective mode of this special issueâs own production as it emerges from an ongoing informal working group we have sustained over several years. While relying on institutional and disciplinary affordancesâsuch as university funding for conferences or access to academic publishing platformsâwe have been working toward creating a community that exceeds, and often resists, the prevailing logics of our academic institutions. Our aim has been to create a space for shared inquiry and mutual support that pushes back against disciplinary siloing and technocratic neoliberal assessment modes of both labor and knowledge productionâand this certainly extends to our experience collaborating with the journal editors throughout the publication process. Our goal has been to examine both the persistence and variability of developmentalism, understood as what Gustavo Esteva calls a âpowerful but fragile semantic constellation,â as a conceptual formation that has historically inspired, legitimized, and mobilized media projects across Asia, Africa, and Latin America.21 And gendered biopolitics, from population control to gender mainstreaming, have remained integral to development policies and media practices, recurring across formats from institutional newsreels to film festivals.We share the conviction that, far beyond the history of nonfiction institutional media, development (as both a broad ideological project and a network of material and institutional practices) and developmentalism (as a set of discourses and theoretical models associated with development) have exerted a far-reaching influence on film and media cultures at large. As such, they must be treated as a major force in shaping global film and media systems and also the many ongoing assumptions behind their critical discourses. The discipline of communication studies was founded on modernization theory governed by Cold War goals of dissemination of Western liberal democracy around the world, while âan area studies framework allowed compartmentalizing Western and non-Western outcomes of technologies that were always claimed to be universal.â22 Despite critique from postcolonial and critical race studies, many of these frameworks have remained foundational for media theory.23 In historical scholarship, as we increasingly move beyond âmodernityâ as a dominant conceptual anchor, engaging with practices and discourses of development opens more precise analytical pathways. These film and mediaâs entanglements with the logics of and economic and the associated with as well as their conceptual underdevelopment, and impact in as diverse as and of media aesthetic and paradigms in film and film and funding are developmentalist assumptions to the they to underwrite the narrative and logics of and global media from the structure of the film to the cultures of argue that a examination of the historical entanglements between film and developmentalist aesthetics, modes of as well as infrastructures and critical the and that our contemporary media is a of the historical contours of development as a field of inquiry embedded within a of some of the methodologies by the featured in this special a of this complex history, to the larger at in media, development, and gender all its development a it as an of be with practices as divergent as and in In as we work on this the of the of the USAID the ideological that have the history of international the and of this on the global its a from development as a global practice and as an institutional and which over the has as a with its own media Yet or does not erase the historical impact of these the contradictions they have reflected and over the as the of development several crucial to the economic theories of development initiatives to and through the of the development an international policy framework at from the Global to the of the Global the by the political role of and the of the International the on was challenged by dependency theory and at development as global structural the neoliberal of the the Programs by the and World imposed and as conditions for and forms of assistance became known as the major markers for international development development has moving beyond economic to such as the Human Development and the Development and from international organizations such as the United Nations to a broader network of These frameworks increasingly of and liberal of and with what in many ways to various while the of the to developmentâs epistemological more scholarship has toward a of its and material the field has to a of and critical by and scholars, which development as a dynamic of conceptual and political to these the studies in this special issue call for sustained analysis in place of In we draw from a of and that in of of gender and to this special issue engage that and from Mexico to contemporary specific local historical of global distinctly feminist methodologies as well as attention to studies that this issue a in the global history of development on and documentary work in Mexico how early women infrastructures as of while US films an early of state and transnational on a outside the Global as the of developmentalist both the and markers of development media, its to the and Latin central grounded in archival also womenâs in transnational and the methodological of archives on study of the series to a a digital media not by but by women not as but as subjects and within circuits of neoliberal and the aesthetics and of how developmentâs has models of to contemporary neoliberal paradigms of and analysis how digital and gender and practices, discourses on and their of these essays the of some of the historical of developmentalist as the question of the role of the state within such on a notion of economic as a and the dominant of development that the state as the for and through infrastructural projects. This understanding of development was shared across both of the as well as in the Third The United and the increasingly mobilized international in the of the modes of international at the postcolonial of policy and ideological These programs were at the expansion of their and of while with the and decolonial of The conceptual between modernization and development that the Cold in of and hierarchies of that long and As an of postcolonial their role as of international aid concern about the of Western development projects. In alternative across the Global South that to structural between and through policies of and In many they were further the global structures. In Latin for example, this approach was through organizations such as the United Nations for Latin and the both developmentalist projects and their have taken many forms historically, and they have and they have been to a of projects, and postcolonial and development has been and in ways and with frequently political While many of these alternative frameworks the embedded in dominant Western they often technocratic and assumptions. gender and gender as for the of to be shaped by This becomes particularly in the media that of development where women frequently a crucial associated with and women were as both the subjects and of their participation in the and labor often as the index of In this study of from the 1970s how women were as of this as these about womenâs urban and recurring and of a within the own of and critique that official examination of archives and enables a feminist interrogation of their mobilizing a of the in the of contribution to this issue similarly the of a dynamic within as well as across ideological the of womenâs and the media of the and as active in labor and as integral to the technocratic women became of as their labor remained a of and analysis and archival with attention to the specific of and It also transnational that as a and affective a nexus of and practices through which gender, media, and developmentalism one film not as a but as part of the of alongside and work a broader concern of this special media as a of developmentalist projects. The debates the World and which international such as the United Nations and a critical historical for such primarily by postcolonial and of the for the of media and communication infrastructures in as to counter Western The a between and economic how systems of media and reinforced global hierarchies of and in an agenda that supported and alternative media infrastructures across postcolonial contexts, the framework gender as an analytical This âgender in the 1970s by of the Women in Development in relation to The Double its political critique of with its broader to center women in development policy through and This was also in of media, which was shaped by its international reach and audiovisual production and and and Yet, as WID institutional it also to the and of the womenâs development programs often by in These were by a of studies, and on and the to of womenâs presence and through the of their economic and In this on the filmmaker this history directly by the and of for women by the WID framework during the with and agencies the of and against Women in at the of the neoliberal turn, when institutional media often the only to access and support to projects. The an by this dynamic as of the from the Global South are to engage with the developmentalist assumptions funding models that their similarly the as a in developmentalist media history by the of and centers on the Film a between of and the attention toward the and labor by and work was foundational the of and the of audiovisual aid, as both a of development projects and a critical for their the in this issue argue for a with media, gender, and developmentalism as an field of that is and shaped by feminist and methodologies and that challenge the entanglements between academic knowledge production and and technocratic development And while methodological these dynamics at the structural the of feminist in media and cinema by this the very a