NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Susan Johnson is a senior lecturer at the Centre for Development Studies at the University of Bath.  Her main research interest is in investigating the means through which social and cultural factors influence the economy and in particular how these factors influence the operation of markets in developing countries. She, therefore, investigates at the boundary of economics and other social sciences, in particular drawing on economic anthropology and economic sociology to investigate the social and cultural dimensions of market transactions and market development. Johnson’s research can also be characterised as empirically driven and methodologically inductive in seeking to understand this boundary through the study of actually existing markets and the processes through which they are instantiated.

Having started her career as a development practitioner, Johnson’s priority is research that engages theory with policy and practice. The core focus of her work to date has been on microfinance and the wider financial markets it operates within. She has therefore been engaged with a number of research and action research projects relating to the microfinance sector. More recently through Johnson’s engagement with the Wellbeing in Developing Countries research programme (WeD) she has considered how markets relate to this wider goal.