Welcome to my web page.  This web page reflects my interest in the intersection between thought and practice in furthering the public good.  In simple terms this entails identifying problems in ensuring that people have a safe, decent place to live, with access to basic services, and opportunities to improve their lives through individual, family, and communal efforts, and then solving those problems.  My focus has been on the equitable access to financial services both internationally and in the United States, with a specific, recent focus on microfinance -- the provision of financial services to the poor.

My approach to public problems and their solutions is informed by the literature in economic sociology and organization theory.  Economic sociology is the analysis of economic problems using concepts derived from sociology.  It treats markets as structured phenomena that are organized by specific rules, both formal and informal, and by relationships between actors in the market, whether they are individuals or organizations.  My own work in this field also includes the idea that markets operate within a structured spatial context, that is both a manifestation of and a constraint on the workings of the market. This understanding of markets provides policy-makers and market actors with information that they can then use to solve important policy questions, which may be being created by markets, or may have a solution in markets.  I also extend the use of economic sociology to reach beyond markets to examine how public, private, and civil society organizations interact to create or solve problems that matter to people.

I use organization theory to inform my analysis of how public, private, and civil society organizations deliver goods and services and structure the decision-making of their own members and those in other organizations.  As with economic sociology, rules, networks, and space are important concepts in understanding the way organizations work and the way individuals within organizations behave. 

Though these theories sound very abstract, they are very practical in their consequences.  For example, supply chains are networks of relations between organizations; government regulations concerning the provision of financial services are rules that both structure the market for such services and also inform how individual organizations do their work; and social rules about what work men can do and what work women can do, inside and outside the household, are rules that inform labor and other markets and the hiring practices of an organization.  A clear understanding of these different factors and their effect on the everyday lives of people can inform how a policy-maker defines and solves a problem with new policies, or how a manager of an organization negotiates their way through their work of delivering goods or services to improve the lives of people.

Please feel free to browse my web page and its links.  I am launching a new project called micro-initiatives, which takes the lessons learned from microfinance and applies them to other sectors, such as public health.  Check back to take a look at that web page when it is up and running.

Guy