The mantras of commerce today tear down, rebuild, restructure, reinvent have altered our economy dramatically.
Constant change is now an undeniable fact of commercial life.
Few dispute the underlying economic logic whereby corporate restructuring has produced robust capital gains for stock market investors at the expense of downsized workers. The dilemmas of corporate restructuring aside, few have considered that practical changes, paradigm shifts, and experimentalism, when applied to entrenched social structures, can actually improve society. An outgrowth of Yunus s discontent over the level of poverty in his homeland, the Grameen Bank is a social experiment of sorts, one that has discredited some central assumptions about poverty. In advancing his restructuring plan, Yunus recast conventional characterizations of the poor as members of a fixed, permanent underclass incapable of becoming economically productive. Instead, he came to see them as economically savvy, capable individuals who had simply become mired in poverty and were given no chance of improving their economic base.