Rethinking Agricultural Marketing Middlemen in Tanzania: A Social Embeddedness Perspective

Abstract

This thesis explored how social relations of middleman traders influenced and patterned their entrepreneurial actions in informal agricultural output markets of Kasulu District in Tanzania. The study applied a mixed methods social network analysis design which involved a balanced fusion of personal network analysis and ethnographic techniques. The study established that middleman traders’ personal relationships have a pervasive influence on their entrepreneurial actions. Interpersonal trust emerged as a key mediating factor of entrepreneurial actions. Contrary to the perception that middleman roles are performed by minorities and “strangers”, the study showed that trading middlemen emerge from the peasantry and, therefore, represent a form of endogenous entrepreneurship. The study showed that governance of entrepreneurial exchanges occurred mostly through informal personal relationships. The study revealed a tendency for reverse embeddedness involving the overlaying of personal relations on relationships that originate from pure market interactions. The overlaying of social dimensions on pure economic relationships creates a social enforcement mechanism that compensates for the lack of formal rules and regulations. Overall, study results suggest that social embeddedness of informal entrepreneurship manifests through a composite interplay of sociological concepts such as patronage, clientelisation and reciprocity. Based on the study findings, I argue that bean-trading middlemen employ a socially embedded business model in which social relations are accessory to the performance of entrepreneurial actions. In sum, this study has generated new insights regarding the link between social embeddedness and persistence of middlemen in agricultural markets. The integrative theoretical and analytical approach contributes to the quest for a unified approach to studying social embeddedness. Ultimately, the study revealed that, while economic sociology concepts have independent theoretical lives, they are inextricably linked and integrating them is central to understanding the social embeddedness of economic phenomena.