The meanings of the social media practices of African women engaged in multi-level marketing in Makhanda

Tembani, Khuselwa Anda

Title: The meanings of the social media practices of African women engaged in multi-level marketing in Makhanda
Creator: Tembani, Khuselwa Anda
Subject: Neoliberalism South Africa Makhanda
Subject: Humanism
Subject: Social media and society South Africa Makhanda
Subject: Discourse analysis
Subject: Precarity
Subject: Subjectivity
Subject: Multi-level marketing
Date Issued: 2022-10-14
Date: 2022-10-14
Type: Academic theses
Type: Master's theses
Type: text
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/365588
Identifier: vital:65762
Description: In their efforts for a place in the economy, many South African women have embraced opportunities in the informal sector such as selling products for big Multi-Level Marketers (MLMs), who generally operate on a pyramid structure of commissions. This qualitative study investigates the meanings African women engaged in MLMs in Makhanda make of such work and examines how they construct notions of progress and success through their social media practices. The study was conducted in the strictest lockdown period and pioneered a research method that used Zoom to facilitate screen sharing on mobile phones to create an online version of the scroll-back method for Facebook. As expected for women working in a society increasingly integrated in a global neoliberal order, many of the meanings the women construct are rooted in neoliberal discourses that celebrate hyper-individualism and competition. This firstly includes constructing success through personal stories of self-appreciation, through which these women embody the MLM’s brand, while simultaneously improving their position in the market as sellers. Secondly, the women invest considerable effort on social media in constructing MLM work as epitomising stability in the context of the growing precarity that characterises their everyday lives. However, other meanings draw on the local African context. Here the women make sense of the inequalities that characterise the MLM pyramid structures, by constructing top players in the upline as a symbolic vanguard trailblazing freedom from a racist past through showcasing paths out of poverty. More interestingly, success is constructed as both resulting from and serving collective ways of being rooted in the discourse of African humanism. Here success is recognised as emerging from dense place-based networks in the neighbourhood built on trust and obligation, now replicated on social media. In conclusion, the study speculates that the worlds of meaning facilitated by MLMs might provide ways for neoliberal and traditional discourses to find points of synergy, and so serve as entry points into a neoliberal order that interestingly nevertheless draws on communal cultures of obligation and patronage.
Description: Thesis (MA) -- Faculty of Humanities, School of Journalism and Media Studies, 2022
Format: computer
Format: online resource
Format: application/pdf
Format: 1 online resource (150 pages)
Format: pdf
Publisher: Rhodes University
Publisher: Faculty of Humanities, School of Journalism and Media Studies
Language: English
Rights: Tembani, Khuselwa Anda
Rights: Use of this resource is governed by the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons "Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike" License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/)

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