Ghazal Mir Zulfiqar

• PhD in Public Policy
• Professor (Associate) at Lahore University of Management Sciences

While management research on sexual harassment has offered important insights on its organizational antecedents and outcomes, it has remained empirically focused on explaining how the phenomenon manifests in the Global North. Drawing on findings from a multi-source qualitative study on sexual harassment in urban Pakistan, we move beyond the prevail...

The Organization Manifesto celebrates 30 years of Organization as a vital force in critical management and organization studies. It reaffirms the journal’s commitment to radical pluralism, within a non-hegemonic mode that avoids reproducing relations of dominance and subordination. Central to scholarship published and welcomed in Organization are f...

This critical autoethnographic account describes a journey from marginalization, as a racialized Muslim minority woman in the age of American Islamophobia and biopolitical racism, to a position of dominance as my identity changed with my move from the United States to Pakistan. I reflect on the feelings of solidarity that welled up inside me with t...

This essay describes a hybrid form of contemporary colonization that involves the fusion of digital and financial realms to explore new frontiers in profit generation, governance, and control. While early research has explored this dual mode of financialization and surveillance capitalism, it primarily employs Western frameworks assuming a universa...

This study addresses the gap between policy and practice on the issue of women’s right to own rural land through a qualitative study conducted in Pakistan’s two largest provinces, Punjab and Sindh. A recent survey finds that only 4% of women own rural land in Pakistan. Given the relatively large agrarian economy, land is a key resource determining...

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed global capitalism’s fault lines and the deep vulnerabilities built into its functionings. This article investigates how Pakistan’s informally employed women homeworkers, who labor at the bottom of global production networks (GPNs), fared during the first year of the pandemic. It empirically demonstrates how the GPN’s d...

Extant research on dirty work—occupations involving physical, social or moral taint, which affect worker identities—has been read primarily through the lens of social identity theory (SIT). There are two notable shortcomings that emerge as a consequent of dirty work being too heavily reliant upon the precepts of SIT, which we seek to remedy in this...

Women's gold jewelry, particularly in the context of the Indian subcontinent, has been referred to as a barbaric relic, an uncivilized obsession, and a leakage from the economy. Yet women in the region continue to save almost exclusively in gold. In dismissing these savings as a leakage and a waste, we miss a critical opportunity to understand the...

In this article, we study the nexus between class privilege and social inequality through management education. To do so, we conducted a set of exercises with management students at an elite private business school located in the Global South (i.e., Pakistan) with the specific intent to invoke reflexivity among these students about their own class...

Ajnesh Prasad and Ghazal Zulfiqar had the opportunity to interview Professor Cynthia Enloe—feminist, social justice activist, and the plenary speaker for the Critical Management Studies division at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management. The contents of the interview are presented in this article. The interview is based on an initial...

The expropriation of marginalized women’s labor is a key issue in business ethics in these times of global outsourcing and informal work arrangements. This has led to a transnational advocacy movement for securing the labor rights of homeworkers, who are poor women working on piece-rate contracts out of their homes. Drawing on materialist feminism,...

While the feminist literature on social reproduction is broad and diverse, one area that has remained relatively under-explored relates to the linkages between social reproduction and finance, particularly between social reproduction and household debt. In our contribution to this Special Issue, we seek to document and to analyse the structural lin...

Using a global justice network (GJN) approach, in this article I examine the localization of a transnational network for homeworker rights. Based on my field research undertaken in Pakistan between January 2015 and December 2017, I compare different organizing approaches to establish how a politics of vulnerability may be transformed into a politic...

This article presents a critical feminist political economy of women’s entrepreneurship promotion in Pakistan. Women’s entrepreneurship is the new development mantra that has captured the imagination of global institutions, policymakers, business organizations, and academia alike. We argue in this article that this focus on entrepreneurship should...

This article uses the site of a residential community within a gated university complex to examine a new urban wage model of domestic labor in Punjab, Pakistan. In a socio-historical context where employer–employee relations have traditionally been shaped by asymmetric reciprocal relations and kinship bonds based on class, caste, and gender hierarc...

This study examines how Pakistani microfinance banks’ (MFBs) collateralized microcredit arrangements take advantage of the cultural centrality of gold in women’s lives. In so doing, it contributes to the wider debate on financial inclusion and financialization. The product, processes and narratives examined are a local manifestation of global finan...

This case documents the challenges faced by the Kashf Microfinance Bank (KMFB) in 2012, when it was a relatively new entrant in a financial industry established by the 2001 Microfinance Institutions Ordinance. The case documents the difficulties KMFB faced in establishing itself as a microfinance bank, moved away from the unregulated NGO sector whe...

This paper descriptively analyzes longitudinal microfinance outreach numbers and interview data from 140 practitioners and borrowers in Pakistan to examine whether the claim that microfinance enhances gender equity in access to finance can be substantiated. This assertion has recently replaced the more ambitious contention that microfinance has an...

This symposium is a critical assessment of how globalization has turned production, service delivery and governance into the private domain of non-state actors. Some of the means through which this is achieved are analyzed in this symposium and they include global production networks, the political corporate social responsibility of multinational c...

While Pakistan's poverty reduction strategy paper emphasises microfinance as an important development tool, the sector is well on its way to becoming an important part of the country's mainstream banking industry, focusing more on achieving commercial viability and a resulting dilution in the sector's social mission, ie, poverty eradication. This c...

In just 30 years microfinance has transformed from a credit-based rural development scheme that has claimed to reduce poverty and empower poor women, to a $70 billion financial industry. In the process, the traditional NGO-led model has given way to commercialized institutions, resulting in an increased emphasis on profitmaking. This has also led t...

The Clayton-Mathews and Wilson 2003 analysis of Massachusetts’ expenditures of state and federal dollars to address family homelessness documented a serious system misalignment of public resources: that is, 80% of state and federal resources were tied up in shelter provision, while only 20%, including rental assistance, were designated for homeless...