Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future: Stories from Global Frontiers 9781805390053

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Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future

Max Planck Studies in Anthropology and Economy Series editors: Stephen Gudeman, University of Minnesota Chris Hann, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Definitions of economy and society, and their proper relationship to each other, have been the perennial concerns of social philosophers. In the early decades of the twenty-­first century these became and remain matters of urgent political debate. At the forefront of this series are the approaches to these connections by anthropologists, whose explorations of the local ideas and institutions underpinning social and economic relations illuminate large fields ignored in other disciplines. Recent titles: Volume 11 Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future: Stories from Global Frontiers Joost Beuving Volume 10 Thrift and Its Paradoxes: From Domestic to Political Economy Edited by Catherine Alexander and Daniel Sosna Volume 9 Wine Is Our Bread: Labour and Value in Moldovan Winemaking Daniela Ana Volume 8 Moral Economy at Work: Ethnographic Investigations in Eurasia Edited by Lale Yalçın-­Heckmann Volume 7 Work, Society, and the Ethical Self: Chimeras of Freedom in the Neoliberal Era Edited by Chris Hann

Volume 6 Financialization: Relational Approaches Edited by Chris Hann and Don Kalb Volume 5 Market Frictions: Trade and Urbanization at the Vietnam-China Border Kirsten W. Endres Volume 4 Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism: Precarity, Class, and the Neoliberal Subject Edited by Chris Hann and Jonathan Parry Volume 3 When Things Become Property: Land Reform, Authority, and Value in Postsocialist Europe and Asia Thomas Sikor, Stefan Dorondel, Johannes Stahl and Phuc Xuan To Volume 2 Oikos and Market: Explorations in Self-Sufficiency after Socialism Edited by Stephen Gudeman and Chris Hann

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/series/max-planck

Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future Stories from Global Frontiers

° Joost Beuving

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2023 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2023 Joost Beuving All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Beuving, Joost, author. Title: Theorizing entrepreneurship : stories from global frontiers / Joost Beuving. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2023. | Series: Max Planck studies in anthropology and economy ; volume 11 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023000731 (print) | LCCN 2023000732 (ebook) | ISBN 9781805390046 (hardback) | ISBN 9781805390053 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Entrepreneurship. | Businesspeople. Classification: LCC HB615 .B4467 2023 (print) | LCC HB615 (ebook) | DDC 338/.04--dc23/eng/20230428 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023000731 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023000732 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-­1-80539-­004-­6 hardback ISBN 978-­1-80539-­005-­3 ebook https://doi.org/10.3167/9781805390046

The study of the human condition is not the same as the study of the spread of viruses and the density of clouds and the movements of the stars. Human nature does not follow laws like the law of gravity, and to believe that is to take an oath to a new religion. —Jill Lepore, If Then

° Contents List of Illustrationsviii Prologueix Acknowledgementsxv Introduction.  The Problem of the Future in Studying Entrepreneurship1 Chapter 1. Time and Entrepreneurship in Social Theory: Barth, Schumpeter and Keynes

23

Chapter 2. The Social Construction of Individualism: Fish Entrepreneurs on Lake Victoria, Uganda

44

Chapter 3. Profit-­Making and Dreaming of Fortunes: Second-­hand Car Dealers in Cotonou, Benin

68

Chapter 4. Telling Stories with Numbers: The Social Life of Investment Bankers

97

Chapter 5. The Relevance of the Policy Context: Aquaculture Entrepreneurs in Greece

123

Conclusions153 Epilogue: Value and Validity of the Case Study Method170 References193 Index of Subjects207 Index of Key Thinkers215

° Illustrations Figures Figure 2.1. Lake Victoria and the research area in Masaka district, including the Ssese islands 49 Figure 2.2. Business contacts, Herman Kirimega 54 Figure 2.3. Business contacts, Bosco Ssekyewa 55 Figure 3.1. Shipping routes and major car markets in Western Europe74 Figure 3.2. Shipping routes, ports, trade flows and major car markets in West Africa 74 Figure 3.3. Port and car markets in Cotonou 77 Figure 3.4. Business contacts, Abdul 83 Figure 4.1. Business contacts, Bill Broeksmit 108 Figure 5.1. Greece and important points in the company histories 130 Figure 5.2. Business contacts, Galaxidi 132 Figure 5.3. Business contacts, Selonda 136

Tables Table 2.1. Survey of boat ownership among 109 fish entrepreneurs50 Table 2.2. Survey of four prominent boat owners during a two-­week period 52 Table 3.1. Average selling prices on the Cotonou car market 73 Table 4.1. Bankers’ suicides key statistics 119

° Prologue This is an anthropological study that tells stories about entrepreneurship, so let me open this book with one. It is a Tuesday morning, halfway through January 2001, still very early with sunrise a few hours away. I get off the city bus that has taken me from the central station to a residential area in the northeast of the city of Utrecht, The Netherlands. Given the early hour, it is surprising that the bus is filled to capacity: it will be another hour before the city comes to life and the morning rush hour begins. The composition of my fellow passengers gives a first indication as to why. Almost all of them are young men, and many are dressed in oversized winter coats, perhaps to protect them from the winter cold, though the weather this morning is actually not that bad. Their behaviour is also noteworthy. They all get off with me at the same bus stop and then walk in small groups through the residential area where the houses are still in deep rest. An early riser could see how the groups of men stride towards what appears to be a large, open area surrounded by a man-­high iron fence. Swelling noises emanating from it give an indication as to their destination: in the distance, the sound of revving car engines can be heard mixed with the busy chatter of a large crowd. As usual, I had boarded the bus unaccompanied, and I decide to walk with three men with a distinctive West African appearance. On the bus, I had overheard them conversing in French, and with my rusty school French I ask if I can join them, to which they agree with a curt nod. The men appear to be ill at ease, they cast nervous glances here and there; meanwhile, one of them is looking at a scrap of paper with what appears to be directions. We enter the gate towards the end of the fence, where a security guard gives us a stern glance to which the men respond with some hesitation, and then the guard admits us; the three men look visibly relieved. Once inside, we can see a large number of neatly parked cars, at which the men stare for a moment. They then huddle around the scrap of paper, and I can see that on the back is written what appears to be a neatly prepared shopping list. The list, on closer inspection, contains brands and types of cars, with further details, such as the year of manufacture and special options like air-­conditioning, written between brackets. The three

x  •   Prologue

then look about them, straighten their shoulders and walk towards the waiting cars. As the above fragment suggests, the men have come to visit the Utrecht Veemarkt (literally: cattle market), at that time one of western Europe’s largest open-­air second-­hand car markets (following the pace of gentrification, it was closed and subsequently transformed into a luxurious residential area a few years later). Traditionally, the Utrecht Veemarkt catered for the national second-­hand car market, and it was one of many such markets across western Europe. During the 1990s however, Utrecht Veemarkt transformed into a major hub in a global frontier of second-­ hand car dealing, bringing together a wide range of groups of traders, but also transporters, financiers, street-­level bureaucrats, mechanics and so on from across the world. From the Utrecht Veemarkt, a multitude of connections developed with major ­seaports – ­the port of Antwerp in ­particular – ­but also Amsterdam and Hamburg. Here, the second-­hand cars were put on specialized car-­carrying ships to overseas destinations, chief among which were those in West Africa. That I ran into West African men on this early Tuesday morning is therefore no coincidence; the vast majority of those visiting the Utrecht Veemarkt hail from that part of the world, often exploiting their personal networks to export second-­hand cars with a view to making some money. Later in the morning, I run into the three men again, and over plastic cups of weak coffee I strike up a conversation with them. They confide in  me that this is their first visit to Utrecht, matching my observations at the bus stop. The men, who happen to be cousins, originate from Mali, in West Africa, and they have lived in Brussels for a few years, not far from the Midi station, home to a large community of West African migrants. They have held an assortment of small jobs, meanwhile economizing on daily expenses to allow them to save up money. With their savings, they had ventured into second-­hand car trading in Brussels but, because there were so many others doing likewise, they found it difficult to make a profit. A local friend had steered them towards the Utrecht Veemarkt and provided them with directions. He had also advised them to wear the oversized coats: to prevent prying eyes from seeing how much cash they were carrying. But the friend had forgotten to mention one ­important thing. The three men had boarded a train from Brussels, expecting to be able to drive the cars that they would purchase in Utrecht back to Brussels. This turned out to be an unexpected problem: none of the cars they were considering buying that morning had the required MOT certificate. They could thus not drive them back home on the public road, although this was essential for their further business plans. Disappointed with this unforeseen outcome, they finished their coffee

Prologue  *  xi

and wandered back to the bus stop empty handed, returning home by train. This story points to an economic universe with which I became acquainted during the early 2000s. My acquaintance did not follow from design: I stumbled on the fascinating world of the second-­hand car trade through happenstance. I was trained in tropical land use with a minor in development sociology at Wageningen University, a university with a strong focus on agriculture, and I was destined for a professional future as a rural development worker. For several reasons, I had lost my appetite for this career perspective and I began looking for a job in The Netherlands, not sure what I wanted to do with the rest of my professional life. On graduation in 1998, through a study friend I landed a position at INZET, an advocacy organization based in Amsterdam that sought to improve the negotiating power of poor countries in the South in international trade. My supervisor at INZET, Joyce Kortlandt, had formulated the audacious idea of looking into the export of second-­hand cars from Europe to West Africa. At the time, the use of old cars from Europe was associated with environmental pollution in West African cities. My supervisor’s idea was further to make second-­hand car exporting countries such as The Netherlands pay for the health fall-­out in West Africa allegedly caused by the cars’ exhaust emissions. Although my academic interest in the environmental and health aspect was lukewarm, I quickly warmed to the idea of finding out more about the Europe–West Africa second-­hand car trade. The task at hand consisted of a desk study scrutinizing European export statistics, but not long into the project I decided to visit the Utrecht Veemarkt about which I had read in the national newspaper while preparing for the topic. During my successive visits to the Utrecht market, various riddles for research began to suggest themselves. For instance, the three men were cousins, and they prepared for their trip by relying on a friend, so how do social relations affect second-­hand car dealers’ decision-­making processes? Did the fact that the friend had supplied them with incomplete information perhaps say something about larger social dynamics in the car business; might they have been cheated, for instance? Also, the men resorted to a particular behaviour: they had come wearing oversized coats to avoid others inferring what their plans were in terms of spending money. But why was it important to conceal this? How could others possibly benefit from this knowledge, and how would that knowledge then translate into an economic advantage? The logistical complexity of the second-­hand car business presented a further riddle. Here is a business linking various parts of the world through bureaucratic practices (the MOT requirement is a case in point) and logistical procedures (getting a car actually shipped out involves reams of paperwork); a basic understanding of these appears

xii  •   Prologue

key in business success. But how do entrepreneurs such as the three men prepare for that, and how do their preparations (or lack thereof) affect the outcome of the business? Finally, what to make of the revving of the car engines that dominates the soundscape of the Utrecht market? Was this perhaps a way to test the car’s qualities in the absence of other diagnostic tools? And why was such testing actually needed? I attempted to find answers to these research riddles once I had secured funding for a PhD project. The PhD resulted in various journal articles and eventually a dissertation (in 2006) that offered partial answers; an explicit theoretical statement tying together the various riddles remained elusive. However, I felt sufficiently inspired to look for further leads in new research. This began with a study of the social life of fishermen on Lake Victoria. Again, this began as an unplanned step. An evening spent in an Amsterdam café with a friend who had undertaken a study in rural Uganda sparked my interest. I learnt that once upon a time fishing on Lake Victoria may have been a local affair, catering for domestic food markets, but in the course of the 1990s a global frontier had begun to form connecting the shores of the lake via long and complex export chains to overseas supermarkets. Obviously, fishing is not the same as car dealing, but as I worked on this project it dawned on me that observing the Lake Victoria fishermen resulted in similar research questions. For instance, I learnt how fishermen operate in small teams, and how their composition is rarely stable. At the same time, they face numerous difficulties: finding fish may take many days (the fishermen do not have dependable diagnostic tools such as sonar at their disposal); the catch is often rejected by the fish-­processing factories (they look for a uniform size distribution to speed up the fileting); and their fishing gear may be destroyed by bad weather or be stolen. In view of this, I wondered about the social forces shaping the fishermen’s entrepreneurial behaviour, and how that affected the organization and planning that goes into the fishing. With these riddles partially solved, I subsequently became interested in the role of macroeconomic policy, especially economic reform; this struck me as an important condition impacting on the questions in which I was interested. The expected outcome of reform is economic revival and, if this is true, it should be evident in growth in firm activity, especially export sectors. I therefore shifted my attention to a study of aquaculture entrepreneurs in Greece. This Mediterranean country saw the creation of what appeared to be a more favourable business c­ limate – t­ he anticipated result of economic reform policies promoted by a neoliberal reform agenda (austerity). In the same movement, local Greek entrepreneurs pioneered the farming of marine fish for export that found a ready overseas market and attracted foreign investments. Importantly, in the context of the Greek

Prologue  *  xiii

fish export boom, different forms of entrepreneurial behaviour appear to have formed. I observed how some groups of Greek aquaculture entrepreneurs take small and cautious steps towards the future, basing their economic decisions primarily on practical considerations. Yet, I noted how others resort to grand and sweeping gestures that seem to ignore entirely the multitude of practicalities that go into farming fish. These observations sensitized me to the possibility that, in the same policy environment, entrepreneurs may form different ideas about what they consider to be a good business opportunity (or not). A mechanistic explanation whereby entrepreneurial behaviour is primarily a response to a macroeconomic environment may therefore be defective. I gradually began to realize that what actually happens in firms in the sense of how entrepreneurs form ideas about the future in a changing business environment is an essential driver of entrepreneurial behaviour. Although by this time I had begun to gain a stronger sense of theoretical direction, pointing towards the relation between entrepreneurial behaviour and the future, I also realized that my three cases were biased by an important common element: car trading, fish exporting and fish farming have a correspondence in a shared world of directly observable facts: cars and fish, as well as the equipment and organizing practices that surround them, have tangible properties. To encapsulate a more comprehensive theoretical statement, I then added the world of investment banking as a fourth case. This was based on the consideration that one cannot see a securitized derivative or some other financial product to the extent that one can see a car or a fish; financial products are merely represented as numbers on a screen or a sheet of paper. I further learnt that investment banking had boomed since the 1980s, coinciding with the creation of a multitude of new financial products, providing fertile testing ground for my unfolding theoretical idea. A study of secondary source material grounded in a rich corpus of investigative journalism suggests the following additional riddles. First, in view of the intangibility of financial products, how are the basic facts of banking established? It is especially relevant to note that those who purport to be experts in t­ his – ­bankers, financial t­ raders – r­ arely agree on key definitions. This is linked to what emerged as the second riddle: investment banking appears to be a closed world where social boundaries are controlled ­fervently – ­outsiders do not get in easily, but, more importantly, neither do insiders get out easily. (This changed after the financial crisis when tenacious researchers brought to light several scandals in the financial world; their work made writing the banking chapter possible.) How does the resulting social entrapment then rhyme with the noted dissensus about the basic facts, and how does this affect how, in the financial world, entrepreneurs look towards the future?

xiv  •   Prologue

Trying to find answers to the numerous questions that the four cases presented to me has occupied me over the past two decades; in fact, it does so to the present day. In the study that lies before you, I am suggesting answers that hopefully result in a better theoretical understanding of entrepreneurial behaviour. That said, I must also caution against too optimistic expectations. First, these are perhaps not full answers to the extent that they give a comprehensive overview of car dealing, fish exporting, fish farming and banking. The cases that follow merely seek to provide a ‘best fit’ to a theoretical statement. Second, this book does not offer some grand theory of entrepreneurship. In fact, one of my underlying concerns in writing this book is my growing dissatisfaction with grand theory in advancing new ideas about entrepreneurial behaviour. At the same time, new ideas are urgently needed in order to come to grips with the challenges of the twenty-­first-­century global economy. It is true that entrepreneurship in our era has produced tremendous economic successes that make modern society possible; yet, it is also credited with worldwide economic meltdown, uprooting the everyday life of our ­own – ­and quite possibly also ­following – ­generations. An important message of this book is that both outcomes may be different sides of the same coin. Dissecting this coin is what this book is ultimately about. I hope to make this clear by expanding on stories of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial behaviour, adding an extra layer of explanation by way of theorizing. Now, in order to move forward; let us continue with some more stories.

° Acknowledgements Work for this study began about twenty years ago, and it took me on an academic journey to various academic institutions in The Netherlands, especially University of Amsterdam, VU University Amsterdam and Radboud University Nijmegen. I thank my colleagues there for their valuable support, with special mention of Professor Toon van Meijl and Professor Eelke de Jong. I thank the numerous individuals in West Africa, East Africa, Europe and the United States who granted me access to their lives for this study, especially Abdul, Bosco, Herman, John, Lara and Spiros. Hopefully, I have given your stories the voice they deserve. The fieldwork for this book was made possible with funding from the Wenner-­ Gren Foundation, the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, WOTRO Science for Global Development, and various Faculty and Department travel grants, for which I am grateful. In 2021, I wrote an initial version of Theorizing Entrepreneurship at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle, Germany), while affiliated there as a visiting fellow. I am indebted to Professor Biao Xiao, a director of the MPI, for his generous invitation, as well as to various MPI colleagues for their stimulating thoughts, with special mention of Professor Chris Brumann, Dr Mario Schmidt and Professor Thomas Widlok. The Dutch Association of Volunteer Organizations (NOV) kindly offered me a working space in my hometown, Utrecht, which expedited the writing process. I thank Mark Molenaar and Joost van Alkemade for their generous hospitality and welcome. Many important insights that found their way into this book first emerged in conversations with my academic friends Professor Jan Kees van Donge, Dr Edwin Rap, Dr Jens Andersson and Dr Geert de Vries. Also important were the numerous parenthetical conversations about economic life with Dr Jill Alpes, Dr Eelke Heemskerk, Dr Hans Marks and Dr Luuk van Kempen. I thank you for your unconditional faith in this study as well as for your numerous insightful comments. Catherine O’Dea is thanked for language editing: your professional touch is present everywhere in the book. You furthermore planted the seed of this book many years ago during a memorable visit to Dublin.

xvi  •   Acknowledgements

At Berghahn, I thank Anthony Mason and Tom Bonnington for their professional editorship, and the editors of the Berghahn book series ‘Max Planck Studies in Anthropology and Economy’, Professor Chris Hann and Professor Stephen Gudeman, for welcoming this study in the series. Two anonymous reviewers took time off from their busy work schedules to review this book, for which I am deeply thankful. Parts of Chapter 2 were previously published as ‘Chequered Fortunes in Global Exports’ (Beuving 2015); parts of Chapter 3 appeared previously as ‘Cotonou’s Klondike’ (Beuving 2004); parts of Chapter 5 were published as ‘Business Events as Fieldwork Site?’ (Beuving 2019a); parts of the Epilogue were previously published as ‘Contacts in a Box’ (Beuving 2019b) and as ‘Ethnography’s Future in the Big Data Era’ (Beuving 2020). This book could not have been written without the continuous love and support of my partner, Dr Tessel Jonquière, and our two daughters, Coosje and Mijnke: without the three of you, my future makes no sense. Many have contributed to this book, but the sole responsibility for errors and omissions is obviously mine. Utrecht/Nijmegen, September 2022

° Introduction The Problem of the Future in Studying Entrepreneurship

[P]eople make choices based on expectations about an uncertain future. Decisions like ­whether … t­ o buy new factory equipment or lay off workers [are] never obviously rational or irrational in the moment, because long-­ term consequences cannot be predicted. —Zachary Carter, The Price of Peace

Background to the Study This anthropological study tells stories about entrepreneurial behaviour with the purpose of arriving at a new interpretation of such behaviour that explains not only goal-­rational (economic) behaviour, but also behaviour that seems irrational (non-­ economic).1 Such a new, comprehensive interpretation is urgently needed to overcome a major contradiction in contemporary entrepreneurship studies. Various global economic shocks, epitomized by the 2008 financial crisis, have sounded the intellectual death knell for the optimistic idea that entrepreneurs generate business successes by responding rationally to a stimulating economic environment. The wholesale failure of this hitherto celebrated idea has swayed the pendulum towards interpretations emphasizing irrational forces in entrepreneurial behaviour, such as overconfidence or herd behaviour. Yet, entirely dismissing the idea of goal-­rational entrepreneurial behaviour is not very satisfactory either, as many entrepreneurs are found to behave as if they are goal-­rational – a­ stance that finds apparent support in the economic successes of twenty-­first-­century global business tycoons such as Warren Buffet (Schroeder 2009), Jack Ma (Clark 2016), Elon Musk (Soni 2022) and Steve Jobs (Isaacson 2015). In order to solve this intellectual conundrum, I argue that we must take seriously the problem of time, in particular future time, in studying entrepreneurship. The temporal dimension of entrepreneurship has been ­overlooked – ­and sometimes deliberately ­ignored – ­in

2  •   Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future

academic discourse over the past forty years, essentially construing entrepreneurial behaviour as timeless. To clarify how I bring time back into the study of entrepreneurship, let me continue with a brief ethnographic fragment, recorded many years ago in West Africa. It is a cold and rainy June afternoon in 2004, on an ordinary market day in the port town of Cotonou, home to West Africa’s largest cluster of second-­hand cars from Europe. My Beninese friend Abdul, a man in his early thirties who has been dealing in cars for about two years, is seated next to me on the bonnet of a tired-­looking second-­hand Toyota Corolla. Abdul heaves a deep sigh and casts an empty look at the virtually deserted car market. It does not look like he will sell the Corolla today. It has been about two weeks since Abdul last sold a car, and, when this happened, he sold it at a loss. His cousins in Europe, who sent him the car to sell on their behalf, had unexpectedly pressed him for m ­ oney – a­ nd not in a pleasant way. With his financial reserves down for some time, Abdul had little choice but to accept a low price and forgo his own cut: a serious decision, as selling cars constitutes his livelihood. He is therefore in trouble. ‘If this carries on, it will soon be finished for me,’ Abdul explains. I remind him that he made a similar comment a few months earlier. He offers me a wry smile and repeats what he told me then: ‘Tomorrow may look better; you know, after all, car business is good business!’ Abdul’s remark is even more surprising given the wider context from which he is speaking. From a distance, it is hard to credibly maintain that the West African trade in second-­hand cars constitutes good business. That became apparent to me when I scrutinized the financial accounts of several of my research participants halfway through my fieldwork in Cotonou. It was obvious that few of them succeeded in generating a stable income from car trading, and, for the vast majority of them, the car business consisted of scraping together meagre funds at the very best, and bankruptcies were a common outcome of their business. To some extent, these business misfortunes relate to the position in which Abdul finds himself. He is a reseller of cars, meaning that he has limited control over prices: he has to accept what his European cousins offer him. A similar pattern of losses and stagnation emerges, however, regarding traders who import second-­hand cars directly themselves. They too struggle to make ends meet, and only a few have accumulated sufficient capital to allow them to move into the more secure world of wholesaling and transporting cars, which is where the large profits accrue. To illustrate this peculiar pattern with a key statistic: of the 107 car traders that I consulted during fieldwork, only about a dozen could be considered as having developed a stable business. So why is it, then, that Abdul insists that car business is good business?

Introduction  *  3

The scene with Abdul stuck with me, and, after a long gestation, it eventually culminated in my writing this study. Over time, I came to realize that what he said is more an incantation than a factual statement based on careful scrutiny of the Cotonou trade in all its aspects. By talking about the second-­hand car business as a success, he attempts to exorcize what I eventually came to appreciate as the indeterminacy of the future: Abdul’s ‘today may look impossible, but who knows what tomorrow holds in store’. An interesting point about Abdul’s incantation is that most of my car-­ trading research participants in Cotonou also resorted to it. In fact, they repeated it tirelessly; many otherwise gloomy conversations ended on this seemingly hopeful note. Importantly, it appeared to be part of a broader universe where perceived uncertainties are considerable: car prices fluctuate unpredictably, the car’s condition on arrival in the port is usually a surprise, the bureaucracy surrounding the car trade is Kafkaesque, to mention a few prominent ones. In this turbulent world where few traders succeed, they continuously recycle the phrase ‘car business is good business’ as if it were a mantra in a religious ritual, not unlike the incantation of the Hail Mary in the Catholic Rosary. These reflections gradually led me to a broader insight. Entrepreneurs like Abdul face an epistemic (episteme: system of knowing) dilemma in their everyday lives. On the one hand, they cannot know with certainty what tomorrow or next ­week – ­let alone next ­year – ­will look like. This dilemma is implied in the Carter quotation above. Modern market economies, such as the global car business alluded to above, generate from within them an autonomous dynamic of social interaction, or Eigendynamik (Elias 1984), making it difficult, if not impossible, to know in advance what the future will hold. On the other hand, entrepreneurs face the reality of pressing concerns that need to be addressed immediately, such as the arrival of a new competitor or the opening up of a new business opportunity; or, in Abdul’s case, the persistent requests of migrant kinsmen that cannot be ignored without serious consequences. Once one accepts that the future is indeterminate, a major question for understanding entrepreneurship becomes: how do entrepreneurs take decisions today when their consequences will not reveal themselves until that future has arrived?2

Studying Entrepreneurs’ Future-Work The ethnographic cases surveyed in this study point to the importance of what I call future-­work: a sensitizing concept that denotes the social practices, rituals and language that purport to soften, neutralize or smoothen future unknown unknowns (this term reappears in the study and it refers to

4  •   Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future

that which we do not know that we do not know. It contrasts with known unknowns such as a cancelled flight. Unknown unknowns are events that nobody can possibly foresee or foretell because they defy experience and imagination). It is a deliberate choice to connect the term work with the term future.3 The future may be a point for metaphysical ­reflection – ­and in many cases it i­s – ­but this study adopts the position that entrepreneurs create the future by acting towards it. Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai perceptively writes: ‘We need to remember that the future is not just a technical or neutral space, but is shot through with affect and sensation. … The many forms that the future takes are also shaped by these affects and sensations, for they give to various configurations … their specific gravity, their traction, and their texture’ (Appadurai 2013: 286–87, my emphasis). Studying the various social processes through which future-­work results in new configurations, or affirms or challenges existing ones, presents a particular objective of this study. To make this happen, the study regards acting as a concrete activity: it is something that entrepreneurs do. (Incidentally, this stance has the methodological advantage of opening up future-­work to direct o ­ bservation – a­ point to which I return more fully in the Epilogue.) Creating the future further requires effort. As this study shows, entrepreneurs expend considerable physical and mental energies putting the future into existence. They form particular ideas about the ­future – ­some are accurate and have great predictive value, others are flawed or ill-­conceived, yet others are pure fantasies that have little bearing on the real w ­ orld – ­that guide their economic actions into future existence. In other words, entrepreneurs create the future by working their ideas of it on it, and achieving this requires friction (Shackle [1952] 2013). Further, future-­work is transformative: it matters what entrepreneurs do for the course of the future, as individuals but especially in their collective manifestation as a social group. Such transformations may not necessarily be desired ones. As the ethnographic cases in this study show, future outcomes may not be congruent with future expectations, and a major point for further study is to understand better how entrepreneurs deal with negative and/or unanticipated outcomes, considering especially how this affects the epistemic dilemma as they themselves appreciate it. The study thus also looks at the consequences of future-­work, considering especially how entrepreneurs’ current social practices, rituals and language that work towards the future create the conditions for new cycles of future-­work activity (Beuving and de Vries 2015: 33). The relation between future-­work and its consequences is rarely straightforward, and almost never results from planned effort. The (Scottish) Enlightenment philosopher Adam Ferguson aptly puts it thus: ‘Every step and every moment of

Introduction  *  5

the multitude, even in what are termed the enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of human design’ (Ferguson [1767] 2007: 164). In other words, economic futures may be the direct result of future-­work but cannot be reduced to the intended outcome of entrepreneurs’ purposeful actions. Although in the language of entrepreneurs such intentions are often emphasized, putting centre stage the creativity and ingenuity of the individual entrepreneur in commanding and controlling others, this study subscribes to the idea that working the future is a social construction. Future-­work is thus a process that involves many others, and that processual way of dealing with the unknown future is therefore rife with unintended consequences; rarely do those around us behave precisely according to our expectations and w ­ ishes – i­f only. Acknowledging the social construction of future-­work has an important consequence for the interpretive approach to which this study subscribes. To foreshadow a more comprehensive argument that follows, an important part of the work undertaken in this study consists of making visible specific groups or networks or other social figurations where particular interpretations of the future are stabilized. Many of these i­nterpretations – t­he myths, dreams or fantasies through which entrepreneurs anticipate the ­future – ­are fickle and they blow away quickly like the wind; few beyond a tiny circle take them seriously, and they do not accumulate into a serious following that animates social behaviour. Yet, other interpretations somehow solidify into a socially shared belief about what the future has in store and have the capacity to animate entrepreneurial decision-­ making beyond a handful of individuals. The fact that many but not all car dealers that I encountered in Cotonou share Abdul’s views about the future, and draw on similar incantations to exorcize it, is a relevant social fact from the viewpoint of this study: it raises important questions about the social foundations of entrepreneurial behaviour. Future-­work is thus construed as a socially organized activity, something that becomes effective once actors begin to attune their behaviours according to how they expect others to regard the future. Entrepreneurial behaviour, like other forms of behaviour, does not operate in a social void, however at odds this may be with the individualistic discourses on which many entrepreneurs (including those featuring in this study) draw.

Towards an Ontogenetic Interpretation of Time By closely scrutinizing entrepreneurs’ future-­work and its conditions and consequences, the study seeks to add to the social science literature on

6  •   Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future

entrepreneurship with an anthropological perspective that makes central the understanding of time. The study posits that time is not a neutral medium in the sense that chemicals in a reaction vessel are to the inert reagent liquid in which they are absorbed; if the various events that constitute economic life are linked, something special can happen that breathes life into time. Time may be considered with an indifferent shrug, for instance when routines prevail and the future seems determinate, or its importance may be magnified in the face of a sudden new business opportunity, fuelling new expectations of the future. Moreover, time may be manipulated in the sense of presenting a particular image of the future, shrouding particular parts of it, such as by not revealing competitors’ offers in a bid. Further theorizing time is a key objective of this study. This objective is rooted in the various cases of entrepreneurial behaviour with which I became acquainted in the context of two decades of ethnographic fieldwork. The anthropological perspective to which I contribute with this study is grounded in these cases with the explicit aim of illuminating the lived-­on-­the-­ground experiences of several entrepreneurs, or those aspiring to be. The methodological implications of adopting an ethnographic case study methodology are explained in more detail in the Epilogue; for now, suffice it to say that cases are detailed descriptions of a social situation, or event, and that from the empirical details the wider social structure or culture can be inferred. The perspective is hence also firmly grounded in social theory: the study seeks to develop theory as it emerges from ethnographic findings. It begins with a few broad assumptions (for instance, it does not adopt an a priori stance about whether or not entrepreneurs are successful in their future-­work) that are gradually refined to fit the empirical situation under study (Glaser and Corbin [1998] 2008). To further clarify the processual nature of the theoretical perspective, let me briefly consider the intellectual genesis of this study. Future indeterminacy first appeared as a central theme in my study of entrepreneurship during my dissertation research (early 2000s) when I studied ethnographically car dealers in the Europe–West Africa second-­hand car trade (the Abdul fragment draws on it). As part of my intellectual training, I reviewed the work of an important voice in the anthropology of entrepreneurship, development anthropologist Norman Long. In the 1960s and 1970s, Long pioneered an actor-­oriented approach to planned economic development in the rural Global South at a time when structuralist interpretations of it prevailed (Long 1977; Leys 1996). Long was concerned with understanding how capitalist penetration in some rural areas in the Global South resulted in stagnation and capital dis-­accumulation (corresponding with neo-­ Marxist and neo-­ Weberian development theories that prevailed at that time), whereas other areas under comparable political-­economic

Introduction  *  7

regimes of global–local articulation thrived. Local entrepreneurs play a central role in Long’s solution to this intellectual riddle. In his acclaimed Introduction to the Sociology of Rural Development (1977), Long directs attention to enterprising figures in local webs of exchange that manipulate their interpersonal networks to further their economic projects. From Long’s analysis, it transpires that some of these entrepreneurs are better positioned to navigate local exchange webs, thereby stimulating successful entrepreneurship, fuelling capital accumulation and fostering local economic development. In a later publication, Long presents an extended ethnographic case of a multiple family enterprise in the Mantaro Valley in central Peru where he had conducted fieldwork, empirically bringing to life his actor-­oriented approach. That Long published not one but two different iterations of the same case piqued my interest. The 1970s version describes local entrepreneur Romero, a man who realizes several profitable businesses in the Mantaro village of Matahuasi by successfully manipulating an extensive network of useful local connections. Romero is portrayed as a social genius, a man with a remarkable capacity to foresee and foretell what others are up to, bringing him business fortunes. At the end of the story, one is left with the image of a man who has a bright future ahead of him (Long 1979). In the second iteration, published just over thirty years later, the fortunes of the same man, now called Eustaquio (I never figured out why the name change happened), have shifted dramatically. In Long’s words: ‘The days of the Matahuasi-­based multiple family enterprise are now numbered. The interconnections between its various branches of activity have broken apart; it is undercapitalized and will undoubtedly be dissolved on Eustaquio’s death when his children attempt to claim their inheritance’ (Long 2001: 136). Clearly, Romero’s/Eustaquio’s future unfolded in a rather different manner than the original study anticipated: it resulted in failure and stagnation. Much later, it dawned on me that this unexpected twist of events in the Romero/Eustaquio case might in fact be a fundamental characteristic of entrepreneurial behaviour writ large. The fact that Long did not make an explanation of failure and stagnation in entrepreneurship central to his interpretation of entrepreneurial behaviour emerged as a strong motivation to pursue this study. The more I reflected on this point, the more I began to see how entrepreneurs may feel inspired to bend time according to their wishes, yet whether or not they will be successful remains to be seen. This, at the very least, was the central image that emerged in my study of the second-­hand car business. Then, I began to observe a similar pattern during a subsequent postdoctoral study of entrepreneurship among entrepreneurs in the Nile perch export business on Lake Victoria, East Africa. The fish entrepreneurs’ futures appear to be indeterminate, and they form

8  •   Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future

particular expectations of tomorrow and beyond, though in a different manner than the second-­hand car dealers. Rather than focusing on immediate riches as the second-­hand car dealers do, they anticipate the future as an individualistic project. In a third study, now looking into the economic life of farmed fish producers in Greece, I observed yet another case of entrepreneurs struggling with the vagaries of a shifting future. In this case, outside actors appeared to be important: a study of career histories unveils a pattern of expecting rescue from outside actors and capital in a form that resembles a cargo cult (Sillitoe 1989). My modest eureka moment acquired more intellectual weight when the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis rekindled attention on the intellectual heritage of British economist Maynard Keynes (Kay and King 2020; Skidelsky 2003). Keynes’ work is discussed more fully in Chapter 1, but a short introduction may be in order here. Keynes was a prominent twentieth-­century economist and philosopher who, during the Interbellum, pioneered a new approach to macroeconomic thinking that contrasted sharply with the laissez-­faire economics of the day. Importantly, Keynes considered the economy to be a collective belief system, rather than a robust, self-­correcting system of equilibrium prices, as was assumed by many of his academic peers at the time. A concrete consequence is that believing in a rosy future makes entrepreneurs more prone to invest in new economic projects, whereas a collective sense of gloom dampens spending enthusiasm. Such collective beliefs make market economies inherently fragile, Keynes argued, because they are subject to unexpected changes. A case in point follows: Keynes lived through the Great Depression triggered by the 1929 stock exchange crash, which he understood as an expression of what observers later termed ‘investor overconfidence’. The story is well known. In the wake of the economic boom in the 1920s, stock traders began to speculate with borrowed money. Problems on the London Stock Exchange led to a fear that stock prices would drop in the United States too, setting in motion a selling mania that produced the very price drops that traders feared (Kindleberger and Aliber [1978] 2005). Keynes attributed such sudden shattering of the belief in future fortunes to what he termed ‘animal spirits’: a spontaneous response to uncertain circumstances that suddenly trigger entrepreneurs into action, for better or for worse (Keynes [1936] 2017). As a way of expressing drivers of economic behaviour that transcend what is conventionally seen as goal-­rational, Keynes’ animal spirits concept does not stand on its own: there are intellectual similarities with the works of other great twentieth-­century thinkers. Consider, for instance, Durkheim’s collective effervescence (Durkheim [1912] 2012), Freud’s Id (Freud [1923] 2010) and Nietzsche’s Dionysian ecstasy (Nietzsche [1962] 1994). This study is not however the place to

Introduction  *  9

survey Keynes’ place in this wave of intellectual innovation that considers nonrational forces in social behaviour. What is relevant here is that closer analysis of my ethnographic cases left me in doubt about Keynes’ solution. Most centrally, I came to see how the animal spirits concept projects an image of economic life as an elusive miracle that defies social analysis, relying instead on ethnographically unsupported group psychology. It is relevant for this study that Keynes never offered empirical material in support of his argument that we would deem credible by the standards of contemporary social (ethnographic) research. There are no interviews with traders or direct observations of events on the trading floor. A further round of study of Keynes’ work that I discovered about a decade later (Carter 2020) brought me in touch with Keynes’ Treatise on Probability ([1919] 2018). This book, far less known than his seminal General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money ([1936] 2017), conceptualizes future indeterminacy in terms to which I could relate ethnographically, and it eventually came to form the intellectual bedrock of this study. Early into my endeavour, I became aware that trying to understand how entrepreneurs create the future through future-­work transcends mere academic curiosity. Entrepreneurship has consequences in the real world, both positive and negative. On the positive side, entrepreneurs’ collective efforts interlock in the formidable economic force that makes possible the modern consumer society with which many of us identify. The negative side receives far less intellectual attention than it deserves, captured by the image of entrepreneurship as an economic meltdown. The economic calamities that spread in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, for instance, underscore how entrepreneurship can degenerate into a toxic panic, dissipating productive capital as well as undermining popular support for the public economic policy necessary to remedy the fallout. Noncrisis-­ related examples also come to mind, such as the spectacular rise and fall of Theranos, a Silicon Valley company purporting to revolutionize blood analysis, whose founder Elizabeth Holmes is at the time of writing convicted of wire fraud and conspiracy to fraud exceeding US$1 billion (the blood analysis devices that she promised never existed) (Carreyrou 2018). These entrepreneurial meltdowns are not isolated incidents of a few rotten apples, as this study shows. They happen when entrepreneurs’ future-­work becomes detached from a common world of observable facts, and pure fantasy and wild speculation can take over from sober, common-­sense imaginations of the future. They thus form an intricate, though regrettable, part of the ‘normal accidents’ (Perrow [1962] 1999) of modern capitalism. Looking at how future-­ work resonates with the common world of observable facts thus contributes to the practical value of this s­tudy – ­although it is not practical in the sense of a textbook on how to make money

10  •   Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future

with a business. Its practical value consists of providing cues and intellectual guidance to help discover what is going on in economic organizations, be they networks of entrepreneurs or firms, or even entire companies, and scrutinize how their dealings act towards the future. Such discovery brings into focus the real economy of men and ­women – m ­ aking and exchanging concrete ideas, things and ­services – ­that appears to have been superseded, at an alarming rate, by the fictive economy that is shrouded in a cloud of obscure financial constructions (Batko 2013). Making future-­work the centrepiece of this study implies considering the rituals of business. For instance, during the 2008 banking crisis, how did senior bank staff continue to convene around the presentation of quarterly figures, projecting a business-­as-­usual image, when rank-­and-­file employees knew what was coming? The study looks at how stories, such as rumours of unexpected gains, trigger investment behaviour, even when there is little substance to support the fabled gains. It considers how social practices, especially how a presentation of the self as self-­made individual, to which many entrepreneurs keenly subscribe, obscures important social processes that constitute entrepreneurial behaviour. From an intellectual history viewpoint, addressing the epistemic dilemma faced by entrepreneurs holds the promise of resolving major intellectual problems with which entrepreneurship scholars have unsuccessfully struggled for a long time. These problems converge on the myth of the goal-­rational (wo)man, or homo economicus, here summarized in ideal-­typical terms as an opportunistic, and economically successful, individual who maximizes profit on the basis of cost calculation (Douglas and Ney 1998). Drawing on advances in the anthropology of time, this study hopes to show how the goal-­rational (wo)man myth centres on the problematic belief that the past and the present offer a sufficiently dependable basis for entrepreneurs to project the future (Gell 2001). Importantly, the myth subscribes to what philosophers of time label as an epistemogenetic interpretation of time: the idea that information about past and present events can be extrapolated into the future in the form of knowledge about that future.4 At first glance, the epistemogenetic interpretation appears intuitively sound: today resembles yesterday to a striking degree, and why should that not be the case tomorrow? Of course, scholars have long considered that there are limits to a person’s cognitive capacity to process information (Simon 1997), and, in practice, advocates of this perspective settle for degrees of knowing about the future; pure knowledge in the sense of full information remains an ideal that is difficult to realize in real life (Stiglitz 2000). There is, however, a problem with this popular interpretation too. For instance, it appears that humans are ill-­equipped to grasp the minute

Introduction  *  11

changes in time according to which the autonomous dynamics of modern market societies t­ ransform – n ­ ot dissimilar to the fabled frog in the boiling pot (Taleb 2011). On a micro level, experimental studies have related this to change blindness in dynamic situations where various sensory inputs compete for our limited attention, resulting in a diminished focus on transformation (Simons and Rensink 2005). Incapable of detecting change, we feel that it is a safe option to assume that in our daily lives, change is too minute to have practical consequences. We further tend to reconstruct time as a continuum in an ex-­post facto rationalization: projecting a step-­ by-­step order and direction onto events where disorder and capriciousness prevail, perhaps in an attempt to create order from the chaos that constitutes everyday life (Munn 1992). The most damning evidence, however, comes from considering major economic events that few financial experts had seen coming, with the economic meltdown that ensued in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis as a recent case in point (Tett 2010). This testifies to the idea that, apparently, there are behavioural forces lurking beneath the surface of modern market economies that somehow escape our attention and never cease to surprise many of us, therefore requiring a better understanding. This study subscribes to an alternative, ontogenetic, interpretation of time that views the future in terms of nondeterministic probabilities: some future outcomes are more likely than others, yet there is no certainty about which outcome will prevail. Or, the autonomous dynamic of modern market economies makes particular future outcomes more plausible than others, yet without fully determining them. The future, in this interpretation, presents itself not so much as an information problem to which various degrees of knowing apply, but as a problem of genuinely not knowing, especially given what we cannot know because there is no past or present precedent: tomorrow’s unknown unknowns. The ontogenetic interpretation, which is elaborated more fully in Chapter 1 in a discussion of three authors who laid the intellectual foundations for the social study of entrepreneurship (Barth, Schumpeter and Keynes), thus argues that having knowledge about the future is a philosophical impossibility because we do not have information about something that has yet to happen (Kay and King 2020). Reasoned to its extreme consequences, this would imply that the very term, knowledge, should not even be applied to things that may, or may not, happen. In that sense, we can know the future only once that future presents itself as the p ­ resent – a­ nd a new future lies ahead of us. Being in the future thus always escapes us, in the sense of Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise: no matter how hard Achilles runs, he can never catch up with the tortoise. This realization does not, of course, mean that we step into the future unprepared. We form ideas about the future,

12  •   Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future

and those ideas, proponents of the ontogenetic interpretation argue, take the form of a belief in probable future outcomes (Gell 2001). Better grasping this hermeneutic character of time in economic life, including how entrepreneurs anticipate the future and weave this into their future-­work, comprises a particular objective of this study, as well as how such anticipation informs their economic behaviour. Viewing the future in terms of probabilities is not the same as discarding goal-­rational (wo)man altogether. Rather, as this study argues, it urges us to reconsider the epistemic foundations of entrepreneurial behaviour. One central observation that this study makes is that some entrepreneurs are perfectly capable of forming ideas about the future that are grounded in observable facts: their future-­work has some predictive value. Finance investor and business tycoon Jim Simons presents a clear example. Simons is a world-­class mathematician who traded a successful career in academia for an even more successful career in finance, where he pioneered what is known as computerized trading (Zuckerman 2019). As a mathematician, Simons realized that prices of commodities and financial products show particular regularities; they are, in the parlance of mathematics, non-­ random. Subsequently, Simons and his team, all prodigy mathematicians, began to collect a great mass of historical price data that they fed into computer programs specialized in the detection of statistical patterns. Once they began to understand these patterns, as a next step they built models trained to predict price movements. Simons, in a popular TED talk, explains how the predictive models were not particularly good at their job, but, and here is the key, they were slightly better than human predictions. When Simons pioneered his mathematical models in the early 1990s, investment decisions were still very much based on traders’ hunches and back-­of-­the-­envelope calculations. Thus, by focusing on the selection of relevant facts, Simons succeeded in probing the future in a way that gave him a slight edge over his competitors, thereby realizing business fortunes (Simon 2015). More central to the thesis of this s­ tudy – ­and closer to the ethnographic record in which it is ­steeped – ­is that goal-­rational (wo)man first and foremost functions as an important behavioural ideal. That is, many of the entrepreneurs presented in this study feel sympathetic towards goal-­ rational (wo)man. (Incidentally, this may perhaps also explain the success of homo economicus in the academic study of entrepreneurship as the basic atom of economic behaviour, confusing popularity with intellectual gravitas [Douglas and Ney 1998].) For instance, Herman Kirimega (he is more fully introduced further on), a local Ugandan fisherman specializing in fishing and exporting Nile perch, readily self-­identifies as an opportunistic individualist; nothing wrong with remaining untied, he states. West African

Introduction  *  13

second-­hand car dealer Abdul, already briefly introduced above, also holds strong ideas about what it takes for an entrepreneur to reap future profits in the car business. The story of investment banker Bill Broeksmit, a prominent banker who worked for Deutsche Bank at the onset of the credit crunch, reveals how cold calculation was essential in the initial take-­off of the derivatives boom in banking. It appears that homo economicus is alive and kicking, rather than on its way out. The genuine sympathies of these entrepreneurs towards goal-­rational (wo)man are hence a sharp warning not to throw out the baby (in this case, the rational choice model) with the bathwater. Thoughtlessly relegating my research participants’ aspirations and experiences that go into the homo economicus behavioural ideal-­type to the intellectual dustbin would be a stark example of unfounded academic arrogance. That said, this study also claims that the rational (wo)man model, which finds a warm home in the epistemogenetic interpretation of time, is poor at describing what is actually going on in the social lives of Abdul, Bill and Herman. Observing their social practices reveals that they do not behave as opportunistic individualists calculating costs in order to maximize profit under all circumstances. It is a behavioural ideal that appears to function under particular social conditions; or it is part of a system of values that needs to be factored in, its value rationality (Weber [1968] 1978). Herman presents himself as an individualist because he has little faith in working together with his peers and colleagues, although, paradoxically, he is embedded in a large network of local contacts. Abdul professes to a strong belief in making a windfall gain, because capital accumulation through small steps does not strike him as genuinely entrepreneurial; in reality however, he makes a loss. Bill, with his professed commitment to calculation, gradually saw his position at Deutsche become eroded once the upper circles of Deutsche fell captive to an unprecedented future optimism. His warnings about the risks of derivatives products were ignored as Deutsche rode the waves of speculative banking. Rational (wo)man, therefore, has moral but little descriptive value in their universes. To resolve this intellectual puzzle, this study posits that goal-­rational (wo)man is an essential ingredient in what sociologists call the presentation of the self. That evocative and inspiring term builds on Goffman’s dramaturgical model, viewing society as a theatre, with social life being structured by roles that are rehearsed backstage and performed onstage (Goffman [1956] 1990). In terms of the epistemic model of entrepreneurial behaviour, entrepreneurs present themselves as goal-­rational (wo)men as part of their onstage performance: to their networks of colleagues and competitors, their staff, the bureaucrats with whom they deal and so on. This is where the economic future is construed as a knowable reality: an

14  •   Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future

ordered canvas where future indeterminacy has little place. Entrepreneurs prepare for this performance in the more intimate sphere of backstage relations: the domestic sphere of spousal relations, trusted friends or professional confidants such as therapists, where they can share their doubts about the possibility of a predictable future. Here, there is no need to uphold an image of visionary foreteller, as a different set of social expectations operates: as spouse, friend or therapeutic client. (Incidentally, this is an important theme of the classical American novel, The Great Gatsby [Fitzgerald (1925) 2018].) Obviously, this is fruitful stuff for the interpretive social scientist who wants to find out what is happening on the inside; in what social forms are the future’s indeterminacies encapsulated? Approaching goal-­rational behaviour as a performance helps to transcend a major contradiction that has occupied economic anthropology since its inception during the early twentieth century (Hann and Hart 2011). This focuses on a distinction between what economic anthropologist Stephen Gudeman in a recent publication perceptively summarizes as house and market economies. House, in this view, refers to the logic of exchange as it can be observed in circles of social affines such as the household or family/kin group in which capital accumulation is conceived of in terms of longer-­term reciprocity. In the figurative logic of house economies, social hierarchies are tolerated as long as there is redistribution. The example that comes to mind is a local chief who accrues wealth by receiving tributes from a network of followers, which is shared once a year during a grand feast. A modern example would be a café owner who throws a lavish Christmas party for the café staff. Market refers to the logic of buying and selling between anonymous others in which each exchanging party tries to get everything out of the exchange; this makes sense given that there are no further social commitments between them. Gudeman makes it further plausible that the two are intimately linked: ‘the market side of the economy does not function without its ­sociable … ­counterpart, even as it denies this dependence’ (Gudeman 2015: 91–92). By approaching economic life from a dramaturgical viewpoint, this study builds on Gudeman’s observation that goal-­rational and value-­rational behaviour point to interconnected realities. But the study adds something too. Rather than viewing economic logic as a modus operandi that corresponds to particular institutional settings that inspire various forms of entrepreneurial behaviour (exchanging/redistributing versus accumulation), this study situates both goal-­rational and value-­rational behaviour in the same movement of economic action. The cases of entrepreneurial behaviour that I am about to discuss are part and parcel of global capitalism, yet the cases unveil the simultaneous working of a socially situated logic of entrepreneurial action and the performance of entrepreneurial behaviour

Introduction  *  15

as self-­interested, opportunistic profit seeking. This raises a new set of challenging questions about how house and market logic operate at the same time and in the same setting, rather than referring to different institutional settings, as Gudeman seems to argue. Or, in Goffmanian language, how does a presentation of the self as an individualist profit maximizer square with observed economic practice that points towards the operation of a particular value set in one and the same economic setting? Framing the problem in terms of a presentation of the self makes it possible to assess goal-­rational and value-­rational behaviour in what in analytical geometry is known as vector analysis: how are house and market configured, and in what direction does their alignment push entrepreneurship? The analysis of everyday language plays a special role in that ambition: ideas about entrepreneurship are expressed in language. Language is hence an important semiotic vessel for understanding entrepreneurs’ future-­ work. With language, I have in mind conversation and speech as it features in ordinary language analysis (Searle 1996). Consider, for instance, the stories that entrepreneurs tell as part of their future-­work, for example about the expected direction of a price trend or the foreseeable opening up of new markets thanks to macroeconomic policy measures. Once such stories gain sufficient traction, they can nudge entrepreneurs towards particular economic behaviour in a manner that resembles a self-­fulfilling prophecy: talking about future fortunes can make such fortunes happen (Shiller 2019). This may not necessarily be positive. For instance, this study shows how Abdul’s remark that car business is good business is part of a widespread dream of business success. It motivates scores of West African entrepreneurs to continue trading cars, even though real profits are few and far between. A similar pattern can be seen among investment bankers who began to talk favourably about the application of mathematics to finance in the 1990s, known as structured finance (Tett 2010). This resulted in a whole new genre of complex financial p ­ roducts – ­credit derivatives in ­particular – w ­ hose risks few finance traders really understood, at the same time ushering in a collective spirit of invincibility: see Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities (Wolfe 1987). Language matters, therefore, as a symbolic vehicle that shapes entrepreneurs’ future-­work.5

Overview of the Study To further unpack the epistemic model of entrepreneurship, this study explores four ethnographic cases of entrepreneurial behaviour, briefly mentioned in previous pages. These are extended cases, and, as the reader will come to appreciate in the coming chapters, an extended case is academic

16  •   Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future

storytelling that revolves around detailed descriptions of the behaviours of only a handful of individuals.6 In the Epilogue, I elaborate on this particular methodology, but a few words upfront may help to appraise the knowledge claims that a case study methodology can make. First, anthropological knowledge advances by observing social behaviour in a delineated part of social reality, or a case, yet without making a claim of statistical representativeness. This does not mean, however, that extended cases, and the stories contained within them, do not have wider ramifications. Generalization from extended cases follows the road of theoretical inference: from the detailed descriptions, particular abstract insights are distilled about entrepreneurial behaviour that is confronted with the unknown unknowns of future times. Furthermore, the cases are my reconstructions. The descriptions are grounded in the facts as I observed them in different contexts, or as I could glean them from secondary sources, but they are put together with the specific purpose of learning more about entrepreneurs’ future-­work. Therefore, the chapters that follow are less a comprehensive description of economic sectors, let alone of entire economies, and more a precisely delineated repository of statements about observed behaviour put together with the aim of theorizing entrepreneurship. A further question: why these four cases? First, they all speak to the problem of future indeterminacy; it is the central matter with which entrepreneurs like Abdul, Herman and Bill appear to grapple on a day-­ to-­day basis. I feel that their stories are worth listening to; but, as follows from the extended case study methodology, the message ingrained in the cases transcends these entrepreneurs’ individual experiences: there are wider ramifications to consider. This brings us to the problem of context: theoretical inference from extended cases is only as good as the process through which the cases are selected for closer study, or sampled in methodological parlance. The four cases are all situated in what anthropologists call frontiers of global capitalism: places of new economic activity, often away from the globe’s main metropolises, around which new groups of economic actors congregate (Kopytoff 1989). Global frontiers are driven by what anthropologist Anna Tsing perceptively terms a ‘savage sentiment’ of starting something afresh (Tsing 2005). Consequently, the occupants of global economic frontiers are in the business of crafting a new future, and their future-­work is therefore acute. Analysing economic frontiers, including the imaginaries of the frontier as a clean slate marked by an open future that belongs to it and the economic experimentation that goes with it, occupies a special place in this study. This brings me to a third consideration: in the selected cases, some entrepreneurs succeed in working the future according to their wishes, which is manifested in considerable profits (the case of Jim Simons

Introduction  *  17

above), yet for many others their future fortunes are chequered. Or, in the perceptive words of Rebecca Bryant and Daniel Knight, ‘[the frontier] provides a ripe environment for positive orientations towards the future, orientations of hope and innovation, things we can associate with movement and momentum. But the frontier can also be filled with exhaustion, hopelessness, and resignation, orientations we might associate with stasis and inertia’ (Bryant and Knight 2019: 198). Capturing this ambivalence is essential to the explanations that I seek to build from the cases, which in my view offer an excellent opportunity to ask critical questions about the social reproduction of entrepreneurship. Making the diversity of entrepreneurial behaviour central in this study hence offers a way to look behind the success stories of entrepreneurship and consider what actually goes on behind entrepreneurship in terms of future-­work. Each case further zooms in on future-­work in the context of a particular aspect of the goal-­rational (wo)man ideal-­typical ­model – ­opportunistic individual, profit maximizing, cost c­ alculating – ­specifically considering what goes on behind the façade of first impressions. In the description and the interpretation of the cases, the reader will note how I pay special attention to the configuring of house and market, corresponding with social expectations and self-­interest, with each case representing a different configuration. A close study of these different configurations is important to the theorizing ambition of this study, whereby theory is seen as the organization of central concepts around a question (Kaplan [1964] 1998) and theorizing as constituting the process that contributes to this organization (Swedberg 2016). Put in more sociological language, I seek to develop theoretical ideas about entrepreneurial behaviour by studying the articulation of entrepreneurs’ presentation of the self as goal-­rational actants who make a knowledge claim about the future with the social practices and language and rituals through which entrepreneurs are guided towards an unknown future. This begins in Chapter 2 with the Nile perch fishermen on Lake Victoria, Uganda, where a thriving global export business materialized in the 1990s in an area otherwise known for its reliance on subsistence fishing that brought few riches. It focuses on the image of the entrepreneur as an opportunistic individual, modelled on Herman Kirimega and the broader social network on which he draws and depends. There appears to be a tight overlap between their presentation of the self as opportunistic individual and what can be observed as an important ingredient of the studied Nile perch traders’ future-­work: to keep significant others at bay. At the same time, they mingle with their social circles outside of business: in this world, being seen as a recluse means social death. The chapter shows that this avoidance of significant others results from a self-­fulfilling prophecy of

18  •   Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future

anticipated deceit: entrepreneurs treat others as opportunistic adversaries, thereby reinforcing a social expectation that they are precisely that. It fosters the illusion that successful business can only be achieved by remaining independent from significant others. The ecological and economic uncertainties ingrained in the Nile perch fishery are such, however, that they place a premium on collaboration. The absence of genuine collaboration as a result of the self-­fulfilling prophecy has real consequences: capital concentration remains low and losses are common. In Chapter 3, I explore the issue of profit-­ making by scrutinizing second-­hand car dealers in West Africa. Trading cars has a long history in this part of the world, and economic deregulation (following from the World Bank’s structural adjustment requirements for African governments to qualify for economic support), matched with a sizeable overseas community (in Europe) and the availability of cheap sea-­cargo space, created a vibrant second-­hand car market in Cotonou: an important new hub in a global web of car trade. Zooming in on Abdul and his social circles unveils how the Cotonou car traders are driven by the prospect of making a profit: hard cash that they can take home and flaunt. When talking to the car traders, one might get the impression that it is indeed a profitable affair: ‘car business is good business’. Closer inspection of their economic practices shows something else however. Few of the car dealers make a profit, and most eke out a meagre existence. Nevertheless, from the viewpoint of Abdul and his ilk, it makes sense to speak of the car business as a profitable affair. They frame the outcome of car trading as a dream of making a fortune, which they project onto the future with the expectation or hope that the future will come true. There is a resemblance to nineteenth-­century gold prospecting here: striking a rich gold vein in the absence of reliable geological information is a matter of luck. Also, the Cotonou ‘miracle’ created rumours of instant riches that drew scores of young West Africans to the car markets hoping to get a piece of the action. The Cotonou traders’ future-­work thus consists of investing in the ritualized incantation ‘car business is good business’; to make it work, it has to be believed. In Chapter 4, the problem of cost calculation is scrutinized through the case of investment bankers. The world of banking has long been considered a dull vocation, something to avoid for those holding a degree in economics. This changed in the 1970s with the dismantling of the Bretton-­Woods Agreement that had pinned various global currencies to gold. Free-­floating currencies created a demand for new financial products to hedge currency fluctuations: derivatives. To make this work, mathematicians programmed complex quantitative models to compute future price movements based on past trends. This saw the take-­off of a financial market spanning the

Introduction  *  19

globe, with metropolitan hubs such as New York and London. Calculating thus contributed towards greater profits. With its focus on computing and complex mathematical models, this seems a fully rational world, yet my analysis of an extended career history of banker Bill Broeksmit suggests something else. Broeksmit, a specialist in derivatives products, became caught up in a world that cared less and less about numbers and in which calculative skills were increasingly seen as an obstacle to enchanting the present by presenting the future as a Cockaigne. That the derivatives trade could remain profitable only so long global economic growth continued fell on deaf ears. Social forces promoted this pernicious movement towards crowding out a calculative logic. Banks are hierarchical institutions and their upper echelons control the storytelling, contributing to a myopic and self-­affirming future-­narrative that blurred a consideration of financial risks and, eventually, made the 2008 financial crisis possible. In Chapter 5, the study turns to an analysis of macroeconomic policy-­ making, again drawing on the goal-­rational (wo)man myth. This myth pervades policy-­making too. It is thought that, through economic policy measures, policy-­makers can create a favourable business climate. This new climate triggers what development policy thinkers call an entrepreneurial supply response: investments in profitable enterprise that precipitate a cycle of capital accumulation (Reinert 2008). An incentive structure is created with policy measures, and entrepreneurs are expected to respond in an economically rational way that resembles how chemicals behave when a catalyst is added to a reaction vessel. Whether there is a logical relation between macroeconomic policies and entrepreneurial behaviour remains to be seen however. My interpretation of a fourth case of ­entrepreneurship – f­armed sea-­fish export producers in Greece that I began to study after completing work on the Lake Victoria ­entrepreneurs – nuances the role of economic policies in entrepreneurs’ future-­ ­ work. Whereas access to the European Economic Community (EEC, precursor of the European Union, EU) in the 1980s may have triggered widespread economic optimism, austerity measures meted out by the Troika of financial institutions (an alliance of the World Bank, the IMF and the European Central Bank) in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis saw a more mixed outcome, bringing business success and failure. Closer inspection points to group processes: the future-­work of some, though not all, groups of Greek fish producers became caught up in a self-­reinforcing belief that profit-­making depends on outside actors and capital, ritualized in a circuit of international conferences, the hiring of international experts and flirting with international financiers. It is a powerful illustration of this study’s main message: future-­work matters because it has real consequences in terms of economic behaviour and capital accumulation.

20  •   Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future

In the concluding chapter, I take stock of the two main contributions that the study has sought to make: a theoretical one and a practical one. Theoretically, this study seeks to add to an interpretation of entrepreneurial behaviour that explains not only goal-­rational economic behaviour, but also behaviour that seems irrational. It does so by developing an ontogenetic interpretation of time that acknowledges the presence of a multiplicity of futures. Acknowledging the possibility of multiple futures is not the same as resorting to voluntarism however. Futures emerge through social ­forces – ­chief of which is the collective belief of particular groups of entrepreneurs that some futures are more probable than others. This animates entrepreneurs’ economic actions towards the future, hence contributing towards its coming into existence as a present reality. The practical value consists of contributing to a conversation with economic p ­ ractitioners – ­colleagues working in accountancy and business ­administration – ­to look beyond entrepreneurs’ presentation of the self and appreciate the social forces that go into behaviour. A presentation of the self as a goal-­rational individual remains a powerful meme in modern capitalist society, but it does not necessarily offer an accurate description of observed behaviour: the myth of goal-­rational behaviour is grounded in an epistemogenetic interpretation that problematically assumes a knowable future. To contribute to the ontogenetic interpretation, the conclusion offers cues for finding out what is going on inside the companies, firms or other social figurations that shape entrepreneurs’ future-­work. This involves looking for the social boundaries of entrepreneurial behaviour (who is in/out; who is important, or not); looking for the practice context of entrepreneurs’ reflections and statements (what is the relation between speech act and economic action); and looking for the symbols and gestures that make some futures more real, or desirable, than others.

Notes 1. Using the term ‘stories’ may conjure up the image of a random illustration of a pertinent point about entrepreneurial behaviour, but that is not my intention. Storytelling has a double significance in this study. First, there are the stories that entrepreneurs tell themselves and others, about themselves and others. Such stories are semiotic: they are a key ingredient in how entrepreneurs create and circulate shared understandings about their economic lives. For the purpose of this study, those elements of the stories that pertain to the future are relevant. They enter my study as the basis for interpretation; or, in methodological language, they come into focus as data. Second, I reconstruct entrepreneurs’ stories as extended case studies, the methodological basis of which is elaborated in the Epilogue. In my view, case

Introduction  *  21

studies are academic stories constructed for the purpose of theorizing. Hence, this study, in addition to reporting entrepreneurs’ stories as I recorded them in the field, presents academic stories about entrepreneurial behaviour. 2. The problem of the unknown future coupled with the reality of pressing concerns that require immediate action is not confined to the realm of entrepreneurial behaviour. In fact, many of us, one way or another, struggle with some version of the epistemic dilemma in our everyday lives. The reason for making the problem of the future central in this study relates to its origins: the ethnographic cases that I have studied all pointed towards it. That has not been the consequence of a design. As a young academic, I never envisaged studying future-­work, but over time this interpretation increasingly suggested itself, to the point that it could no longer be ignored; it is the unintended consequence of a lifelong intellectual pursuit. I am certainly open to applying the ideas advanced in this study to other realms of behaviour. As a tentative suggestion, I would consider this effort to be especially worthwhile in the study of migration behaviour, often construed as an expectation of a better future life; organization behaviour, where images of the future are important for planning; political behaviour, where a vision of the future is instrumental in mobilizing voters; and engineering, in which objects such as buildings or infrastructure solidify ideas about the future, at the same time nudging future society into a particular direction. There may, however, be other realms of behaviour to which the sensitizing concept of future-­work may be fruitfully applied. 3. When developing the term future-­work, I briefly considered ‘future making’ as an alternative, as this term seems to have gained traction in recent academic debates about the future (Schmidt 2019; van Wolputte et al. 2022). Eventually I settled for future-­work, though obviously the two terms are related: entrepreneurs (can) make the future by working towards it. Nevertheless, I have come to prefer the verb work in connection with the future, as it emphasizes the effort that goes into creating the future regardless of its outcome. The term thus makes more explicit the struggles into which entrepreneurs are locked when pursuing their future projects, without implying that their envisaged futures actually materialize. My work-­focused approach finds inspiration in the thinking of anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, who writes about the imagination as a form of collective work: ‘the imagination has broken out of the special expressive space of art, myth, and ritual and has now become a part of the quotidian mental work of ordinary people in many societies; it has entered the logic of ordinary life from which it had largely been successfully sequestered’ (Appadurai 1996: 5). A further inspiration is sociologist Abraham de Swaan, who writes about the work that goes into the maintenance of normality: ‘Maintaining normality is hard work: a body must be rested, cleaned, groomed, and clothed every day; it must be fed properly and decorously at the correct time and it must be walked on the right tracks and talk the right things. Such normality presupposes that everyone else behaves more or less as expected, and that the entire society pursues its appointed course, so that for any one person the preconditions of achieving his or her individual normality are fulfilled’ (de Swaan 1990: 1). 4. Epistemogenesis is a compound term that combines epistemological and genesis to denote how knowledge (Greek: episteme) about the future originates in previous

22  •   Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future

moments in time, with the suggestion that the relation is singular. Thus, the future is seen as the inevitable consequence of past forces in a way that suggests determination. In a popular phrasing, knowing the future entails first and foremost scrutinizing the past looking for patterns that can be projected into the future. Conversely, ontogenesis combines ontological (ontos is Greek for being) and genesis, with the suggestion of the future as a multiplicity of possible outcomes. Or, in the perceptive wording of anthropologist Christina Toren, ‘the process through which each of us embodies the history of our own making’ (Toren 2002: 187). Biology offers a comparable interpretation of ontogenesis as the development history of an organism within its own lifetime that evolves out of the interaction between genotypical (innate) and phenotypical (environmental) life features. I thank Dr Mario Schmidt of Cologne University for suggesting ontogenetic as a key term. 5. In connection with entrepreneurial behaviour, a particular language appears to have developed around the term ‘risk’: what happens if some undesired outcome presents itself? Outsider interpretations tend to reduce entrepreneurial behaviour to a response to risk (risk seeking and/or risk avoiding), but, as I set out to show in this study, that resonates with an epistemological interpretation of the future as a known set of probabilities. In other words, risk is typically seen in terms of known unknowns, which, from the viewpoint of this study, is a flawed conception. To complicate things, risk has also transformed into an emic term: many entrepreneurs justify their own behaviour as a response to risk and they resort to risky vocabulary. From the viewpoint of this study, entrepreneurs’ risk language presents a concrete example of the myth of the homo economicus that serves as a powerful metaphor in the presentation of the self as a goal-­rational (wo)man. We return to this problem more fully in Chapter 4. 6. In the descriptions of the individual persons and the situations in which they feature, I was led by the principle of including as much detail as was relevant for the interpretation. In practice, although the individuals are named, none of them is readily ­identifiable – ­with the exception of public figures whose views are widely known (Reyes 2017). For more details about the various ethnographic cases, see Beuving 2015 (Chapter 2 this book); Beuving, 2004 (Chapter 3 this book); and Beuving 2019a (Chapter 4 this book).

1

and Entrepreneurship in ° Time Social Theory Barth, Schumpeter and Keynes

The business[wo]man avails him[/her] self of his[/her] experience while making up his[/her] mind, but his[/her] eventual decision is a creative act of choice. [S]he has no access to the dark web of causality within which [s]he, and his[/her] actions, are embedded, and which will eventually determine the outcome, good or bad. —Alfred Gell, The Anthropology of Time

Introduction To begin unpacking the future-­work of various groups of entrepreneurs that appear in this study, let us first consider more closely how social theory has grappled with the epistemic dilemma that entrepreneurs face: the future’s unknown unknowns. Rather than offering a state-­of-­the-­art literature review of entrepreneurship in social theory (see Pfeilstetter 2022; Steyaert 2007; Swedberg 2000 for excellent surveys), I limit myself to a focused discussion of two prominent models of entrepreneurial behaviour: Barth’s social manipulator and Schumpeter’s visionary creator. Other models could have been explored, but it seems that Barth’s and Schumpeter’s make my point rather clearly. Moreover, whereas their work explored the social study of entrepreneurship several decades ago, they left a considerable footprint in social science understandings of it, rendering them especially relevant for treatment in this study. In Barth’s work, the idea of entrepreneurial behaviour as a form of brokering eventually ­ emerged – ­ mediating between actors that would normally not ­meet – w ­ hich is nowadays a common way of looking at entrepreneurial behaviour in fields as diverse as the study of politics (Stokes et al. 2013), organizational studies (Stewart 2003), public administration (Kapucu et al. 2014) and, of course, anthropology (Xiang 2012). In Schumpeter’s case, the focus of entrepreneurial behaviour has been on how entrepreneurs bring

24  •   Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future

together new connections that trigger ­innovation – ­doing things in a novel way, such as the introduction of a new method or technology, or a new way of organizing economic a­ ctivity – ­which has become commonplace in studies of small business development (Block et al. 2016) as well as in studies of tycoons and other business elites (Isaacson 2015). Closely considering these two ideal types of entrepreneurships thus may shed light on a broader wave of theorizing entrepreneurial behaviour that thrived during the past forty years or so. But there is a problem too. Despite their widespread uptake in social science work, they suffer from what models as a rule do, in that they represent an idealization of behaviour: constructs abstracted from concrete social realities (Kay and King 2020: 248–61). In this particular case, the idealization relates to how the models deal with time. To take up a thread started in the Introduction, Barth’s and Schumpeter’s work subscribes to an epistemogenetic interpretation of time: ­the – ­mostly i­mplicit – a­ ssumption that the future somehow follows from things happening now or that have happened in the past. To sum up a broader argument that follows: Barth’s entrepreneur is a social genius who can forecast the behaviour of those around him, whereas Schumpeter’s entrepreneur is a visionary figure who can see profitable new combinations into the future. At the same time, a critical reading of their work unveils how both authors have struggled with precisely this problem throughout their professional lives. In a way that resembles the change of mind we saw in the case of anthropologist Norman Long (his work was briefly discussed in the Introduction), their ideas about time at one point leant towards an ontogenetic interpretation. Understanding their intellectual struggles, and their consequences for the further understanding of future-­work, is what constitutes the substantive core of the second part of this chapter. It centres on a discussion of the ideas of Maynard Keynes, who pioneered an ontological interpretation of time on which the remainder of this study builds. From it, I infer Keynes’ own model of entrepreneurial behaviour, here summarized as ‘perceptive juror’. Based on this interpretation, the chapter concludes with a short meditation on the social study of entrepreneurs’ future-­work. Before carrying out this challenging task, let me first make a short methodological statement that involves making a distinction between cases and models. As stated, the works of Barth and Schumpeter are ideal-­typical models of economic behaviour: abstractions of human behaviour that have a function in advancing social theory (Weber [1968] 1978). Whether or not that behaviour can be observed in a concrete situation is less relevant for modelling than the model’s function in a theoretical discourse. Barth himself reflected on this with the following words: ‘[Models] are not designed to be homologous with observed social regularities; instead, they

Time and Entrepreneurship in Social Theory  *  25

are designed so that they, by specific operations, can generate regularities in a large body of individual items of behaviour’ (Barth 1966: 1; emphasis in original). Particular to Barth’s theoretical ambitions, he presents the entrepreneur as mediator (or broker) in order to build social theory that considers society as a system of transactions between various groups of actors. Schumpeter, likewise, acknowledges the limits of behavioural models: ‘[M]ost of us economists’ … opinions have more to do with our preconceived ideas or ideals than with solid fact, and our habit of illustrating them by stray instances that have come to our notice is obviously a poor substitute for serious research’ (Schumpeter 1947a: 151). Schumpeter deploys the entrepreneur as innovator as a vehicle in a larger theory of economic change. The empirical body of my study, conversely, is steeped in cases. A fuller statement follows in the Epilogue, but for now suffice it to say that cases are detailed empirical descriptions that have a place in theorizing: developing theoretically representative concepts. Models are obviously important in the sense that they can help generate new foreshadowed problems, but they must not be confused with accurate descriptions of social behaviour.

Fredrik Barth and the Entrepreneur as Social Manipulator Norwegian anthropologist Fredrik Barth (1928–2016) published three pioneering texts on entrepreneurship, all during the 1960s: The Role of the Entrepreneur in Social Change in Northern Norway (1962), Models of Social Organization (1966) and ‘Economic Spheres in Darfur’ (1967). I focus my discussion on the latter two texts, as they offer the most precise formulation of Barth’s point in a way that rhymes most clearly with the objective of my study. The three texts revolve around the same key message: entrepreneurs are individuals with special capabilities who bring together an array of different persons around a shared project with the objective of making a profit, monetary or otherwise. A short note on the historical background of this intellectual project may be in order. Like his coeval Norman Long (see the Introduction), Barth was influenced by British social anthropology: he studied with Raymond Firth and Edmund Leach, who were both connected to Bronislaw Malinowski. British anthropology in the 1950s and the 1960s sought to break away from the structural functionalism that prevailed in the social sciences at the time (Kuper [1973] 2015). Barth rejected this viewpoint on the grounds that social structures are not fixed as they change over ­time – o ­ ften imperceptibly slowly, sometimes dramatically quickly. He contributed to a processual approach in social research that transcends

26  •   Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future

social structure, instead making central the perspectives and practices of social actors. He became interested in particular actors in society, namely, those bringing together groups of people (Hylland-­Eriksen 2015). Barth argued that uniting different persons successfully hinges on a special trait: being able to foretell the behaviour of others and then benefit from that in a way that conjures up an image of a social manipulator. To further grasp Barth’s interpretation, a brief understanding of the substantive content of the model is required. Barth’s 1966 text revolves around a Norwegian fishing crew skimming Iceland’s fishing grounds for herring. This lucrative fishing peaked in the 1960s and 1970s, and Norwegians were particularly active in it, though it no longer exists in the form described by Barth; the Norwegian herring fishery collapsed in the following decade. Barth zooms in on the social hierarchy that applies aboard the fishing vessel, distinguishing sharply between the herring skipper and his crew (this is a man’s world). The social hierarchy is made visible through specific privileges. For instance, the (sheltered) bridge is off limits to everyone but the skipper (accompanied by his helmsman to which the actual steering is delegated); he takes strategic decisions, notably where to fish and the duration of the trip; and the skipper receives a disproportionately large share of the profit from selling the herring, in principle. Furthermore, the distinction is made visible through clothing (the captain’s is more expensive) and through a particular form of behaviour that suggests authority. Yet, at the same time, and as recorded in many other cases of open-­sea fishing, once the fishing vessel is offshore, the nature of the social hierarchy changes. Generally speaking, it loses its hard edge as the crew and captain are on their own, and, in order to ensure a positive outcome of the ­trip – ­a hold filled with fresh herring, hopefully with no one hurt (open-­sea fishing ranks among the world’s most dangerous occupations) – the men must collaborate under the challenging circumstances of being in open water for a considerable stretch of time. Consequently, the privileges that, in principle, mark the skipper’s social position on board appear negotiable. For instance, he may welcome particular members of the crew onto the bridge when the weather is particularly rough; or he may decide to give a greater share of the profit to a particular crew member whom he seeks to appease; or he may receive demands from the crew to shorten or lengthen the trip, depending on expected catches. In practice therefore, relations between skipper and crew are more malleable than the official hierarchy suggests. To capture this social aspect of the fishing enterprise, Barth analyses closely the network of relations as a series of transactions: among the crew, and between the crew and the captain. These transactions comprise material aspects such as paying money, sharing food and offering shelter,

Time and Entrepreneurship in Social Theory  *  27

as well as non-­material ­aspects – ­support and social status in particular. Barth explains how the skipper’s chief objective is to maintain, or expand, his social status. Achieving a high status is essential for ensuring a greater share of the herring profits. Once this becomes a problem, for instance if the crew look for a greater share of the profit, or disagree with his choice of a particular fishing ground, or would like to make adjustments to the length of the trip, they may turn against the skipper. Consequently, he may try to resolve the charged situation by handing out favours to renegade crew members in an attempt to buy them off. A skilled skipper is therefore an expert social manipulator: ‘the skipper must convert the contractually imposed submission to a voluntary and spontaneous one, by exercising authority only to the extent that this is approved and accepted’ (Barth 1966: 16). It is therefore essential in Barth’s analysis that the skipper’s status is not seen as a given but as a social property that emerges from a web of transactions between various actors involved: it is a ‘bargaining situation’ (Barth 1966: 7). Barth further explains how the successful outcome of the bargaining depends on the skipper’s playing a role as a knowledgeable expert. This centres on his communicating goal-­rational behaviour: deciding upon the direction that the ship takes (towards the richest fishing grounds), the length of the trip, precisely where to cast the nets, at what depth and so on. The skipper does this, Barth explains, through a distinctive presentation of the self (a sensitizing concept first theorized by the sociologist Ervin Goffman; see the Introduction for more details): ‘he gives very few cues as to what he is thinking, he communicates little, in contrast to the others on the bridge, and he never elicits comments, evaluations, or advice from other persons. … he claims rationality without making the basis and logic of his decision available for critical scrutiny’ (Barth 1966: 8). Thus, the more capable the skipper is in controlling his presentation of the self as a goal-­rational individual, the more likely he is to maintain the high social position that entitles him to more of the herring profits than the rest of the crew. Barth further develops the idea of entrepreneurship as social manipulation in another sociocultural context, that of rural Africa, more specifically in the Darfur province of western Sudan. Here, we encounter a poor, mountainous countryside dotted with small villages, whose Fur-­identifying inhabitants resort to a combination of subsistence agriculture with millet as the main staple (grown for porridge and beer) and fruits (citrus and papaya) and vegetables (potato, onion and, importantly, tomato) grown for local markets. Market relations are maintained through itinerant traders: they visit the local markets procuring fruit and vegetables. Importantly, these traders do not form part of mountain Fur society: they identify

28  •   Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future

ethnically as Arabs. Of further importance for the mountain Fur economy is the heavy agricultural work which is carried out in work parties: a temporary alliance of villagers, often held together through kinship relations, in which the collective tilling of the land is combined with the copious consumption of millet beer, to be supplied by the land owner; work effort and sociability are hence smoothly integrated, fostering local solidarities. Barth describes how, one day, an (unnamed) Arab trader actually settles in one of the Fur ­villages – ­an event that Barth describes as rare. The trader then does something remarkable. He asks local village leaders for permission to rent a piece of land (which is granted) on which he seeks to cultivate a large tomato crop. He further brings along his wife, who arrives in the village with a millet crop that her husband had procured cheaply from outside the area. The wife brews a considerable amount of beer from it, which the trader makes available at work parties that the Fur villagers willingly attend. Consequently, a sizeable tomato crop is produced, which the trader then sells for money in the local market, pocketing a handsome profit. What is remarkable about the Arab trader’s enterprise is that he converts millet directly into tomato. In traditional Fur society, this would be impossible: cash is reserved for the procurement of durable household items such as crockery and furniture as well as to pay for bridewealth, comprising a considerable sum that requires long-­term saving. Also, cash is accumulated piecewise, through the occasional sale of tomato crops, and rarely amounts to a large sum; cash is therefore not viewed in terms of accumulation for its own sake. The Arab trader, in Barth’s interpretation, is thus described as a person with three special capabilities: (a) the trader realizes that there is a business opportunity that local Fur villagers may have seen but that they could not pursue for customary reasons of which he was culturally not part (Darfurians were not expected to accumulate capital with a view to making a profit); (b) he has the organizational skills to pull this off successfully, especially by getting access to local land and labour (through the work parties), securing a key input from outside (cheap millet) and connecting all of this to a market further afield; (c) for that, he must be able to maintain cordial, or perhaps even friendly, relations with various disconnected parties, in particular with local village leaders and villagers. This last point clearly reveals the social genius that is already shimmering through the figure of the Norwegian skipper; in fact, it is magnified in the Darfurian case. This becomes clearer on consulting other sources documenting social life in the same area (Barth does not provide further information on this point): in Darfur, cross-­ethnic ties do not arise easily. In the course of Sudan’s history, ethnic Darfurians and Arabs have maintained charged, and often downright hostile, relations: Arabs are

Time and Entrepreneurship in Social Theory  *  29

seen as colonizers by the Darfurians, whereas Arabs frequently consider Darfurians as beneath them. There is a particular history to consider in the Darfurian area: bonded labour has become an established practice, more often than not degrading into slavery, even today (Flint and de Waal 2006). Establishing cross-­ethnic ties that are sufficiently dependable to conduct a business in such a charged situation is an impressive achievement: the Arab trader that Barth presents must have been someone quite special. The similarities between Barth’s Norwegian and Darfurian cases are thus striking in that they conjure up a similar image: the entrepreneur as a skilled go-­between, a person who is able to connect with a diverse palette of individuals embodying different social positions and/or strategic interests. The ability to manipulate presupposes a considerable degree of social foresight: to anticipate future actions of individual persons, as well as the outcome of interactions between them. Whereas in the Norwegian example Barth appears to acknowledge that the ‘pure’ knowledge of foreseeing all possible outcomes is difficult to attain in p ­ ractice – b ­ argaining implies u ­ ncertainty – i­ n the Darfur text he appears more resolute: the Arab trader settling in a Darfurian village apparently does not meet opposition, nor does Barth report the existence of a bargaining situation. There is yet another, important, difference too: in the Darfur text, the centrality of the presentation of the self, or performance, as a goal-­rational individual that we saw in the Norwegian text has disappeared. Gone are the considerations of how ‘he can reassert leadership without referring to positional authority’ (Barth 1966: 8). From the viewpoint of this study, Barth thus trades a nuanced, ontogenetic interpretation of time (the Norwegian skipper’s future fortunes depend on his successful projection as a successful skipper, hence denoting an investment in future-­work) for an epistemogenetic interpretation in which the future is assumed to be knowable. A reverse interpretive shift appears to have happened in Schumpeter’s work, to which we now turn.

Joseph Schumpeter and the Entrepreneur as Visionary Creator During the 1940s, Austrian-­ American economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950) published three ground-­ breaking texts about entrepreneurial behaviour: ‘The Creative Response in Economic History’ (1947a), ‘Theoretical Problems of Economic Growth’ (1947b) and ‘Economic Theory and Entrepreneurial History’ (1949). It is fair to say, however, that throughout his professional life Schumpeter grappled with the theme of entrepreneurship, especially seeking to explain the rise and fall of ­economic – ­or more precisely ­capitalist – ­development. Whereas his earlier work leans

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more towards p ­ sychology – i­n the 1910s especially, Schumpeter looked for particular individual traits that he qualified as e­ ntrepreneurial – ­in his last theory of entrepreneurship, as it emerged in the 1940s, he turned to a sociological understanding of it by considering entrepreneurial behaviour as belonging to a particular social role that includes persons but also organizations such as firms, and even larger institutions such as the state. Consequently, Schumpeter ‘de-­ essentialized’ entrepreneurship towards the end of his life, accepting that a given individual or organization may be entrepreneurial at specific junctures in their biographies, but not necessarily throughout them; it is less a person type and more a form of behaviour. Schumpeter’s interest in entrepreneurs must be seen in the light of the intellectual tendencies of the time. Schumpeter grew up in the AustroHungarian Empire, which dissolved following the end of the First World War. Unlike other countries in Europe at the time, the Empire’s economy remained steeped in agricultural production and it saw a much slower rate of industrialization than, for instance, Britain and Germany: Austria-­ Hungary appeared relatively late in the theatre of European modernity. Schumpeter at a young age had already become interested in the problem of why some economies remain stagnant, whereas others display dynamic properties. He attributed the lack of economic dynamism to the absence of charismatic, economic leaders who initiate new economic activity. In the words of one noted Schumpeter interpreter: ‘The Schumpeterian ­pioneer … e­ xhibits Nietzschean characteristics and is a leader personality who is equipped with will-­power, daring and a spirit of adventure whose success inspires the masses of mere managers to follow’ (Hagemann 2003: 59). With this observation, Schumpeter challenged received understandings that looked at economies in terms of equilibrium: the idea that an economy functions as a self-­correcting system of factor prices, a vision that is not unlike the organic model of society inherent in structural functionalism. In developing these ideas, Schumpeter saw himself first and foremost as a theoretician, and he never bothered to produce a focused example of entrepreneurial behaviour in the sense that Barth did. His work teems with short ­illustrations – ­he appears especially fond of examples from manufacturing, such as textile ­factories – ­but they lack the ethnographic concreteness that we seek in this study. Nevertheless, Schumpeter’s model of entrepreneurship can be gleaned from his various publications. Entrepreneurial behaviour, Schumpeter style, revolves around ‘doing new things, or doing things that are already being done in a new way (innovation)’ (Schumpeter 1947a: 151). Schumpeter clarifies the latter, by explaining that ‘doing things that are already being done in a new way’ revolves around the making of new combinations. As Schumpeter-­ interpreter Richard Langlois explains, a Schumpeterian-­style innovation

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thus includes the introduction of a new technology or method, but it may also be a new way of organizing economic activity (Langlois 2014). Entrepreneurial innovation in the sense of bringing about new combinations has a clear economic function. Schumpeter, like his contemporaries during the Interbellum especially, envisaged economies as moving about in a circular flow, connecting consumption and production. Entrepreneurial innovation upends the prevailing economic equilibrium (a process known as ‘creative destruction’, Swedberg 1992: 157), which presents a necessary springboard towards higher volumes of production. Economic growth (or stagnation) is hence logically connected to entrepreneurial activity (or its absence) (Schumpeter [1934] 1983).1 This search for new combinations as a rule requires the mastery of social friction: doing things in new ways inevitably renders obsolete the prevailing economic practice that benefits various economic groups in society. Schumpeter considers upsetting the existing economic order as key to entrepreneurial behaviour, and that is not for the faint-­hearted: a person who is likely to meet opposition to his/her plans for change and who is therefore considered a contested figure. Overcoming such opposition in order to create something new is hence key to entrepreneurship. Especially at the beginning of his professional career, Schumpeter envisaged the entrepreneur as cutting a dashing figure: ‘the entrepreneur requires the will power adequate to break down the resistance that the social environment offers to change’ (1947a: 157). It is not difficult to see a parallel with Max Weber’s charismatic leader. Later on, Schumpeter appears less convinced that entrepreneurial innovation necessarily invokes a counter response; he seems more open to the possibility that entrepreneurs may be welcomed in a society as drivers of change. Here, too, Schumpeter appears ambiguous and struggles to make a final statement. More important than his intellectual qualms, however, is Schumpeter’s view that entrepreneurial profit is always provisional. The economic advantage obtained by advancing some new combination disappears once others have figured out how to create the new combination themselves; in that case, new combinations must be sought to gain a new advantage. Schumpeter argues it as follows: ‘[Once] the spell is broken, new businesses are continually arising under the impulse of the alluring profit. … Consequently, the surplus of the entrepreneur in question and of his immediate followers disappears’ (Schumpeter [1942] 2010: 241). Innovation is therefore a discontinuous process, and it may happen only once in a professional lifetime. Yet, the search for entrepreneurial profit, and the innovations upon which it rests, is a never-­ending process, contributing to Schumpeter’s portrayal of the entrepreneur as a restless figure. In the long run however, entrepreneurship will disappear, Schumpeter maintains, as

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innovation’s novelty in society gradually wears off, and ‘[entrepreneurial action] tends to become depersonalized and automated. Bureau and committee work tends to replace individual action’ (Schumpeter [1942] 2010: 281). Hence, entrepreneurial behaviour over time becomes encapsulated in larger structures, and capitalism necessarily evolves into a form of corporatism, including that of the state. Finding new combinations is what Schumpeter terms the creative response, and it is reserved for only a small part of s­ociety – t­hough Schumpeter acknowledged that some societies may be more entrepreneurial than others. Two versions of the creative response appear in Schumpeter’s work, and this distinction is especially relevant for my study. In his younger years, Schumpeter attributed visionary qualities to the entrepreneur, as a person capable of foretelling the particular combinations that would turn out to be profitable. As he optimistically wrote in his seminal Theory of Economic Development: ‘If anyone in an economic system … sees the possibility of founding a business’ (Schumpeter [1934] 1983: 239, my emphasis); or ‘[A]t first only a few see the new enterprise and are able to carry it out’ (Schumpeter [1934] 1983: 246, my emphasis). Schumpeter’s model of entrepreneurial behaviour thus has at its heart a capacity to perceive a new ­opportunity – ­a special capacity reserved for only a handful of privileged ­individuals – ­and creatively pursue it: in other words, to anticipate the future by seeing what modern consumer society needs, or craves. Later in his life, Schumpeter acknowledged that entrepreneurial behaviour has a strong element of stepping into the dark, which may succeed, but also fail (though he remained remarkable silent on the latter possibility). In his words: ‘[the creative response] cannot be predicted by applying the ordinary rules of inference from the pre-­existing facts’ (Schumpeter 1947a: 150, my emphasis); also, ‘[T]he entrepreneurial performance i­nvolves … ­the ability to perceive new opportunities that cannot be proved at the moment at which action has to be taken’ (Schumpeter 1947a: 157, my emphasis). These are important formulations as they foreshadow how entrepreneurial behaviour does not so much denote a prediction of the future as create it, an insight that is central in this study. Regrettably however, Schumpeter wrote these prophetic words not long before his death, and he never brought them to full intellectual fruition. Nor do others appear to have done so. Schumpeter’s earlier, more optimistic work received widespread attention; the implications of his later work appear to have been ignored. How entrepreneurs act towards the ­future –m ­ ore precisely, how they actually see ­it – ­has remained an elusive aspect of Schumpeter’s otherwise ground-­breaking ideas of entrepreneurship as involving disruptive behaviour.

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There is an interesting, performative aspect to Schumpeter’s image of the entrepreneur as a visionary creator. As the portrayal of the Norwegian skipper in Barth’s work discussed above already suggests, a presentation of the self revolves around emotional self-­control. In Barth’s case, this involves not admitting to self-­doubt coupled with a zero tolerance of contradiction, and projecting an austere appearance that suggests expertise. Similar considerations apply to Schumpeter’s entrepreneur, but s/he appears instead as a flamboyant and charismatic individual. The various depictions of entrepreneurs in his work conjure up an image of entrepreneurship as a spectacle (Bill et al. 2010) in which the entrepreneur takes centre stage and presents himself as the great mobilizer of ideas and practices: an energetic person that ‘gets things done’ (Schumpeter 1947a: 152). S/he is admired for her/his special qualities, a true Caruso (an acclaimed early twentieth-­century Italian tenor) possessing ‘super-­normal qualities of intellect and will’ (Schumpeter [1934] 1983: 209). Here is a person who is at the centre of public attention: ‘his success impresses and fascinates’ (Schumpeter [1934] 1983: 526). The entrepreneurial spectacle is motivated by a variety of considerations, and Schumpeter is in two minds in clarifying this. In his earlier work (the charismatic version alluded to above), he portrays entrepreneurs as status seekers; in looking for new combinations, they are motivated by ‘the dream and the will to found a private k­ ingdom … ­and the will to c­ onquer … ­and to prove oneself superior to others’ (Schumpeter [1934] 1983: 288). This corresponds closely to the theatrical image of the Caruso-­like figure, and monetary concerns seem to be of limited importance; in fact, this opens up the possibility that entrepreneurship does not yield money but dissipates it, a possibility explored further in Chapter 4. Elsewhere in his work, however, Schumpeter adopts a more dispassionate stance, attributing profit-­maximizing behaviour to entrepreneurs. He argues in particular that entrepreneurs look for profit beyond a risk-­adjusted market rate of return that rewards their combinational effort with what Schumpeter terms ‘entrepreneurial rent’: a payment for ingenuity. Once others have caught up on the innovation, the rent disappears; it is thus always a temporary benefit. To round off this part of the chapter, I briefly consider cross-­linkages between the works of Barth and Schumpeter. Barth, in his study of the Arab trader in Darfur, observed the introduction of tomato seeds by that trader. This action closely resembles a Schumpeterian innovation: making a new combination in the sense of bringing together different spheres of economic exchange that were previously disconnected. The Arab trader also appears as a visionary creator: he did something that no one had done before, and, once this took off, others followed in his wake, as Barth

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describes later on. This is not unlike the picture that Schumpeter offers of the diminishing economic advantage once an innovation materializes. Further, the new combinations that Schumpeter talks about resemble Barth’s idea of bridging ties in the sense of bringing about a new organization. At heart, therefore, their work shares a common intellectual basis. Their common struggle with future time is part of ­that – a­ task that they partially accomplished. Whereas Barth shifted from an ontogenetic vision of future time to an epistemogenetic one, a reverse shift appears to have happened in Schumpeter’s case. For a more accomplished solution to the epistemic problem, we must turn to the work of another pioneering figure in economic thinking, that of British economist and philosopher Maynard Keynes.

Maynard Keynes and the Entrepreneur as Perceptive Juror Unlike Barth and Schumpeter, Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) never offered a systematic account of entrepreneurial behaviour, though elements of it are unmistakably there; it is implied in his work.2 In the popular mind, Keynes’ work is associated mostly with deficit spending, a special formula for economic policy-­making that centres on the idea that in times of economic decline, government must spend beyond what it gains through tax revenues in order to reverse the downswing and foster economic growth. This spending creates a temporary budget deficit that is expected to be paid for with the economic growth it creates. In his acclaimed General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money ([1936] 2017), Keynes explains that government spending is essential in maintaining consumption: the demand for products and services that constitutes the lifeblood of national economies. Government spending can take the form of direct employment creation by the state (for instance, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, this took the form of infrastructural megaprojects such as dams, canals and roads), or of social welfare, in particular by spending on unemployment benefits. As long as ordinary people have money in their pocket to spend, and do not hoard it in the form of savings, producers will see a ready market for their products and services, motivating them to deliver, thus keeping the economy going. As a gloomier prospect, when consumption falters, economies will stagnate and, in extreme circumstances, grind to a halt, such as happened after the 2008 financial crisis. Keynes’ ideas were ground-­breaking (they relegated the nineteenth-­ century laissez-­faire economic policies that had helped create the 1930s’ crisis to history’s dustbin [O’Donnell 1990]), but, for the purpose of this study, it is important to note that they actually build on an idea that he

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helped develop much earlier in his professional life, almost three decades previously. In a lesser-­known publication, entitled A Treatise on Probability ([1919] 2018), Keynes posited the unknowable future as the fundamental epistemic issue that impacts on all economic decision-­making (consumption as well as production). Much of Keynes’ work grappled with resolving the problem of how economic decision-­makers come to term with that, other than seeing all economic behaviour as a perverse playing with destiny. A recent intellectual biography of Keynes sums up this problem as follows: ‘­How … ­can people make rational decisions in the present based on beliefs about the future when those beliefs may or may not be vindicated by events’ (Carter 2020: 115). In other words, and summarizing the main question that drives this study, given that the future cannot be known, how do economic actors formulate ideas about the future and subsequently act towards the future? To foreshadow a discussion that follows in Chapter 5: Keynes’ formulation of the epistemic problem in ontogenetic terms fell on deaf ears in a powerful strand of macroeconomic policy thinking, known as Keynesianism. Keynesianism posits an equilibrium model of the economy, linking savings, investment, income and interest rates in a series of ­equations – t­ he IS-­LM model (Kerr 2005). It analyses the factors determining output and employment levels, and thus gives a first approximation for understanding a real-­world economy. However, Keynesianism suffers from two basic weaknesses from the viewpoint of this study. Firstly, in seeking to explain economic cycles, it builds on (economic) variables with a known, objective probability distribution. This implies an analysis of economic behaviour based on empirical frequency tables indicating their statistical chance of occurring (Love 1992). It thus ignores the future unknown unknowns that Keynes thought key to economic behaviour (Kriesler and Nevile 2002; Dequench 2003). Secondly, the model exogenizes long-­term future expectations and hence does not consider that shifts in the IS or LM equations create new expectations of the future that affect the model’s original variables. For these reasons, Keynesianism is regrettable: it reintroduced the deterministic interpretations of economic behaviour that Keynes had sought to avert. Keynes’ solution to this epistemic problem is inspired by British analytic philosophy. This branch of early twentieth-­century philosophy is interested in questions of everyday experience, especially considering common-­ sense understandings and ordinary language as the basis for philosophical inquiry (Beaney 2017). Edward Moore, a prominent analytic philosopher whom Keynes admired, ‘took words seriously, especially the words used in everyday language. When people called something good or bad, beautiful or ugly, intelligent or stupid, he thought they were just that, not something

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else’ (Skidelsky 2003: 88). As everyday language use and common sense-­ making are observable practices, analytic philosophy makes a strong case for the rules of the scientific method. Analytic philosophy pitted itself against another branch in early twentieth-­century philosophy, called idealism. Idealism is less interested in everyday problems and instead considers metaphysical problems that transcend the everyday. It questions, for instance, whether God exists or what the soul comprises; clearly, the rules of the scientific method are of limited relevance in this philosophical vista. Analytic philosophy proved immensely popular in Keynes’ social circles, and his work cannot be understood well without reference to it. In this intellectual ambiance of attention on the everyday, a debate ensued about time. The aforementioned Moore took the position that whereas time is a real property of everyday life, the future is fundamentally unknown. That said, Moore argued that some future outcomes are more probable than others; the number of future alternatives is not infinite. Moreover, it is possible for a decision-­maker to make a judgement about such probable futures. An important part of what in this study we call future-­work consists of considering the future outcomes that can be considered as more probable than others, and which ones are simply nonsense. A short note on terminology may be in order. Outside Keynes’ work, the term probability often has a statistical connotation that points to statistical frequencies. Yet, this is the perspective that Keynes emphatically argues against. As John Kay and Mervy King explain in a recent book, inferring the future from past statistical frequencies, or probabilistic thinking, ‘is a claim to a knowledge of the underlying issue which, by the nature of the uncertainty surrounding these [frequencies], the speaker cannot have’ (Kay and King 2020: 96). This means that sometimes tomorrow will resemble today and sometimes it will not; we simply do not know which one will occur. In thinking about how humans judge future probabilities, Moore and Keynes parted ways, intellectually speaking. Whereas Moore argued that our judgements are ultimately guided by prevailing norms in society, evidence plays a special role in Keynes’ work. Rather than responding to personal opinion or free-­floating beliefs, humans form what Keynes terms ‘rational expectations’. The term rational has a special meaning here that transcends the means-­ends relation of homo economicus. Keynes clarifies this meaning of rationality with reference to the example of a beauty contest. Suppose that members of the jury are rewarded for scoring the most popular faces among all contestants. For individual jury members, it is rational to select the face that they think that the other jury members will prefer, rather than to select the face they themselves consider to be the most handsome. Knowledge of public opinion (in this case, the small group of fellow jurors) is hence an important clue to arriving at a reasoned

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estimate of which face gets selected by the jury (Keynes [1936] 2017). Consequently, the amount of evidence supporting the probability belief contributes to the weight of the argument; or, ‘[t]he more facts we have, the more confident we are that our belief is justified’ (Skidelsky 2003: 286). Keynes’ rationality argument is thus deeply social in nature: in forming expectations about the future, we factor in what we think (or believe, or hope) that others will do. To take the beauty contest example one step further, in economic life, those others also form their expectations of the future, so what we may end up with is what sociologists term a double hermeneutic: a future expectation that presents itself as a belief in other persons’ beliefs. Such beliefs may be stable, taking the form of what Keynes called long-­run expectations, and they may be volatile, unexpectedly shifting in the sense implied by the term ‘tipping point’ (Gladwell 2001; Scheffer et al. 2013) – what Keynes’ called ‘animal spirits’. In terms of outcomes, the historical record is positive: entrepreneurs pumping fresh funds into new labour-­saving technology for instance, or consumers going on a shopping spree, whipping up the economy to a higher level. Keynes, however, had lived through the Great Depression of the 1930s, and he had seen how economic behaviour grounded in false beliefs could grind entire economies to a halt. The belief among stockbrokers that the New York Stock Exchange was about to crash led to selling off stocks on a mass scale, making the original belief come ­true – ­a phenomenon that sociologists aptly term a self-­fulfilling prophecy (Merton [1949] 1968). (I return to the causes and consequences of self-­fulfilling prophecies for entrepreneurial behaviour in Chapter 2.) Keynes’ work in this way suggests a social model of entrepreneurial behaviour that revolves around a perceptive juror: a person who judges the likelihood of a future outcome based on an observation of the behaviour of those around him/her. Gone are the social manipulations of the Barthian entrepreneur, and gone also is the visionary Schumpeterian entrepreneur. Keynes sketches an economic universe where future certainty is absent, and the economy consists of interlocking beliefs that interact in unpredictable ways. Still, the model offers some behavioural clues about entrepreneurship. Successful entrepreneurial behaviour depends in the first place on ‘people skills’, including an understanding of human nature and a sensibility to public opinion: understanding how the wind in economic life will blow. Like the jurors in the beauty contest, such understanding hinges on the capacity to suspend one’s own beliefs of the future and instead scrutinize those of others, including those of foes, rivals and other unpleasant company. Anthropologist Mitch Abolafia in his study of bond traders makes a similar point: ‘Traders are generally aware that it is not the correctness of the interpretation that counts, but rather the degree to

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which others will read the same information the same way’ (Abolafia 2001: 24). In other words, empathy, or the capacity to appreciate what is going on in another person, replaces the rational actor in Keynes’ work. With these ideas, Keynes forged a breakthrough in finding a solution for the epistemic problem of entrepreneurial behaviour. But there appears to be a problem with his ontogenetic interpretation too. The social world in which this behaviour is embedded remains out of focus. Keynes’ universe of entrepreneurship is a socially unstructured one, conjuring up an image of a flock of sparrows zigzagging on the horizon: a whimsical pattern in which individual differences between birds are morphed into a collective behaviour; or, ‘a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction’ (Keynes [1936] 2017: 161). The entrepreneurship universes that feature in this study are certainly collective in nature, but they also register a greater diversity in behaviour patterns than Keynes appears to recognize; and these behaviours are socially situated. There is social structure to consider, for instance: some individuals or groups are respected, or envied, by others, and they function as role models to which others attune their behaviour. Furthermore, whereas it is often the case that entrepreneurs function in social groups, the composition of such ­groups – ­and therewith the forms of economic behaviour associated with t­ hem – a­ re dynamic: forces of fusion and fission operate on them. In addition, ties between various entrepreneurs may be strong or weak, meaning that different degrees of push and pull forces operate on them. Assessing precisely such social processes is key to what I term future-­work, to which I now turn.

The Social Study of Entrepreneurs’ Future-Work The central tenet of this study is that entrepreneurs act towards an indeterminate future in the sense implied in Keynes’ ontogenetic interpretation of future uncertainty through future-­work: an amalgamation of social practice, language and rituals. Let us now consider in more detail the social processes that operate on each of them. In its most basic form, social practice in economic life involves collaboration and competition for valuable goods, services and opportunities. Let us consider these twin processes more closely. Working together may comprise the forming of (whether temporary or not) alliances around a common project (Cyert and March [1963] 2013), or it may take a lifelong commitment in the form of a family firm (de Groot 2021). Likewise, competition may be an isolated event involving distant contacts, or it may concern business rivals who are locked in a struggle for dominance that spans several generations, sucking up considerable effort and funds (Glenn

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2000). More specifically, this study works with the assumption that entrepreneurial behaviour is embedded in ongoing networks of competitors and collaborators. The term ‘embeddedness’ has come to acquire various meanings since it was theorized by American sociologist Mark Granovetter nearly four decades ago.3 In this study, I subscribe to a common-­sense understanding of social embeddedness as it appears from the various cases presented in later chapters. This common-­sense understanding involves entrepreneurs drawing and depending on the various linkages in their social networks, yet without being able to fully control those linkages; nor is their behaviour fully determined by them. Various social influences are locked into entrepreneurs’ webs of social ­relations – p ­ ower and prestige in particular (Long 2001), which present themselves as expectations to which entrepreneurs may or may not attune their behaviour. The various modes of behavioural attuning resorted to by entrepreneurs in various social situations occupy a special role in this study. Entrepreneurs therefore shape and understand the future through the social relations that they forge. This forging is not done on the spot, nor does a once-­forged relation exist forever. Drawing on the work of American sociologist Ervin Goffman (introduced in the previous chapter), this study sees relations as part of roles in the sense that a theatre play is organized into a limited number of performing roles. Such roles come with expected behaviour (to which entrepreneurs may or may not attune) that change over t­ ime – ­though usually at a slow speed. Considering how entrepreneurs present themselves to others is central in approaching their role behaviour. To take the example of Barth’s Norwegian skipper: he presents himself to the crew as an individual who appears perfectly in control of a challenging environment. This does not mean, however, as Barth explains, that this self-­presentation necessarily corresponds to the skipper’s behaviour in all circumstances. One of Barth’s key insights is that, once the vessel has left port, the skipper must negotiate with the crew over strategic decisions; and this compromises the idea of self-­reliance to some extent. In fact, once the skipper becomes bogged down in negotiation (and this can happen), his presentation of the self as a goal-­oriented and self-­ reliant individual is seriously compromised. The resulting loss in status may in a next round of social interaction come at the cost of not being able to recruit a crew (gossip travels fast in fishing communities), putting pressure on his profit-­making ambitions. A similar point may be made with reference to Schumpeter’s image of the entrepreneur as a visionary creator: this can be fruitfully deconstructed as a distinctive presentation of the self. Social practice is expressed in social relations but also through language: humans are talking animals. This study subscribes to a view of language as a symbolic system of ordinary meanings, as discussed above with reference

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to the British analytic philosophy tradition. In this tradition, words and particular expressions are seen as corresponding to their use in everyday life. The American political scientist Frederic Schaffer in a study of the meaning of democracy, and paraphrasing the analytic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, puts it thus: ‘the meanings of words consist in the actual ways they are used in various contexts’ (Schaffer 1998: 10). The implication of this statement is that language cannot be interpreted outside the social situation where it is produced and/or upon which it bears. From this, it follows that there is not necessarily a universal consensus among members of a language community about specific meanings of terms or expressions; they may be contested in a way that reflects the underlying social structure of that community. Understanding both mainstream meanings and their contestation and the peripheral meanings arising therefrom, as well as their impact on social action, is considered in this study. Economic language especially warrants further discussion, and I focus on two elements. First, the entrepreneurs portrayed in this study spend a considerable time discussing what will happen next (tomorrow, or the following week), using vocabulary that projects an image of the future, sometimes suggesting knowledge about it. Their language contains many elements that at first may seem a demonstration of homo economicus in action, following from the self-­fulfilling prophecy of the successful internalization of economic thinking in the sense implied in the work of French anthropologist Michel Callon: calculative agency, hyper-­ individuality, opportunistic greed and so on (Callon 1998). As Abdul’s hopeful incantation ‘car business is good business’ in the previous chapter indicates however, such language statements must be carefully unpacked and cannot be taken at face value. The entrepreneurs in this study certainly feel inspired by the ideal of the goal-­rational actor, and they often resort to a language emphasizing their allegiance to it. Yet major questions remain about the specific relations between economic language and social behaviour, especially how this relation unfolds in a particular presentation of the self. Second, the social lives of the entrepreneurs portrayed are steeped in future-­narratives: stories that project a­ – u ­ sually o ­ ptimistic – i­dea about economic opportunity. Such narratives may be contagious, spreading like wildfire especially when receptive actors are in close communion coupled with powerful frames that promise future fortunes (Shiller 2019). Appreciating such future-­frames as well as grasping how they animate future-­work presents a special challenge to this study. Subscribing to an ontogenetic interpretation of future-­time implies a concern for everyday ritual – ‘expressive or symbolic aspects of economic life’ (Gudeman and Hann [2015] 2017) – such as car dealers revving the engine of a second-­hand car to comfort a prospective buyer; or derivatives

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traders scrutinizing the projections of complex econometric models in lieu of investment decisions; or the skipper who arrives first on the bridge, symbolically marking his control of the situation. For the purpose of this study, I make a distinction between two types of rituals: those that revolve around social group boundaries and structures in which ideas about the future are being formed, or social rituals; and those that have a direct bearing on the future, or uncertainty rituals. Social rituals make visible hierarchies; consider for instance the abovementioned Norwegian skipper. Schumpeter’s work points to yet another version of the same principle: the entrepreneurial spectacle as a social ritual in which the entrepreneur makes himself the centre of attention; consider for instance how Steve Jobs engineered his celebrated product launches, not unlike a Protestant minister delivering a sermon in church. Uncertainty rituals, on the other hand, often have an element of accountability; they help entrepreneurs interpret situations when there is a mismatch between the common world of observable facts and the collectively expected outcome (Dein 2016). For instance, when the price trend in derivatives does not follow the projections, derivatives traders believe this must be because of a flaw in the model. The subsequent tweaking of the model to account for the new reality can be seen as a ritualized response that helps the traders to deal with the inconvenient truth that the derivatives market is a reflexive system, meaning that its functioning is influenced by their beliefs about it, thereby compromising modelling (Kay and King 2020: 35–36). The term ‘ritual’ may have a placid connotation, but it must not be overlooked that there are real consequences to consider. For instance, business tycoons whose incantations of future fortunes are ritualized through public presentations (TED is a case in point) can be dethroned, as empty promises can lead to popular anger, and even imprisonment. Accountability is then elevated to the level of personal responsibility, often without full consideration of the fact that the social construction of the future is a collective endeavour that involves the players onstage as well as the audience admiring their performance. Seen from this angle, popular anger that results from empty promises is hence not just an emotion, but, as this study shows, one that has a place in ritualized dealing with future uncertainty. I end this section with a short methodological meditation, foreshadowing a more extensive one in the Epilogue. Considering future-­work through the social relations that entrepreneurs forge, thereby specifically considering the role therein of ordinary language and everyday rituals, begins by making direct observations of entrepreneurial behaviour. Such observations never stand on their own; the observation of social practice makes sense only when governed by an interpretation of meaning (Winch

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[1958] 2008). In other words, questions of how entrepreneurs understand their situation, and act towards such understandings, drive the observation. The cases presented in the following chapters therefore seek to stay close to observed behaviour; they are ethnographic in character. As a necessary consequence, this choice of approach limits numerical stretch: the reader will be familiarized with the stories of a limited number of individuals, situated in particular global frontiers. Grounding the study in ethnographic cases does not compromise theoretical consequence however (Flyvbjerg 2006; Small 2009). The study draws logical inferences from observational evidence with reference to future-­work, with the aim of further developing social theory, or theorizing future-­work. Theorizing, or thinking with data (Wuyts 1993), denotes a processual idea of theory (Swedberg 2016) that invites the reader to think along. I hope you will join me on this intellectual journey.

Notes 1. Thus viewing creative destruction through innovation as an idealization of entrepreneurship resonates with recent contributions from investigative journalism. For instance, David Gelles portrays General Electric’s celebrated CEO Jack Welch as a figure whose ruthless reform agenda, slashing jobs, outsourcing key production and financializing the company led to the demise of GE (Gelles 2022); and Patrick Radden Keefe shows how the Sackler family succeeded in engulfing US society in the highly addictive OxyContin that killed nearly half a million Americans (Keefe 2021). 2. The American economist Frank Knight is often cited as the one who systematized the study of entrepreneurial behaviour. His acclaimed Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit ([1921] 2014) certainly has its merits in positing entrepreneurial behaviour as a struggle with the indeterminacy of the future. At the same time, Knight works with the distinction between impossible knowledge and partial knowledge, arguing that when entrepreneurs focus their efforts on the latter, they can make a profit; impossible knowledge is to be avoided as it reduces entrepreneurial decision-­making to a gamble. With this distinction, Knight rubs shoulders with Barth and Schumpeter in the sense of remaining within the epistemological interpretation of time; he did not solve the epistemic problem to the extent that Keynes does. My interpretation is thus at odds with John Kay and Mervyn King who argue that Keynes and Knight are ontologically comparable (Kay and King 2020: 15). 3. In Granovetter’s (1985) interpretation, the social embeddedness of economic behaviour is another way of saying that economic behaviour is expressed via social institutions, including those of the interpersonal-­relations network. Granovetter posits embeddedness in juxtaposition to what he considered two major flaws in social theory dealing with economic behaviour: undersocialized versus oversocialized theories. In oversocialized theories, which Granovetter associates with anthropology in particular, actors’ behaviour is fully determined by the social institutions

Time and Entrepreneurship in Social Theory  *  43

of which they are part. Granovetter appears to have in mind ethnographic depictions of pre-­market societies as they were studied in the early twentieth century. In undersocialized theories, which Granovetter associates with neoclassical economics, actors are portrayed as socially isolated individuals, like particles in an atomic structure, resulting from the narrow pursuit of utility. Granovetter argues that these are problematic interpretations. Oversocialized theories assume docile individuals who will behave perfectly according to custom and tradition, with no room for individual agency; behavioural patterns are fully internalized. Undersocialized theories struggle to explain why economic life does not descend into a chaotic scramble for self-­pursuit; it does not explain the social order of market society. As an alternative interpretation, Granovetter argues that economic behaviour is expressed in social interaction; it is situationally shaped. Although this study borrows from Granovetter the insight that social relations find an expression in economic behaviour, it also has reservations about the type of person he has in mind. Granovetter appears to work with the assumption that economic actors arrive upon sensible decisions given the structure of their interpersonal networks and the institutions of which they form part. Or, ‘Their behaviour ­looks … ­more like a reasonable response to their present situation. … That such behaviour is rational or instrumental is more readily s­ een … ­if we note that it aims not only at economic goals but also at sociability, approval, status, and power (Granovetter 1985: 506). Sensibility is certainly part of everyday economic life, but, in this study, it is approached as a presentation of the self, which may or may not project an idealized version of the self.

2

Social Construction of ° The Individualism

Fish Entrepreneurs on Lake Victoria, Uganda

Homo economicus is a male person, sometimes a homunculus inside each of us, sometimes a giant incorporating the whole of society or the world. Our pervasive microcosm to whose outlines all our explanations are required to fit is a quintessential stranger; he has no family or friends, no personal history; his emotions are not like ours; we don’t understand his language, still less his purposes. —Mary Douglas and Steven Ney, Missing Persons (my emphasis)

Introduction In order to project an impression of goal-­rational behaviour, entrepreneurs often present themselves as opportunistic individuals, aptly portrayed in the quotation above.1 Few social anthropologists will accept individualism at face value in the sense that many economists, explicitly or not, tend to see it: the lone decision-­maker who is severed from social ties. Individualism as a theme in social anthropology refers to a behavioural practice that has particular social origins. Some in the discipline argue that individualism as it is commonly understood refers to the eroding forces of a global, neoliberal capitalism that break up class solidarities in a quest for maximum (corporate) profits. In today’s labour markets, this frame of reference is deployed to explain the ‘gig economy’ where workers disguised as impromptu entrepreneurs are paid a return below subsistence, pitting them against one another in a competitive struggle (Ravenelle 2019). Others argue that individualism is a logical response to the redistributive demands originating in intimate ties. A well-­appreciated property of rural life in the Global South, for instance, is that one person’s windfall will quickly result in endless requests for financial assistance from those around him/her. Perhaps this attitude was useful for the survival of mankind in a more primordial state, but this dark side of kinship is also

The Social Construction of Individualism  *  45

credited as a powerful disincentive to capital accumulation. Enterprising individuals must therefore estrange themselves from their social affines in order to achieve business success, which in local terms is then explained as individualistic, non-­social behaviour (Narotzky 2007). These are valuable interpretations that resonate in the case that I am about to present, although the case also brings to light a social element of individualism that warrants yet another interpretation. This alternative interpretation finds inspiration in the future-­work of a particular group of entrepreneurs: fishermen on Lake Victoria, in Uganda. In this part of Africa, a vibrant, commercial Nile perch export fishery emerged during the 1980s, connecting fishing villages and other hubs in a regional East African network of fishing, processing and trading with supermarkets across the globe where the fish are retailed through an extended network tying together fishermen and their crews, fish processors, and packaging and transporting firms in a frontier of global capitalism (Gibbon and Ponte 2005). This frontier functioned as a magnet in the area, drawing hundreds of thousands of Africans to the lake where they set up their new existence. The social and economic implications of this mass migration are numerous, but this chapter focuses specifically on how it created a new form of entrepreneurial behaviour. In this chapter, I unpack this behaviour, specifically considering social processes in the construction of individualism. To illustrate the problem that I seek to address in this chapter, let me now continue with a short ethnographic sketch. ‘Here in Uganda, you cannot trust someone to be your friend; not if you are in business with him. So, in business you just keep to yourself’. The person speaking is Herman Kirimega, a successful local fisherman. We are sitting in his home in Ggolo, an old fishing village sitting right on the edge of the northwestern part of Lake Victoria, Central Uganda. The home is a large mansion built from imported, expensive bricks; the floor is made of shining tiles and the house is furnished with newly purchased household appliances. A widescreen LCD television, which few locals can afford, is tuned into a DStv satellite dish, which even fewer can afford, showing BBC World. In front of the house, on a carefully groomed lawn, a well-­ maintained Nissan pickup is parked, used for transporting Nile p ­ erch – t­ he local fish species in which Kirimega s­pecializes – t­o nearby processing factories. Next to the pickup, a regular passenger car is parked, which Kirimega lovingly calls his shopping trolley, a direct reference to his wife’s shopping sprees in the fancy malls of the capital, Kampala. At the time of writing, Uganda was in the midst of a Nile perch export boom in which Kirimega had made a sizeable investment a decade earlier. Kirimega was among a group of businessmen from Ggolo who pioneered the Nile perch fishing business in the area, and his economic fortunes are apparent.

46  •   Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future

What the statement ‘keeping to yourself’ may mean in the practice of everyday life is not so apparent immediately. At first sight, it appears to be a straightforward expression of the self-­reliant individualism reflected in the ideal of economic man, as discussed in the previous chapters. Things are more complicated however: the life of Kirimega and many others like him whom I studied in the northwestern part of Lake Victoria are deeply embedded in a vibrant social life. In fact, the first impression one gets when visiting a fishing village in the area is one of profound conviviality. Lake Victoria dwellers by and large live their lives in extensive networks of family, friends and colleagues. To be considered a full person in the area is to have a following, rather than keeping to oneself. Keeping one’s distance, such as not participating in important social functions (weddings and funerals) or not going to church in the company of others, leads to social isolation, and the stigma of being a recluse. When one observes the social vibrancy in fishing villages, the isolated individual appears a distant ideal. At the same time, it is important not to dismiss Kirimega’s statement as mere wishful thinking. Consideration of his social practices more closely, as in this chapter, and of how they function in everyday Nile perch business, provides sufficient reason to agree with him. It appears that the key to his future-­work is to strike a delicate balance between keeping significant others at bay without being seen as an outsider. Special attention is devoted in this chapter to understanding whether the aloofness registered by Kirimega’s statement corresponds with business success. This stands to reason, as Kirimega himself accords his capacity to ‘keep to yourself’ as the key to his business fortunes. The chapter unveils a more complex picture however. Large profits may be made by some Nile perch entrepreneurs, yet, for many others, business fortunes are chequered with frequent losses and even bankruptcy. In this chapter, I show that both business failure and business success emanate from a similar model of entrepreneurial behaviour in which collaboration is seen as inherently problematic, fostering a negative attitude towards allowing others into one’s business operations. The Nile perch entrepreneurs thus consider the future in individualistic terms. With this insight, the chapter is critical of the idea, popular in circles of entrepreneurship studies, that entrepreneurs, in order to attain business success, invest in the capital of their social relations by fostering solidarities. The observations presented in this chapter show something else: social solidarities are limited, as they are not considered worth striving for. This is the outcome of an individualistic entrepreneurship in which significant others are seen as adversaries competing for (limited) economic opportunity. Individualism in the sense implied here is fostered by a widely shared belief that it is possible to make money only by remaining independent of others.

The Social Construction of Individualism  *  47

This is a puzzling realization, as the cases are grounded in a world where the future is uncertain and, as will be shown, collaboration could be useful to remedy or mitigate it. Future uncertainty has serious repercussions: Nile perch fishing is capital intensive; the fish entrepreneurs sink large sums of money into their business, and this may evaporate at a single stroke of bad fortune. Here are some examples. Ecological uncertainty: Nile perch is a solitary and omnivorous fish known to move freely in the water column, and catching an individual Nile perch does not predict the presence of others (as is the case with flocking fish like herring). Pooling efforts to integrate fishing spots could help to mitigate the risk of catching nothing. Weather uncertainty: there are strong winds on Lake Victoria and, with local weather forecasts remaining rudimentary, storms that may damage vessels and equipment arrive without notice. Setting up a contingency fund could help to overcome such losses. Economic uncertainty: prices paid for Nile perch are volatile, and price shocks are unpredictable: the consequence of being at the tail end of a long commodity chain (the fish are exported to overseas destinations). Price movement could be hedged through mutual insurance. Because none of the solutions suggested here apply, many of the Nile perch entrepreneurs whom I consulted experienced financial loss frequently, or went bankrupt, and many of them have sleepless nights over it. To throw some more light on why Nile perch entrepreneurs do not see collaboration as a viable way out of their future predicament, the chapter presents an ethnographic account of their social lives. The account focuses on the lower end of the chain linking Nile perch fishing via trading to exporting and overseas retailing (Pringle 2005; Schuurhuizen et al. 2006). This contrasts with higher levels of the Nile perch chain, which appear to be associated with foreign-­owned (Asian, European) companies, such as fish-­processing facilities (Nile perch is a large fish that must be cut up in fillets for selling purposes), major traders, cargo companies airlifting the fish, and supermarket retailers, representing vast concentrations of capital and economic power. At the lower end of this global economic frontier however, we find numerous local fishermen, traders and other small-­scale entrepreneurs who began their Nile perch business in the wake of the boom, and for whom money-­making opportunities are consistently less pronounced. Business presents itself here as an occasional stroke of luck alongside frequent financial setbacks, often resulting in a marginal existence with limited opportunity to move up the Nile perch chain where better profits and more stable incomes can be generated. The chapter continues with a brief exposition of the political-­economic forces that led to the creation of the Nile perch frontier situated at and around Lake Victoria. It shows how stories of business success, understood

48  •   Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future

as an opportunity to advance beyond the rural locality from which many of the newfound fish entrepreneurs originate, attracted scores of candidate entrepreneurs from across the region to this new, global frontier. The chapter then zooms in on the career histories of two of them, the abovementioned Herman Kirimega and his colleague Bosco Ssekyewa. By juxtaposing their career histories in terms of the social relations upon which they draw and depend, I show that, for Nile perch entrepreneurs in the area, sociability generally ends where business begins. This is manifested in a propensity to avoid doing business with social ­intimates – ­spouses excepted. The entrepreneurs’ networks tend to move towards an avoidance of significant others and a reliance on distant contacts. This tendency, registered across a wider range of cases in the area, results from a self-­fulfilling prophecy of anticipated deceit. By anticipating that others will deceive them, the entrepreneurs tend to eye collaboration with great suspicion, thereby placing a serious limit on future capital accumulation by exposing the entrepreneurs to uncertainty. The behaviour that is intended to avoid future indeterminacy paradoxically thus magnifies future uncertainty. In the conclusion, I connect this surprising outcome to our debate about future time. By anticipating the future in negative social terms, entrepreneurs create a present that confirms their original assumption: a partial definition of the situation evokes a type of behaviour that makes the original partial conception become true.

Entrepreneurial Careers on Lake Victoria’s Nile Perch Export Frontier British colonial administrators introduced Nile perch to Lake Victoria in the 1950s to boost local fish production, but it remained a marginal, inconspicuous business until the mid-­1980s when exports to overseas destinations first started (Balirwa 2007; Pringle 2005). Although the rediscovery of Nile perch is of recent origin, Nile perch exports evolved against a long history of commercial fishing in the area. Fish from the lake, mostly native cichlids (a class of small, bony fish), were used for sustenance in local fishing villages or sometimes sold in local markets; but because the villages were connected to regional trade networks too, fresh and smoked/dried fish such as tilapia and sardines (mukene) had been finding their way for a considerable time from the lake to consumers in neighbouring countries. Essential business networks as well as a local fishing and fish-­trading organization were therefore already in place when a pronounced overseas demand encountered a growing Nile perch stock in Lake Victoria (Butcher and Colaris 1975; Bokea and Ikiara 2000).

The Social Construction of Individualism  *  49

Figure 2.1.  Lake Victoria and the research area in Masaka district, including the Ssese islands. © Joost Beuving.

The Nile perch export industry emerged in Uganda in the wake of economic reforms carried through in the 1980s and 1990s. Under these reforms, the role of the Ugandan government in coordinating the domestic economy was curbed dramatically, with the objective of putting market incentives in place. Thus, former state monopolies were dismantled, trade licensing was abandoned and foreign exchange transfers were liberalized (Kuteesa et al. 2010; Reinikka and Collier 2001). In response, hundreds of thousands of aspirant entrepreneurs moved to the lake, looking to make money. They invested capital in boats and equipment and began to fish the lake, mostly in places offshore or close to the Ssese islands, which are scattered in the Ugandan part of Lake Victoria (Figure 2.1). They settled at so-­called village landings, some of which were the traditional fishing villages of the pre-­Nile perch era; the majority, however, are new settlements that emerged in the wake of the Nile perch boom. Those staying at better established village landings benefit from a connection with all-­weather roads, making possible fast transport of the perishable fish to fish-­processing factories where the sizeable Nile perch is filleted and then packaged for export. Hence, access to infrastructure has become a key factor in entrepreneurial success. Within this broad organizational framework, different economic actors emerged, specializing in a particular part of the Nile perch chain. Local Nile perch entrepreneurs in Uganda usually make a distinction between three categories: Nile perch traders, boat owners and fishing crews. An elaboration of these categories and the arrangements that developed between them helps to better elucidate the economic environment in which they operate.

50  •   Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future

Actors in the Nile Perch Sector Traders are a diverse yet small group of well-­established businessmen who buy fresh fish from boat owners for sale either to other traders or directly to fish-­processing factories. Smaller traders travel from one village landing to another in refrigerated lorries or with specialized transporter boats fitted with an ice box to extend the time between procurement and delivery of the fish, making spot payments to fish-­selling boat owners. Larger traders are found at larger landings where they receive fish from boat owners with whom they enter into a credit relation. That is, smaller boat owners receive expensive petrol needed to fuel their outboard engines from the traders on credit and pay this back by delivering fresh Nile perch. Larger traders in the research area are reported to maintain credit ties with several hundred boat owners. Boat owners organize the fishing part of the Nile perch business. They are usually local businessmen, often with links to riparian communities, who invest their capital in the boats and fishing equipment used for fishing trips, recruit the crew to do the fishing and maintain ties with traders. Boat ownership is highly skewed in the area. A survey revealed that more than half of the boat owners command one to two boats and that half of the boats are in the hands of a small business elite commanding several boats (about 20 per cent) (Table 2.1). Boats are expensive items: a fully equipped boat may cost around the price of a second-­hand car, which only very few Ugandans can afford to buy. Larger boat owners usually do not fish themselves; instead, they coordinate their enterprise from shore; smaller boat owners almost always fish themselves. Crews are usually migrant young men with a rural background who come to the lake with little finance at their disposal.2 They carry out the fishing trips: they go to the lake, setting the nets or long-­lines at a suitable spot where they usually spend a couple of hours waiting for fish, and then sail their catch back home. They work in small teams, usually three to four persons, and a division of labour usually develops between them, with a Table 2.1.  Survey of boat ownership among 109 fish entrepreneurs. © Joost Beuving. Boats #

Boat owners %

 1–2

55.0

 3–5

24.8

6–10

13.8

 >10

 6.4

The Social Construction of Individualism  *  51

captain being responsible for overall boat management and contacts with the boat owners. The men sleep and eat during their trips and receive a salary in return for their work. This may be a cash payment (typically around €5 a day), but, in particular when business is disappointing, they are given part of the catch.

Career Patterns in the Nile Perch Business The ideal career pattern in the business from the viewpoint of local fisher­ men is as follows. A young man enters a village landing with limited economic means at his disposal and hence is unable to purchase a boat and equipment. Instead, he takes a job as crew for a boat owner. He is paid a modest salary in return for his services, eventually making it to the rank of boat captain. Once he has accumulated sufficient resources, he begins to invest in the purchase of a boat. Usually, this is a second-­hand vessel powered by an outboard engine that can be rented locally. Once established as a boat owner, he will try to expand his fleet to a number that generates enough to venture into fish trading. If the trading goes well, a trader may become a commissioned agent, working directly for a processing factory. Very large businessmen may eventually open their own fish-­processing factory. This pattern, however, reflects an ideal rather than an actual trajectory. In reality, upward mobility in the Nile perch chain is very limited. During the fieldwork, very few crews were observed to succeed in procuring a boat for Nile perch fishing. This is true for regular crews, but also for the captains who are slightly better positioned. Lack of income seems to be a major problem. Crews complain frequently that they are not paid on time, nor are they always paid the amount due (Beuving 2010). To boost their incomes, many therefore resort to backdoor selling of Nile perch and petrol: selling beyond what was agreed with the boat owner. Because of its illicit nature, it is difficult to present reliable figures, and one must therefore depend on anecdotal evidence. For instance, during private conversations, several crew informants indicated that they had served time in Masaka prison following accusation of these practices. Also, during the numerous nights that I spent at village landings, I noted a lively trade in petrol delivered in unmarked yellow jerry cans. Sometimes, befriended crews took me to spots outside the landing to witness the exchange of petrol at night; and, on several Nile perch fishing trips in which I participated, parts of catches were transferred from one boat to another with the intention of selling them without notifying the relevant boat owner. In response, boat owners make frequent changes in the composition of their crews: my survey among the largest four boat owners in the area shows

52  •   Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future

Table 2.2.  Survey of four prominent boat owners during a two-­week period. © Joost Beuving. Crew composition Boat owner

Same

Changed

Total

1

11

15

 26

2

23

21

 44

3

40

28

 68

4

16

10

 26

Total

90

74

164

that they changed around 40 per cent of their crews in a two-­week period (Table 2.2). Likewise, it was noted that few boat owners succeeded in expanding beyond two to three boats, even though many of them aspire to this: commanding five boats is considered the minimum required to run a stable business. They explained that moving beyond a few boats makes it impossible to monitor their crews. An even larger group of boat owners struggle to maintain their single boat. Usually endless repairs are being made, and, in response, a profitable carpentry industry has emerged in the research area. Another indicator is that fewer boat owners use the expensive fishing nets sold in town and instead resort to much cheaper locally manufactured long-­lines. This gear uptake evidences a business in distress, as confirmed by the following figures. Of the 109 boat owners consulted for this study, 25 ceased their business during the research period, and about half maintained their fleet, albeit often after a long and expensive struggle to make ends meet. A small group of better-­off boat owners continued to fare reasonably well. Some of them tried to make it as traders, in many cases borrowing to make this happen. However, more often than not they eventually abandoned this project because of disappointing profits and resumed their fishing activities. Traders becoming factory owners were never encountered; in fact, Indian business families with no previous dealings with Nile perch own most fish-­processing factories in Uganda today. To better understand the limits placed on upward mobility in the Nile perch chain, the chapter now continues with a description of the careers of two Nile perch entrepreneurs.

The Social Construction of Individualism  *  53

Career Histories: Mr Kirimega and Mr Ssekyewa Mr Kirimega and the Appearance of Business Success Herman Muwanga Kirimega was born in 1960 in Ggolo, the eldest son in a coffee-­growing family of five boys (see Figure 2.2 for details of his contacts). After completing his education at secondary boarding school near Kampala, he returned to Ggolo where initially he worked in his parents’ coffee fields and occasionally did some fishing for home consumption. At that time however, coffee prices dropped and, following common practice in Ggolo, Kirimega, together with an experienced paternal cousin, took to commercial fishing, mostly tilapia (a fish traded mostly regionally) but occasionally Nile perch too. Local market opportunities were promising, but the highly mobile fish resource also required long trips; this brought the young men into contact with several fishing villages in the vicinity. With civil war brewing in the area, smuggling in essential commodities intensified, locally called magendo (Himbara and Sultan 1995), boosting demand for lake-­borne transport. Kirimega, together with his cousin and several village f­riends – a­ ll distant k­ insmen – c­ apitalized on their knowledge of local waterways by offering transport services to regional traders. Their services were not without r­ isk – K ­ irimega remembers several arrests by the ­police – ­but the money was good. This allowed Kirimega to buy a boat and start his own cargo business. The civil war ended a few months later, quickly reducing demand for lake-­borne transport, and Kirimega went back to fishing. During the immediate post-­ war period (after 1986), coffee prices remained low, and many coffee farmers in Ggolo switched to fishing, mainly for home consumption. The sudden increase in fishermen had a repercussion on near-­shore stocks: ‘in those days, catches were very low because the whole village went to the lake’, Kirimega remembers. The group of friends had fared well: unlike most local fishermen who relied on paddles, the friends had succeeded in purchasing modern outboard engines that facilitated trips further from shore. In the early 1990s, they therefore started to migrate out, notably to other well-­established fishing villages south of Ggolo. After brief stays on several landings, in 1995 Kirimega received word that a fish factory for processing Nile perch had opened in the town of Kalisizo, in the vicinity of a village landing called Kasensero. Without a second thought, Kirimega and several other boat owners moved to Kasensero. In the wake of rapidly increasing perch catches during the mid-­1990s, several other fish factories sprang up, mostly concentrated near the capital, Kampala, and therefore far away from the Kasensero area. This inspired Kirimega to a next step: with profits remaining from the smuggling business, he bought a pickup truck and started sourcing perch from outlying

54  •   Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future

Figure 2.2.  Business contacts, Herman Kirimega. © Joost Beuving.

landings. During this time, he developed a reputation as a ruthless businessman. A former fish supplier remembers: ‘Mzee [a honorific term in local parlance] never paid all the money; he always made promises and then forgot!’ Business fared well during these days, evidenced by the purchase of a titled plot (entailing legal ownership that can be mortgaged for loans) and the construction of a house in Ggolo, but also by Kirimega’s rapidly expanding fleet of boats (at one point he owned twelve). As he now spent his days as a travelling salesman, he entrusted the organization of the fisheries in Kasensero to a succession of Ggolo kinsmen (including a son from his first marriage in 1980). The condition of the boats deteriorated rapidly during these years, eventually forcing Kirimega to abandon some of them, because few of the kinsmen were willing to finance the necessary upkeep. In the words of one of them: ‘Money issues are complicated; you cannot develop financially when you are employed by a relative’. Kirimega’s rapid rise to prosperity gradually brought him mugaga (rich man) status, and this introduced him to a new circle of prestigious contacts. This is important in what followed. During a function hosted by a wealthy local businessman in 2000, Kirimega re-­established contact with a local businessman called Richard Kalungi. Earlier, they had met as fellow fishermen in Ggolo, but, following a move into the retailing of fishing nets in Kampala, Kalungi had specialized in importing fishing gear from wholesalers in Dubai. Overseas business trips are highly valued in the area, and Kalungi’s overseas contacts offered an avenue for Kirimega into this. With cash raised from selling his boats in Kasensero, Kirimega initially bought electronic appliances at outlet stores in Dubai, which he then retailed in Kalungi’s shop in Kampala. After a wrangle over profit sharing, and inspired by his earlier success in fish transport, Kirimega shifted to importing second-­hand pickup trucks from the Emirates to Kampala. As

The Social Construction of Individualism  *  55

he lacked dependable contacts in Uganda’s capital, recouping the invested cash proved problematic, and in 2004 Kirimega gave up his Dubai trips. With only a few boats remaining, Kirimega now left Kasensero because, in the words of a fellow boat owner, ‘he could no longer join the class of mugaga, and had to go’. Subsequently, Kirimega moved to Nakatiba, a landing on the Ssese islands, where a wealthy kinswoman from Ggolo, ‘auntie’ Sylvia, had set up shop as a perch trader a few months earlier. For a while, Kirimega supplied fish to her, but her payments to him stalled, and he experienced difficulties recruiting crews: ‘these are just local boys, they cheat and they steal; it’s very difficult’. Next, Kirimega succeeded in mortgaging the titled plot and used this to buy a collector boat. Relations with his relative quickly turned sour when Kirimega used this to buy perch from neighbouring landings. The arrival of Kirimega’s second wife, Veronica (they married in 2005), made possible a division of labour that promoted their next step. The couple moved to Nkose, a remote island on Lake Victoria, where they found an available beach supervised by a mugaga whom Kirimega had befriended a few years earlier. Here, Kirimega supervises an expanding fleet of perch boats, while his wife organizes the buying of fish from nearby boat owners. Kirimega is considering downsizing the fishing and concentrating on trade only: ‘it is difficult, working with the crews; they always go where they are best paid, and then never come back’. Yet, despite his misfortunes, he will not abandon the perch business completely and is already making plans to purchase a second collector boat.

Mr Ssekyewa: A Marginalized Entrepreneur Bosco Ssekyewa, a sturdy, muscular man in his mid-­forties with rugged hands and a weather-­beaten face, represents a more common type of boat owner, marked by frequent setbacks and few financial peaks (see Figure 2.3 for his contact details). He spends most of his days in Lambu, where he rents a small landing-­style room: built from rust-­coloured corrugated iron sheets, with a few personal items inside mixed with an assortment of fishing gear. Recently, he bought a new pair of shoes in Masaka town, but otherwise he wears the same clothes as he did about a year ago.

Figure 2.3.  Business contacts, Bosco Ssekyewa. © Joost Beuving.

56  •   Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future

Ssekyewa was born in 1961 in a small village in Masaka district, and he settled in Lambu in 1980 when, as a teenage school dropout, he started venturing there as a boda-boda, a bicycle taxi man. Initially, he teamed up with his elder brother, Michael (he has an unknown number of other brothers, who do not appear to play a role in Ssekyewa’s career history), a former bicycle mechanic, to transport passengers by ­bike – l­ ater he bought am ­ otorbike – ­between Masaka town and the Bukakate ferry station near Lambu where they were living. Ssekyewa found revenues from the bodaboda business to be disappointing however, and, once a trade network developed in Lambu in the wake of the smuggling practices, Ssekyewa shifted his activities there. The expanding trade included mukene, a locally consumed sardine-­like silver fish that requires little start-­up capital. From his savings, Ssekyewa bought a lamp (mukene are light responsive), paddles from a local shop and a set of nets in town; in 1992, he purchased a small boat from a former boda-boda colleague. He remembers the catches as being good, and he found a ready market for the silver fish with ambulant traders in Lambu, but also elsewhere in the area, mostly on Ssese. Business went fairly well, and in 1996 this prompted Ssekyewa’s wife, Rebecca (they married in 1990 and had their first child the following year), to leave their ­village – ­where she farmed a small kibanja plot (a common tenure form that gives a tenant usufruct rights but not ownership) of bananas and ­beans – ­and join him in Lambu. Around this time, several well-­established mukene fishermen diversified into fishing perch. Although older fishermen in Lambu remember Nile perch as a by-­catch that they occasionally sold when other fish species were in short supply, demand for the valuable fish picked up halfway through the 1990s. Like many of his peers, Ssekyewa was initially sceptical about the fortunes of the new fish. Adult Nile perch are strong swimmers that avoid shallow coastal waters, and catching them requires advanced equipment such as expensive monofilament nets and motorboats. However, when Ssekyewa noticed how lesser-­endowed mukene fishermen, many of whom had arrived in Lambu only recently, put their money into perch fishing, he no longer hesitated. By selling his motorbike and the mukene gear, Ssekyewa raised sufficient cash to buy a second-­hand boat and a set of nets and started hunting perch. Like elsewhere in the region, during these years scores of young men found their way to Lambu, eager for a fishing job. Following common practice among boat owners, Ssekyewa recruited his crews from their ranks, hiring two or three men at a time and sailing with them to fishing grounds, mostly south of Ssese Island. Ssekyewa had difficulty remembering their names and other personal details, suggesting a loose relationship. Catches were fair, but this was offset by favourable prices, and for about a year and a half Ssekyewa made a modest profit. With this money, he bought two more

The Social Construction of Individualism  *  57

second-­hand boats and, after a number of particularly successful fishing trips, he fitted one of them with an outboard engine and nets. His rise through the ranks did not go unnoticed: locally, people started addressing him with the honorific mzee. To demonstrate his prospering business, Ssekyewa increasingly started to frequent the many bars that Lambu boasts. He often stood a round of drinks, and his photo album evidences how he functioned in an extensive but loose network of drinking friends. With one of these friends, a fellow boat owner called Ssentongo, Ssekyewa pooled some money and occasionally rented a collector boat. Thus, they tried to diversify into trading fish to a small fish factory off ­Bukakate – ­as the previous case also shows, a much-­desired career step in Uganda’s perch sector. The men had some success doing this, and with profits from their trade Ssekyewa started to construct a house in his native village. The house stands half-­finished today, mainly because Ssekyewa’s fortunes took a quick turn for the worse during the early 2000s. Most memorably, in 2004 a team of armed policemen arrested several fishermen in Lambu in an attempt to enforce a government ban on commonly used small-­meshed fishing nets. During the raid, locally remembered as Operation Wembley, Ssekyewa was quickly singled ­out – ­even though he had always maintained good relations with the local authorities. He suspected the complicity of a former crewman with whom he had quarrelled over payment a few weeks ­earlier – b ­ ut he failed to raise the funds needed to pursue a court case. Strongly declining catches presented another problem for Ssekyewa at this stage. Before the raid, Ssekyewa deployed four fully equipped fishing boats and, even though fellow boat owners continued to report satisfactory volumes of fish, his catches went ­down – ­especially from those boats that ventured onto the lake unsupervised. Surmising backdoor selling by the crews, Ssekyewa responded by replacing most of his crewmen with new ones from Lambu. Nonetheless, the losses he thus incurred, together with the payment of a steep bribe to pay his way out of jail following the raid, brought Ssekyewa to the brink of bankruptcy. He then sold two boats, including their equipment, to raise some money and resumed venturing onto the ­lake – ­this time using (much cheaper) long-­lines. Catches were declining overall in those days, and ­Ssekyewa – ­like many ­others – ­responded by sailing to ever more remote spots on Lake Victoria. One day during a storm late in 2008, he lost sight of one of the boats, and it failed to reappear once they returned to port. The boat was retrieved many days later on a remote village landing, but without the expensive outboard engine that Ssekyewa had fitted before the trip and with the crew gone. This constituted an irretrievable loss, and in December 2009 Ssekyewa made arrangements to return to catching mukene: he sold his remaining spare outboard engine and made a down payment on the

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construction of a new, small boat. Ssekyewa’s wife, meanwhile, had travelled back to their village where she resumed farming and, incidentally, dries and sells some of her husband’s by-­catch at the local market, thus bringing in much-­needed cash.

The Social Organization of Entrepreneurial Careers Kirimega’s and Ssekyewa’s fortunes are chequered; that is, their careers proceed as a series of high points and setbacks. Both succeeded in entering the Nile perch chain once the export fishing frontier materialized, and they established a business in it. Both moved up in the Nile perch business by expanding their fleet and upgrading from strictly fishing to trading fish. Kirimega even moved out of the chain by venturing into trade in manufactured goods. Through their moving up/out, they rose to mugaga and mzee status, respectively, and thus converted their profits into greater social prestige, furthering their businesses. Yet both suffered considerable setbacks too. Kirimega lost a sizeable sum of money during his overseas adventures, and he suffered losses because of the declining quality of his fleet during this period. Problems with his crews limited the number of fishing trips that he could organize. Ssekyewa’s fate is even bleaker. He faced several spells of declining catches that he attributed to his crews’ malfeasance; poor relations with his crews appear to have been instrumental in his brush with the law; and he lost expensive boats and fishing equipment, bringing him to the brink of bankruptcy, which eventually marked his exit from the Nile perch chain. Access to outside capital plays an important role in their careers. Ssekyewa’s more marginal fate resulted from lack of capital to make necessary investments in boats and equipment. He relied mainly on second-­hand boats necessitating frequent repairs. Also, he began using the outboard engines needed to secure catches in a competitive environment relatively late in his fishing career, limiting his profits. Kirimega, on the other hand, entered the expensive Nile perch business with sufficient means at his disposal. He was able to quickly expand beyond the five boats that are considered a threshold for a stable ­business – ­all powered by outboard engines. As a result, Ssekyewa was worse off towards the end of his career, eventually depending for family sustenance on the revenues generated by his wife. Kirimega got off to a flying start at first, but progress stalled and he increasingly depended on money made elsewhere. Hence, Ssekyewa’s story appears to be that of a person who remained poor, whereas Kirimega is someone who is not yet poor because he can buffer or mask losses with external capital.

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It may be asked whether their faltering career trajectories result from extracting too much from the business, dissipating profits into unproductive areas, or whether their Nile perch business itself failed to yield sufficient revenue. The evidence suggests a combination. Ssekyewa for a while supported an extravagant lifestyle from Nile perch revenues (the drinking bouts halfway through his career), and he withdrew some sums to construct a house. Likewise, Kirimega used Nile perch proceeds to buy an expensive house and channelled considerable funds into his unsuccessful overseas business venture. However, a healthy enterprise can support some revenue withdrawal without compromising business. Another part of the explanation is that both men had trouble turning their Nile perch fishing and/or trading enterprise into a self-­sustaining profitable business. The case studies suggest that this is because uncertainties associated with the lower reaches of the Nile perch chain present themselves as unmanageable shocks. Social relations are key in these shocks, a point further explored below. The material suggests that an analytical distinction should be made between relations with family members and those with non-­ relatives, notably colleagues and crews.

Family Relations In the early stage of their careers, fishermen and boat owners tend to rely on close kinsmen. For young, aspiring men, resident members of the extended family present their first set of viable business contacts. They are groomed in dense networks of family ties, and working with a kinsman is therefore a logical course of action in the beginning. For instance, by working in their father’s coffee gardens (Kirimega) or by helping out in an elder brother’s bicycle workshop (Ssekyewa), young men succeed in generating an income. These early professional contacts are crucial in exposing young men to the wider world and, in addition to generating income, can thus provide an important springboard for their future careers. These contacts usually do not last very long however. Kirimega’s engagement with his cousin continued for a few months, up to the point where he had raised sufficient funds from his smuggling business and could purchase a boat himself. It is salient that Kirimega saved up sufficient cash to buy the boat without having to depend on financial assistance from the cousin, or from any other kinsman. Also, supplying the fish to a kinswoman in Nakatiba was short-­lived because of problems over payments. In a comparable fashion, Ssekyewa set up shop in Lambu after he had befriended a regular customer living there, but he did so without involving the brother with whom he had previously teamed up. Ssekyewa could have introduced his brother to the customer and thus helped his brother to diversify, but he

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chose not to do this. An important reason for the short duration of reliance on close kinsmen is that kin ties are experienced as authoritarian social relations. They usually take the form of junior kinsmen working for their senior kinsmen for a small wage, which they usually consider a meagre reward for their hard work. Hence, Kirimega’s relative’s remark earlier on: there is a feeling that one cannot develop when working for a kins(wo) man. The authoritarian nature of such relations presents a strong incentive for young men to break away from the receiving end of family ties, and they tend to do so as soon as the occasion arises. After the men progress into more senior positions, they begin to recruit junior kinsmen in their businesses, who in turn lament the exploitative nature of the relation. So, it seems that once the entrepreneurs extract themselves from authoritarian kin relations, they behave in an authoritarian manner themselves. Marriages present a major exception to this pattern: these are more stable relations. The material shows that, at key points in their careers, the men depended on their spouses. In Ssekyewa’s case, his wife provided for the family in their village during his first years in Lambu, and later she commercialized her husband’s by-­catch to pay household bills. Kirimega’s (second) wife acted as his partner in the business, making it possible to carry out a mixed fishing-­trading business. His case follows a more common pattern in the area, that of business expansion coinciding with marriage, whereby every branch of the business is co-­managed by the wife. This does not mean that marriages are very peaceful arrangements. The women in the case studies complained about their husbands, in private deploring their husbands’ frequent financial losses as well as their limited room for manoeuvre. Because of the patrilocal nature of marriage however, women become dependent on their husbands for sustenance (Musisi 1991). With very few alternative options, they tend to resign themselves to their fate, eventually.

Non-Kin Ties In more advanced stages of their careers, the two men are increasingly seen to mix with non-­family members. These include ­peers – ­equally positioned entrepreneurs with whom they enter into business ­relations – ­and crews. Collaborations with peers are common. Ssekyewa teamed up for a while with Ssentongo, and Kirimega did business for some time with Richard Kalungi, and later with his friend based on Nkose island. Typically, these arrangements are limited to low-­risk economic activities, such as sharing the cost of renting a collector boat (Ssekyewa) or paying some money to get access to a favoured trading or fishing spot (Kirimega). Entrepreneurs optimistically refer to these arrangements as ‘forming a company’ ­(okwegatta

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in local parlance), but their life span is typically in the range of a few weeks, and seldom more than a few months. They further encompass sums of money that are small in proportion to what is needed to run a Nile perch business, seldom exceeding €40 or €50. Further, as Ssekyewa’s example shows, collaboration of the okwegatta type tends to peter out, usually as a result of smouldering conflicts that are framed as a dispute over profit sharing. Such conflicts rapidly emerge once profits come under pressure following falling catches or unexpected price drops. This then raises questions among okwegatta partners about how losses ought to be accounted for, either now or in the near future. Raising this question usually sparks a tense discussion about rights and responsibilities that tends to spin out of control. Conflict mediation is rarely sought, and, because of the small sums involved, few adversaries consider going to court. The stories of entrepreneurs are therefore full of references to unresolved conflicts in the past. Whereas relations between peers are presented as being between equals, that is not the case in relations between boat owners and their crews. The material suggests that these are asymmetrical: boat owners are in a position to hire and fire crews. Recruitment is practised in public spaces, usually at or around the beaches where the boats are moored. Working out the details of the labour arrangement in a public space rather than in the privacy of one’s home is interpreted by those involved as stressing the superior position of the boat owners: it makes the asymmetry visible. Moreover, these are thin social relations: note the difficulty Ssekyewa had in remembering the names of his current crew, and Kirimega’s dismissive statement about the crews being ‘just local boys’. As to emphasize his superior position, Kirikega made a point of paying his crew on the groomed lawn surrounding his luxurious home; and an important aspect of this ritual was that the men were never allowed into the house itself. It is further telling that the men hired their crews from the lakeshore; none of their crews were related to them, and relations therefore remained single-­ stranded, i.e. limited to the transaction involved. Thin and conflictive relations with crews come at a high cost however. Because boat owners are not motivated to commit themselves to their crews, neither are the crews committed to them. So, in practice, rather than a build-­up of confidence in relations between boat owners and crews, a market for short-­term Nile perch fishing labour has emerged. In this market, both parties behave according to the ideal of the neoclassical actor: the individualist seeking economic opportunity. For boat owners, this means that they try to limit payments to their crews in an attempt to beef up profits. Crews try to minimize their labour effort and are constantly on the lookout for opportunities to moonlight (compare Hara and Jul-­Larsen 2003). Yet, a key factor in the organization of fishing in the area is that the

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crews are entrusted with very valuable equipment. Smaller boat owners can keep a direct eye on their crews’ movements, but for boat owners with more than two or three boats this becomes impossible. Further, boat owners generally consider it prestigious to retire from active fishing, thus contributing to social status symbolized by the honorific address mzee or mugaga. In other words, boat owners face a constant tension between expanding their ­fleets – ­contributing to catches and social ­status – ­and the need to directly supervise their crews; few Nile perch entrepreneurs succeed in resolving this.

Interpretation: A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Anticipated Deceit A major reason why Nile perch entrepreneurs tend to value self-­reliance and are unfavourable to cultivating social relations in business is that they are inspired by a negative perception of other people. This does not mean that there is no social life at the landings; in fact, there is and it is vibrant. Boat owners attend functions, notably those hosted by their colleagues, and sometimes even by a crew member with whom they have worked for some time. Funerals or marriages of landing dwellers are therefore marked by the movement of (often overloaded) minibuses from/to village landings. Further, on religious holidays, most landings bustle with life: people dress up and spend time socializing. These are important social rituals, and it would be considered antisocial to refrain from participating in them. However, sociability generally ends where business begins and does not usually include the bringing together of different business interests. The observed behaviour is the logical outcome of a self-­ fulfilling prophecy. First theorized by the American sociologist Robert Merton, a self-­fulfilling prophecy denotes how a public definition of the situation becomes an integral part of that situation; the definition thus shapes further developments. The essential point is that the original situation definition is not necessarily true, in the sense of corresponding to readily observable things. As Merton puts it: ‘The self-­fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the original false conception come true. This specious validity of the self-­fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning’ (Merton [1949] 1968: 477). Applying this ground-­breaking idea to the material uncovers the following. In relations with kinsmen, junior kinsmen find themselves trapped in authoritarian relations. Once an opportunity arises to escape, they do so, often without consulting their senior kinsmen and/or without fulfilling their commitments to them. Once

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individuals advance to a more senior position, they surmise that the junior kinsmen with whom they occasionally work will do as they did: make use of the relation rather than invest in it. They respond to this by adopting an authoritarian stance, which in turn promotes the belief that opportunities for personal advancement in kin ties are limited. This belief undermines the build-­up of trust relations, placing a premium on behaving in the directive, domineering way that characterizes these relationships. The belief that social relations hinder personal advancement becomes internalized as an expectation that is carried into other relations upon which the entrepreneurs come to draw during later stages of their careers. Peers, for instance, are often approached as opportunistic adversaries with whom collaborations should be reduced to a minimum. This belief has two consequences. First, time must be spent policing one’s business partner to check whether or not s/he is withdrawing some of the pooled capital for private e­ nds – t­ ime that could have been used productively otherwise. Second, it restricts the pooling of capital to relatively small sums. Losing money to one’s business partner is anticipated, and entrepreneurs confine pooled capital to sums whose loss can be overcome. The fact that local banks are reluctant to issue loans to fishermen, and that procuring loans through personal networks beyond the fishing business is limited, reduces the availability of the capital needed to move up the Nile perch chain (by buying more boats or by expanding into trading) where risks are lower and profits usually higher. Thus, boat owners tend to become trapped in the lower regions of the chain, bearing the full brunt of end-­of-­chain uncertainties. In relations with crews, the negative perception appears even more prominent than in other relations. Boat owners deeply distrust their crews, a priori considering them as unreliable. This stance motivates the owners to undervalue their crews’ work and to want to closely monitor their actions. Sensing their distrust, and frustrated because of the low pay, crews are prone to resort to the alternative, illicit income opportunities of which boat owners accuse them. Furthermore, crews are aware that even if catches have been d ­ isappointing – a­ s they often a­ re – t­he boat owners for whom they work will routinely attribute it to backdoor selling. Because crews do not usually get the benefit of the doubt and know that there is a reasonable chance of getting fired upon their return, they might as well seize the occasion and try to sell fish and petrol during the trip. Backdoor selling presents a formidable loss, and boat owners are usually compelled, eventually, to reduce the size of their fleets, pushing them down the Nile perch chain. In sum, a self-­fulfilling prophecy of anticipated deceit permeates the social relations of the studied fish entrepreneurs. Because other persons

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are expected to behave opportunistically by exploiting the relation, they resort to similar behaviour, with the result that their relations are short-­ lived and conflictive, in turn promoting opportunism. The working of this prophecy highlights the force of the social in entrepreneurship: rather than making autonomous decisions, entrepreneurs base their decision-­making on the views they hold of persons around them. These views cannot be suspended: they force themselves upon the entrepreneurs and are part of their taken-­for-­granted lifeworld. Also, they do not emerge overnight but are transmitted and reproduced via complicated social links. In the studied cases, authoritarian kinship relations socialize young men into self-­reliance and opportunism, which transforms into an expectation of deceit that they anticipate by resorting to authoritarian behaviour. A major unanswered question that remains is whether the sociogenesis of this behaviour is more broadly associated with the structural conditions of the studied cases: economic reforms and emerging global markets. That requires another study, but hopefully this study has shown how answering this question depends on acknowledging social relations in entrepreneurship and how they structure the upward and downward movements in global export chains.

Conclusion The analysis presented here highlights the value of looking at entrepreneurs’ social relations in the analysis of global export frontiers, expressed in the statement ‘in business you keep to yourself’. This ethnographic case study of entrepreneurial careers in the Nile perch export business has shown that whereas the examined entrepreneurs present themselves as homo economicus – self-­reliant, opportunistic i­ ndividuals – ­their behaviour does not subscribe to the atomistic image of economic man: it has social origins that are conditioned by past social experiences. Ethnographic case analysis uncovered that their behaviour presents a logical response to authoritarian kinship relations that eventually spill over into other social relations domains. The fish entrepreneurs thus tend to engage with others in the belief that depending on them is bad for business, setting in motion a self-­fulfilling prophecy that spawns conflictive relations. Because of that, supervision problems prevail and resource pooling is kept to a minimum. The Nile perch entrepreneurs’ social behaviour thus has real consequences: entrepreneurs remain trapped in the lower parts of the chain where uncertainties are high and fortunes chequered. From this research outcome, two broader points may be inferred that have relevance for this study of entrepreneurship. First, the cases bring into focus a fundamental difference between self-­reliant individualism as

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a distinctive presentation of the self and individualism as a social practice expressed in a particular social situation. The Lake Victoria case may be seen as an extreme (or pure) case: the presentation of the self and social practice overlap. That is, Kirimega’s statement at the beginning of this chapter mirrors sustained attempts to keep significant others at bay. To be sure, the message of this chapter is not that such a strong overlap is typical of entrepreneurial behaviour, in economic frontiers or elsewhere. The ethnographic literature on entrepreneurship is replete with instances where entrepreneurs present themselves in individualistic terms but in daily practice are fully absorbed in corporate groups or strongly integrated networks (e.g. Rubbers 2009; Walsh 2004). This chapter, however, serves as an important warning not to be dismissive about the possibility that some overlap may occur, and is often common. Key to unpacking the future-­work of entrepreneurs, in other words, is to consider what happens socially behind the image of individualism that entrepreneurs project; and, in a world where significant others are appreciated in opportunistic terms, keeping them at bay makes a lot of sense. The Lake Victoria case makes explicit the social mechanism that is at play. At some point in time, the fish entrepreneurs came to view their significant others in negative terms. To my knowledge, the point at which this emerged cannot be precisely ascertained in the case of Nile perch fishing, but it stands to reason that it followed from the mixing together of various groups in creating the Nile perch frontier, sometime in the 1990s, matched with the optimistic belief that the Nile perch boom pointed the way towards a bright future. This shifted the collective definition of the future as one of opportunistic adversity, which, in turn, elicited, and then normalized, unscrupulous behaviour that confirmed the original definition of the situation: crews stealing from their bosses became a matter of routine practice, bosses began to undercut their colleagues’ prices and so on. Such malicious behaviour fuelled the perception that others cannot be trusted, setting in motion a spiral of negative stereotypes that resulted in a conviction that one is best advised to keep to oneself. This may be a slowly creeping process, as the Nile perch case suggests, but there is no reason not to assume that it could unfold more quickly in a rapid meltdown. As a second point, there are spill-­over effects to consider. When the self-­fulfilling prophecy mechanism outlined above remains confined to one particular social sphere, it seems that its broader future economic effects remain limited. Consider, for instance, the possibility that Kirimega or Ssekyewa would struggle only with kinsmen aspiring to be fishing crew, but that others, from non-­kin circles, would find a warm home in their enterprises. In that case, the mechanism would be contained and its broader, economic effects could be limited. My material, however, suggests that

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this is not the case, as few entrepreneurs in the area build up larger fleets of canoes: they operate socially mixed enterprises that are constrained by what they can maximally supervise themselves. In the case of Lake Victoria, the negative stance towards social ties germinated in the sphere of kinship ties and then spilled over into the social sphere of non-­kin ties. This observation underscores the point that once individualistic/individualizing social practices migrate out of the sphere where they were first formed, and then work their way into various other spheres, there may be a more serious, pernicious economic effect to consider. The germination of negative sentiments towards one’s fellow kinsmen has been registered more broadly in the record of African studies (Geschiere 2003; Jakiela and Ozier 2016; van Donge 1992), but it does not follow that this is typical of frontiers elsewhere. The lesson rather seems to be that in situations where a tendency can be observed to consider ‘the other’ in negative terms, thereby fostering individualizing practices, it must be established whether this pertains to a specific set of contacts or to other persons in general. When the latter applies, as a next step it must be considered how the negative expectation is externalized, specifically considering at which points in the social network a spill-­over occurs. Also, the exception to the rule observed in the Lake Victoria ­case – s­pouses are considered dependable from the viewpoint of making them central in future plans and escaping the self-­fulfilling ­prophecy – ­may not apply elsewhere. The ethnographic record holds mixed evidence. In one African ­case – ­Kenyan women partaking in an export boom in fresh ­vegetables – ­spousal relations are at the heart of the problem of building dependable relationships. Growing vegetables is considered a housewife’s customary activity, but, when vegetable growing transformed into a money-­making business geared towards export markets, women observed how their husbands encroached upon their domain, crowding out the women. The women, in turn, responded by sabotaging the vegetable businesses to which they had privileged knowledge. Distancing themselves from their husbands put a strain on spousal relations, from that point onwards degenerating into a nuptial battlefield that undermined the coveted vegetable export production (Dolan 2001). The Nile perch case documented in this chapter thus has implications for understanding future-­work when two key social processes interlock: the presentation of the self as a self-­reliant individual functions as a powerful mould to craft actual social practice, coupled with strong spill-­over effects, transmitted and reproduced via complicated social links. The outcome is a paradox that may help to understand better other cases of global frontier economies where entrepreneurial take-­off falters or is absent. The paradox in sum: whereas entrepreneurs seek to find a secure future by avoiding

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significant others, as they are seen as difficult to bring under one’s sphere of influence, doing so exposes them to the vagaries of conducting business in a frontier economy. This paradox is neither intended nor centrally coordinated: it is meshed up in the autonomous dynamic of the social world in which entrepreneurs are embedded.

Notes 1. The chapter presents a heavily reworked version of the original case material that was published in Beuving 2015. 2. The Lake Victoria fish business is dominated by migrants with very diverse backgrounds, and, as reported elsewhere in Sub-­Saharan Africa, ethnic affiliation is not a strong focal point for social organization (Ferguson 1999). The main protagonists’ various places of origin are, however, mentioned in the case studies, because spatial considerations appear to be a key ingredient in entrepreneurial behaviour.

3

and Dreaming of ° Profit-Making Fortunes

Second-Hand Car Dealers in Cotonou, Benin

What would be the respective outcomes of a set of rival courses of action? We have to decide on one course out of all that seem open; we have therefore to make some particular a­ ssumption … a­ bout what the outcome of each course would be; and in the task of selecting or creating this assumption, we shall be influenced by desire and imagination as well as by rational belief or unbiased institutions. There will be so-­called ‘wishful thinking’; but we shall see that here is a form of wishful thinking that is by no means stupid or even illogical, but is, indeed, the natural and reasonable response of human nature to intractable uncertainty. —George Lennox Shackle, Expectations in Economics

Introduction The impression of goal-­rational behaviour benefits from a presentation of the self as a profit-­maximizer: looking for the greatest return on some investment.1 Much entrepreneurial behaviour may be driven by some future vision that points towards capital ­accumulation – ­it actually seems difficult to imagine a form of entrepreneurial behaviour that is devoid of such a vision. This chapter, however, questions how the idea of profit percolates to socially shared understandings of accumulation, including what constitute socially acceptable pathways to profit-­making. This chapter thus approaches profit-­making as a socially shared definition of the future, and, importantly, one that relates what entrepreneurs currently do, or refrain from doing, to what they expect will happen tomorrow or next week. There is an interesting anthropological literature dealing with this problem that transcends conventional, economic interpretations: profits as the material consequence of measured steps into the future, expressed as revenue minus input costs. The anthropological literature has produced two dominant interpretations of profit-­making, here summarized as zero-­sum game and

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magical money. In this chapter, I add a third one, which revolves around profit-­making as driven by a dream of making a fortune. Viewing profit-­ making in terms of dreaming of fortunes appears to be a powerful way to construct the future in the globe’s frontiers: places that are perceived as having a lot of future and little past. Zero-­ sum interpretations of profit revolve around the idea that profit-­making is intimately tied to the distribution of social positions in a society. Two versions of this idea apply. In egalitarian societies, powerful figures emerge who orchestrate the distribution of products and ­services – s­ ometimes also referred to as the Big Man model first identified in Melanesia (Stewart 1990). Such figures act as powerful patrons, and they position themselves as obligatory passage points, fostering the (temporary) accumulation of rents.2 In societies with more unequal tendencies, competitive struggle tends to be organized socially around a system of patronage. Clients in patronage networks relinquish some of their productive value and, in return, receive particular favours from their patron. The Mafia presents a classic case in point: shopkeepers paying a fee to a local boss in return for protection against similar claims from a rival boss (Balsamo and Carpozi [1988] 2019). Studies in Sub-­Saharan/West Africa yield a similar impression, with the addition that the patronage may result in a relatively stable pattern, as the patron figure becomes naturalized into a position of authority (Guyer 1993). Profits seen in this light are thus a redistribution of a society’s productive value, held together in a system of unequal exchange. What accrues as profit is the total sum of what a patron’s network of clients puts in his/her hands. One man’s profit is the summation of many men’s losses; the total sum of productive value remains unaffected. A major question pertains to the social sanctioning of the inequality: under what circumstances is such profit-­taking legitimized, and when is it considered downright theft? The work of Janet Roitman in northern Cameroon presents an interesting case. She shows how, in the 1990s, a new form of capital accumulation emerged in this part of Africa, in local parlance referred to as a voleur imprenable: the unstoppable thief. Voleurs imprenables are typically young men who once held government positions, but after Cameroon’s state downsizing following its submission to World Bank and IMF structural adjustment programmes, they lost their coveted jobs. To make up for a foreseeable loss in social prestige, but also to simply make ends meet, some of the men turned to an alternative livelihood as highwaymen. On popular roads, they set up improvised roadblocks and with hired military outfits they pretended to be state officials. In this borrowed capacity, they began to collect bribes from drivers, especially pressurized ones such as those carrying perishable produce or impatient passengers. The drivers pay the bribe to get the voleurs off their backs

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and continue their journey. Although this new phenomenon elicited some moral indignation locally, it was also met with considerable admiration. From a local viewpoint, the voleurs came to be appreciated as a new enterprising group that was successfully beating the government system with its own weapons (Roitman 2005). Another anthropological interpretation of profit focuses on the question of where the m ­ oney – t­he currency in which profits in a capitalist economy are normally ­expressed – ­actually comes from. This line of thinking is associated with anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff’s work on occult economies: ‘the effort to conjure w ­ ealth – ­or to account for its ­accumulation – ­by appeal to techniques that defy explanation in the conventional terms of practical reason’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000: 310). This interpretation hinges on the belief that money is a magical thing and that a special relation with supernatural powers is needed to acquire it. Particular circumstances appear to foster this belief, characteristically when a community of self-­subsistence dwellers is suddenly exposed to a market economy, typically in a colonial or capitalist order, combined with the sudden rise of sharp economic inequalities in the community (Taussig [1980] 2010). This raises new questions about the origin of newly acquired wealth with which indigenous interpretive models struggle to come to terms, consequently evoking the thought that there is more between heaven and earth than ordinary mortals can grasp. In this interpretation, the issue of social sanctioning is also important. Daniel Jordan Smith’s work on the Bakassi boys proves illustrative (Smith 2004). The Bakassi boys are a vigilante group that emerged in southeast Nigeria during the late 1990s as the country descended into political turmoil after a period of bloody dictatorship. In response, groups of young men began to offer protection to neighbourhoods and streets. Such groups were popular for obvious reasons. Smith describes how one such group suddenly began to accumulate fabulous wealth, which they flaunted with the procurement of expensive clothing and cars and by taking out the local girls to fancy restaurants. It appears that the group made money through 419: advance-­fee scams circulating widely via the internet (Ellis 2016). At the time, this was not understood well by local Nigerians: the internet was something new in this part of the world. To them, it appeared that the vigilante group was making magical money. This led to increasing resentment, especially because it comprised a form of capital accumulation that was no longer rooted in systems of reciprocity associated with local social practices, especially those of kinship and patron-­clientelism. Therefore, the 419 men embody the perceived consequences of wealth accumulated without the corresponding social obligations of redistribution. Quickly, a link was established between the magical money and alleged supernatural

Profit-Making and Dreaming of Fortunes  *  71

powers that the Bakassi boys were expected to command. Eventually, this led to witchcraft accusations, culminating in the killing of one of them, demonstrating the force of socially unsanctioned capital accumulation. Both these interpretations embody important lessons for this study, yet they do not fully explain the case of West African second-­hand car traders that I am about to discuss. These traders view profit-­making neither in terms of redistribution nor as magic. The way in which these traders work towards the future can better be explained with the model of the economic behaviour of gold prospectors. I posit that the last great North American nineteenth-­century gold rush near the Klondike River offers an interesting behavioural template. The Klondike prospectors were lured by the hope of making a fortune. Few succeeded, however, because of the harsh circumstances of artisanal gold mining coupled with a sharp fall in the gold price. Most of the prospectors quarried gold ore with little knowledge of the condition of the soil they worked. Moreover, they lacked prognostic tools such as deep drills and/or ground radar to survey deeper layers of rock. They therefore could not accurately predict the location of ore-­rich soils, though it was apparent to them that gold had to be somewhere. Striking gold therefore became a matter of chance. As with the car traders in Cotonou, their collaboration was kept at a minimum and therefore failure to find gold was not cushioned by cooperation and solidarity. Although some prospectors struck gold, keeping alive the expectation of immediate riches, most ended up in deep poverty. To scrutinize this particular problem, the chapter picks up the story of Abdul who was briefly presented in the Introduction. You may remember how we encountered him at a moment of business misfortune: being unexpectedly pressed for money from his overseas cousins, compelling him to accept a lower price for a car that he had on offer, incurring a loss of profit. But, as he insisted perhaps a little surprisingly, ‘car business is good business’. I show in the chapter that imagining the future in terms of an unexpected windfall gain is intimately related to this remark; it belongs to a language in which making money has a strong element of an expected surprise. The setting of this chapter is the social universe of car dealers in Cotonou, Benin. Cotonou became part of a global frontier specializing in the second-­hand car trade, and worldwide it gained a reputation as a good business opportunity: a place for making a quick buck. As the ethnographic case of Abdul shows, however, this remains a distant dream for many who come to Cotonou with high economic aspirations. Making money does happen, but it is typically confined to those who make the second-­hand car trade possible, as well those monopolizing car wholesaling; it is far less common among traders like Abdul who specialize in the reselling of cars. Their economic life presents itself as an uphill struggle, yet, despite their

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difficulties, the success of a few others keeps the dream alive that, one day, anyone can strike gold. The chapter continues with a discussion on the economic universe of second-­hand car trading in Cotonou. This requires some understanding of the history of car trading in West Africa, as well as an appreciation of how the economic behaviour of the car traders is shaped in a particular social organization of their professional careers. This suggests the working of an ideal of economic elevation along a progression of steps, though upward mobility appears difficult to achieve in the reality of everyday life. The majority of aspiring second-­hand car traders will not therefore move up, and many struggle to make ends meet. This does not discount their strong hope of, one day, striking gold, bringing us to a cultural interpretation of profit-­making addressed towards the end of the chapter. Its ramifications for understanding entrepreneurs’ future-­work form the conclusion of the chapter.

The Economic Universe of African Car Traders in Cotonou A Short History of Car Trading in Benin Cotonou, the capital city of the West African country of Benin, saw the emergence of a large-­ scale international market for second-­ hand cars during the early 1990s. This is remarkable, as Cotonou is not a major town in West Africa and, preceding the second-­hand car boom, it had a limited reputation for international trade. Cotonou was a minor port in colonial French West Africa, and pictures from a coffee table book documenting the history of the port of Cotonou project the air of a sleepy town (Bio-­ Sawe 1995). During the Biafra war in the late 1960s, the port of Cotonou developed into a regional node for capital, people and goods (David 1998; Igué and Soulé 1992; Igué 1999), but it became a proper global hub only during the 1990s when the importation of second-­hand cars became big business. This followed from the interlocking of three political-­economic processes: (a) a regional history of integration through migration and cross-­border trade (Igué and Soulé 1992); (b) economic reforms during the 1990s, following the end of the Kérékou dictatorship, organizing the economy Marxist style as a series of macroeconomic plans (van de Walle 1994); and (c) an increased importance of entrepreneurship in West African economic life (Leys 1996: 164–87). Since the 2000s, Cotonou has boasted the largest second-­hand car market in West Africa (over 100 hectares in area), reportedly importing between 400,000 and 500,000 cars in recent years, mostly on their way to a final destination in Nigeria: Benin’s neighbour directly to the east and the regional economic powerhouse.3

Profit-Making and Dreaming of Fortunes  *  73

In the early stages of the rise of this new global frontier, the car business was a matter of individual European ‘overlanders’ dealing with African traders along trans-­Sahara routes, limiting the magnitude of the trade to a few thousand per year. Many of those had a pedigree in development aid and the car business coincided with the aid industry, of which Benin has been a major recipient since the 1980s. Later, shipping companies, specializing in the transport of fruit from southern Africa during the European winter in ships that often returned south empty, began to make s­ pare – ­and therefore a­ ffordable – ­cargo space available for the transport of cars. In their wake followed shipping companies with specialized Roll-­on, Roll-­off (RoRo in sea transport parlance) ships, offering yet even more affordable and quick sea transport for the cars; their services cut a one-­way trip to just over a week, and, after West African governments had dredged their ports (often with international donor money) to accommodate the modern RoRo vessels and invested in high-­tech port equipment such as heavy-­ lifting cranes and a computerized administration, a quickly expanding flow of used cars started to appear. The cars originate mainly from European trading hubs, particularly those situated in the car-­trading belt delineated by Essen (Germany), Utrecht (The Netherlands) and Antwerp (Belgium), reflecting a pre-­existing colonial global order (Figures 3.1 and 3.2). The spectacular growth of second-­hand car trading into Benin may paint a successful picture, yet, in reality, few traders succeed. When the trade emerged in the early 1990s, big profits may have been common, but at the time of my fieldwork that was no longer the case. The supply of cheap cars from Western Europe has declined, mainly because African car traders faced increasing competition when East European car traders, interested in similar car types, entered European markets from the mid-­1990s onwards. A survey of sales receipts suggests that prices have decreased by between 2 per cent and 7 per cent for the majority of cars sold between 2000 and 2002 (see Table 3.1). African traders have also seen the terms of the Table 3.1.  Average selling prices on the Cotonou car market © Joost Beuving. Average price (in €) Price range 500–1,000

Sales (%) 16

2000

2001

2002

892

837

830

1,000–1,500

39

1,254

1,242

1,232

1,500–2,000

24

1,801

1,758

1,733

2,000–3,000

12

2,214

2,360

2,484

3,000–5,000

 9

4,004

3,685

3,739

74  •   Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future

Figure 3.1.  Shipping routes and major car markets in Western Europe. © Joost Beuving.

Figure 3.2.  Shipping routes, ports, trade flows and major car markets in West Africa. © Joost Beuving.

transnational car trade deteriorate as a result of currency crises.4 To make things worse, African car traders have not been able to control important nodes of the Europe–West Africa commodity chain. The companies that ship the cars are European owned, and Lebanese traders dominate the wholesale market. Although trade seems to be burgeoning at the point where seller meets buyer, the real profits are made elsewhere.

Profit-Making and Dreaming of Fortunes  *  75

The Port of Cotonou The port occupies a special place in the public imaginary that surrounds second-­hand car trading in Cotonou. It is here that, three or four times per week, thousands of people gather at one of the quays as the majestic car-­ carrying RoRo ships moor there. The ships can hold four to five thousand vehicles per journey; they are over 200 metres in length, and they rise above the buildings that surround the port. The city of Cotonou is then in turmoil; many rush to the port to witness what is considered to be an exciting event: the arrival of cars from Western Europe. Inside the port, a confusing assembly of gesticulating and ­screaming – ­sometimes even ­fighting – ­tradesmen unfolds against the backdrop of roaring car engines. Uniformed security personnel appointed by the port authorities frantically try to keep them at a distance from the ships, shouting at those who attempt to come near the disembarked cars, threatening them with their two-­tailed whips. But their attempts are mostly in vain. Once landed, the cars are assaulted by the waiting mob, and from the jostling crowd every now and then someone triumphantly emerges with a detached car part. Headlights, wheel rims and side mirrors are thus usually removed minutes after a car arrives in Cotonou. Next, the car’s front doors are pulled open, two or more persons jump hurriedly inside and drive the car off with spinning wheels from the quay. Leaving the bewildered spectator behind, the car has now begun its second life in Africa. Despite its chaotic first ­impression – ­tradesmen running every which way in the port, looting cars seemingly at will, and occasionally coming to ­blows – ­the car trade in Cotonou is organized in a particular way. In its simplest form, this organization consists of the routes that cars follow after they are landed: from the port, via the central parking lot, to a car market where they are sold and subsequently taken elsewhere. Until around 2006, the car markets were in the immediate vicinity of the port, so that port activity and the car trade interpenetrated. Because few of the cars remain in Cotonou after being sold, this created considerable cross-­town traffic that exceeded the infrastructural capabilities of the city road network, resulting in major congestion. To remedy this public problem, to the east of the port and along the main road towards Nigeria, a series of new car markets were created. Car traders move along with the cars, so that, when car-­carrying ships arrive in the port of Cotonou, most of the car markets are virtually empty. The port, however, is not only the location where the car trade starts or a spot for meeting fellow traders. It is also deemed the place to be when the latest batch of second-­hand cars arrives. A well-­established importer remarks: ‘If you don’t stay in the port, you lose out on trading opportunities, it all happens here!’

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Many cars are traded immediately on arrival. Whereas markets outside the port are open to all kinds of traders, trade within the port area is restricted to experienced ­traders – ­or newcomers accompanied by such a ­trader – ­who possess a laissez-­passer from the port authority. Access is restricted because of a dearth of information about the port as well as the complexity of bureaucratic port procedures. Shipping schedules are only sparsely distributed and are known to be unreliable (the ships call at various ports along the West African coast before finally berthing in Cotonou). For inexperienced traders lacking well-­developed contacts in the car business, the arrival of a particular ship is therefore difficult to predict. Car traders who are not in the port when the cars arrive run a risk: thefts of spare parts and damage to cars are widespread. Whereas the loss of spare parts is r­ eversible – ­most parts are renewable and readily available at cheap ­prices – ­damage is more problematic because of the high costs incurred. Being absent is also risky because drivers appointed by the port authorities remove the cars from the quay in an attempt to alleviate congestion. These drivers usually work under time pressure, and their chief interest is to drive the cars from the quay as soon as possible (they are paid per delivery). Cars driven by these drivers are therefore usually haphazardly parked near, or inside, the central parking lot. Retrieving a car then requires the logistic support of employees working there. Most car traders therefore prefer a long waiting period in the port to losing track of their cars. Once command of a car is obtained, a series of shipping documents has to be processed by specialized clearing agents (see Bako-­Arifari 2001). Maintaining good contacts with these specialists is of crucial importance in settling administrative procedures required to clear the car with the briefest delay. These characteristics of the car trade in Cotonou are described by a trader: ‘Too much happens here: people steal things; you have to be careful about your belongings. In addition, the port authorities harass me all the time. It’s difficult to bear this by yourself’. This comment reveals how basic social contacts are needed to overcome the complexities of this trade. Cars not immediately traded in the port (the vast majority) are moved, usually in large convoys, to the car markets (Figure 3.3). These markets consist of a large tract of barren land enclosed by a stone wall, accessible through different gates manned by security guards. The gates are locked at night to prevent theft and damage. Immediately on arrival, the cars are registered by the market authorities and allocated a place. Goods transported in the cars, such as refrigerators, TVs and spare parts, are normally unloaded here and displayed separately. The market fee (amounting to about 5 per cent of the value of a car) is usually paid to the market authorities at this stage, although this can vary depending on local conditions. After a car is sold, it is normally taken away within a few days. This time

Profit-Making and Dreaming of Fortunes  *  77

Figure 3.3.  Port and car markets in Cotonou. © Joost Beuving.

is typically used to make tax arrangements with customs, which are represented at all car markets. An importer articulates a common opinion: ‘I prefer the markets to be well managed. Even if this is costly, that doesn’t bother me, because without security you can easily lose money’. In sum, the Cotonou car trade is an ordered activity, carried out by people who tend to hang around the cars and whose social contacts inform their success or failure. These contacts are needed to overcome problems of theft and damage, secure access to reliable information and settle administrative procedures. To further our understanding of this market organization, this chapter now addresses the question of who engages in the car trade and how they can be differentiated into several groups of traders.

Cotonou Car Traders Car traders in Cotonou usually identify four categories of economic actors: car market owners, car importers, resellers and market runners. Let us briefly consider each of them: they contain important information about the case study that follows. Market owners are a small group of affluent businessmen who are permitted by local law to levy particular fees on all items traded on the market. They operate under a system of concessions granted by the Beninese government, for which they pay a large sum of money. Among them, there are Yoruba-­speaking traders from southeast Benin, often with close ethnic ties

78  •   Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future

to Yoruba traders in Nigeria. With money made from the export of locally produced cotton, and aided by a network of overseas migrant kinsmen who could deliver cars cheaply, they created the first two car markets in the centre of Cotonou in the early 1990s. They organized themselves in a syndicate and shifted from trading cars to operating a car market when Benin’s newly elected post-­dictatorship government banned the sale of cars in the port, as had been customary. Second, Lebanese entrepreneurs (present in the region since the late nineteenth century) opened two large car markets near the port in the mid-­1990s, after they struck a deal with the Yoruba syndicate. Following negotiations by the Lebanese council, the political vehicle that mediates Lebanese business interests, they secured concessions from the Beninese government. Fon-­speaking Beninese businessmen who had contributed financially to the re-­election of President (and former Marxist dictator) Kerekou in 1996 were allowed to create two car markets near the port. Early in 2001, these had set up a syndicate too, and they had obtained a cluster of new car markets outside Cotonou, along the main road towards Nigeria. Finally, there is a group of Hausa-­speaking cattle and lorry traders who set up three large car markets near Cotonou’s Islamic centre (Zongo) in the late 1990s. These markets were sub-­divided into several smaller markets following a business dispute. This differentiation of market owners shapes the car business in Cotonou in three ways. First, lack of cooperation between groups of market owners has resulted in different fee regimes for different markets. Attempts by the Beninese state to harmonize these fees by setting up an organization to accommodate all car market owners have so far failed. Second, market owners have generally handed the day-­to-­day operations of the ­markets – ­involving the collection of fees and maintaining ­order – ­to managers. Most people in Cotonou therefore deal with these managers; the market owners remain largely invisible to them. Third, car traders in Cotonou, especially car importers, tend to be distributed over car markets according to the market owner’s ethnicity, particularly in smaller, older car markets. The newer and larger car markets are generally more ethnically heterogeneous. Car importers are a large heterogeneous group of people who import cars from Europe and sell them in Cotonou. Most of them maintain business relations with overseas ­migrants – ­often fellow West Africans living or residing temporarily in Western Europe. Some importers travel themselves to Europe, where they buy the cars themselves, typically in the car-­trading belt mentioned above. The vast majority, however, stay mainly in Cotonou where they arrange the purchase of cars from Europe through their social contacts. Around eight hundred importers obtained, from the local Chamber of Commerce, an import licence at an annual cost of about the price of two second-­hand cars: a lot of money by local standards. An

Profit-Making and Dreaming of Fortunes  *  79

informal system of import licence sharing has emerged, therefore, which involves payment of a far smaller s­ um – a­ round €15 per car at the time of the fieldwork. This considerably lowered capital requirements for car trading, making it accessible to a large number of traders, and those aspiring to be one. Hence the appearance of disorder in the port: the informal licence sharing provides aspiring car traders access to this highly competitive economic space. Cotonou car dealers consider an import licence a desirable asset for two reasons. First, only licensees enjoy the right to construct in the car markets a paillote – small, roofed constructions on stilts where importers generally reside during market days. Paillotes provide useful vantage points to overview the market and are favourite meeting places. Second, membership of the African syndicates is limited to import licensees. In these syndicates, rules and regulations are formulated for the operation of the car markets based on majority vote. Syndicate members can therefore influence key decisions about the levying of fees, market access for colleague traders and forms of cooperation between car markets. Also, syndicate membership presents an opportunity for licensees to interact with market owners, who are a source of information and favours. Resellers buy cars in the port or the central parking lot to resell them elsewhere, mostly at one of Cotonou’s car markets. They comprise a heterogeneous group of people who do not hold an import licence and have not made cooperative arrangements with a licence holder. Most resellers maintain extensive contacts with importers, with whom they frequently engage in credit arrangements, often in the form of delayed payment. Further, a quick glance at the list of arrivals often permitted to them by importers allows resellers to preselect particular makes and types of cars for purchase, even before a ship’s arrival. This arrangement is typically seen when an importer helps a poorer family member to set up a car business. Once resellers and importers have established a stable alliance, they appear to divide between them the long and unpredictable waiting period typically associated with the arrival and disembarkation of cars. In some cases, resellers hire extra hands to disembark the cars, thus allowing them to increase their contacts with importers. Market runners mediate between second-­hand car sellers and buyers. This group includes a high proportion of women and is characterized by a lack of business capital and an inability to establish credit or licence arrangements with importers. This form of mediation is not unproblematic, especially when a buyer, a seller or both refuse to avail themselves of the runner’s service. Frequently, buyers can be observed being chased away from a market by a group of runners for not doing so. Market runners are therefore often accused of seeking monetary gain without delivering any

80  •   Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future

service and without true effort. Resellers emphasize how they themselves prepare transactions by preselecting cars and pre-­negotiating the sale of a car. Market runners tend to specialize: they limit their actions to a single car market, and they normally confine themselves to particular types of cars. They are mostly seen at the ethnically heterogeneous, larger car markets, where they benefit from the multiplicity of languages spoken and where they can check prices with car sellers.5 They also tend to cooperate with fellow runners. They normally roam a market in small groups; one pre-­ arranges a price with an importer or reseller, and the others seek potential clients around the market. Once an agreement has been reached between buyer and seller, one of them returns to the seller where a commission is pocketed and subsequently distributed among them. With the rise in the number of car markets in Cotonou and the lack of harmonization of different fee regimes, market runners are increasingly seen as playing off managers of car markets against one another. This has attracted the attention of market owners, who have started to discuss harmonization of fee regimes, though with few concrete results.

Careers in the Car Trade So far, the differentiation of car traders in Cotonou into several categories has focused on how they make money and mobilize business capital. In particular, attention has been given to the types of markets in which traders operate, and the forms of cooperation they seek. These categories represent different steps in a local ideal of a career in the car trade. Operating as a market runner often represents the beginning of such a career. Market runners frequently become involved in the trade as hired hands of resellers or importers. They are not always newcomers to the trade: mediating between buyers and sellers also presents an opportunity to restart in the business after bankruptcy. Particularly when a bankruptcy results in unpaid bills, re-­entrants switch their operations to a different car market. Market runners generally enjoy little prestige, especially among importers who have developed stable alliances with their clients. A market runner explains this as follows: ‘You have to move around a lot, to find the cars and to [get to] know the people around here well. Of course, it sometimes happens that a seller doesn’t want me around. But this is what I have to do to make money’. Once sufficient capital can be mobilized, either as savings or in the form of credit, market runners are inclined to become resellers. Their previous experience as brokers facilitates their role as car buyers, but, whereas market runners maintain a large number of superficial contacts,

Profit-Making and Dreaming of Fortunes  *  81

with occasional recourse to force, resellers need dependable social contacts to mobilize sufficient credit. The occupational shift does not necessarily imply that resellers make more money than market runners. Resellers bear financial risk. Some of them are known to have lost large sums of money in unprofitable transactions, and they therefore enjoy more prestige. At this stage, direct dealing with cars seems to motivate people to further their activities. This motivation is voiced in the following comment by a reseller: ‘Sometimes market runners make more money than we do. But this is not money made from [car] trade. Me, in contrast, I deal with cars, that’s where you can really make money!’ A successful reseller is liable to start importing cars him/herself. Now social contacts with people in Europe come into play. Most commonly, an importer’s career starts by paying a number of visits to family or friends residing in Europe. These ‘business trips’, as they are called, typically involve a stay of up to three months in one European country. During their stay, African–European market runners usually see these importers around various car markets and garages and assist in arranging shipping to West Africa. In this way, travelling importers may eventually make contact with a Europe-­based car-­exporting company with whom they start operating on a more regular basis. In a very few cases, resellers accompany an importer on their European business trip. This arrangement usually comes about when they wish to operate in different European countries. In Cotonou, operating as a registered importer independent of credit arrangements is considered the apex of a car-­trading business career. Only car market owners surpass this prestigious position. As market owners constitute a small business elite, with well-­developed political connections, most people consider this to be beyond their reach. People’s trading activities are therefore generally directed towards becoming an importer, involving regular visits to Europe, access to a paillote and possession of an import licence that is regularly leased out to resellers. A reseller explains: ‘I don’t like [car] importers, they are too arrogant. But they have one big advantage: they no longer suffer because they have managed their money well. Besides, they can buy cars as they please!’ This discussion of occupational steps in the car trade suggests that people’s future aspirations and actions are shaped by what is understood as a respectable career. Market runners want to become r­ esellers – i­nspired by having direct dealings with cars; and resellers ultimately wish to become ­importers – m ­ otivated by the desire to get away from credit ties. Each career step entails its own set of social contacts that can be seen as a hierarchy: going from superficial contacts of market runners, via more dependable local contacts of resellers, to contacts spanning long distances for importers. To understand more about the social dynamics of the car

82  •   Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future

traders’ economic behaviour, it must be appreciated how entrepreneurship comes into play in concrete social situations. An ethnographic case study of Abdul, a Cotonou car reseller, elucidates this.

Ethnographic Case Study: Abdul the Car Reseller The ATB-­2 market, situated in the centre of Cotonou, was constructed in 1996 by Sale Jake, a wealthy Yoruba from Porto Novo, Benin’s second-­ largest city located near the Nigerian border. ATB-­2 is considered a small market by local standards: it can hold no more than about 500 cars, listing a mere dozen importers, most of whom are Yoruba-­speaking. Because of the widespread sharing of import licences, the actual number of traders is four to five times the official figure, the majority of them also Yoruba-­speaking. This confirms the idea that car-­trading networks are often organized along socio-­ethnic lines. As with most car markets, ATB-­2 is accessed through a large gate, which is closed every afternoon at five and opened in the morning at nine. Behind this gate, in a ramshackle customs building, car sellers pay the import tax for sold cars. A little further on are Mr Jake’s personnel’s buildings where the market inspector, the sales inspector and their assistants have offices. Here, the parking fees are paid. Just opposite there is a small canteen, run by a distant relative of the market inspector. Directly behind the canteen is a small parallel market in refrigerators that emerged a number of years ago, when a middle-­aged woman called Mrs Hassani expanded her water-­selling business in ATB-­2 to the sale of fridges. At the back of the car market, the remains of unsold cars evoke vague reminiscences of failed business. One of the traders operating in the ATB-­2 car market is Abdul, a bilingual (Yoruba and English) Beninese in his early thirties. Abdul, who was briefly mentioned in the Introduction, was born and raised by his mother in Lagos; his father originates from Porto Novo but presently lives in northern Nigeria. Today is an important day for Abdul, as this afternoon a car-­ carrying ship is due to arrive in the port of Cotonou. Even though several such ships arrive every week, it has been months since Abdul received fresh second-­hand cars from his main business contact in Europe, his older paternal cousin Mohammed (a genealogy of Abdul’s business contacts is mapped in Figure 3.4). This morning, however, Abdul is not going to collect cars sent by Mohammed, as he struck a deal with Mrs Hassani’s younger sister, Mrs Oketokoun, whose son, Akim, ships cars every now and then to Benin from Bordeaux, where he is at university. Abdul contacted Mrs Oketokoun after she had asked her sister, Mrs Hassani, to recommend a trustworthy

Profit-Making and Dreaming of Fortunes  *  83

Figure 3.4.  Business contacts, Abdul. © Joost Beuving.

person who would be willing to collect three cars in the port that her son had shipped a few weeks earlier. With the corn market picking up, she was uncertain whether she could combine collecting the cars with her corn business in the Dantokpa market, Cotonou’s largest open-­air daily market where foodstuffs, clothing, fabric and metalwork are traded. She insisted that the person had to be from Porto Novo so that there would be, as she said, ‘a proper understanding’ between this person and herself. Abdul knows Mrs Oketokoun from the time Mohammed introduced him to ATB-­2; being trained as an electrician, Abdul had more than once repaired fridges that Mrs Hassani wanted to sell behind the canteen. According to the market inspector, the ship for which Abdul is waiting docks at noon, but to be sure Abdul goes directly to the port after breakfast. During the long w ­ ait – ­the ship eventually arrives halfway through the ­afternoon – A ­ bdul is approached by several resellers and market runners; some of them have previously dealt with him, others are attracted by the shipping documentation he visibly carries. Abdul brushes most of them aside, as he is supposed to hand the cars over to Mrs Oketokoun rather than resell them. Nor does he wish to hire extra hands to drive the cars to the central parking lot or to handle the import documentation. Abdul insisted on Mrs Oketokoun paying him a flat rate in cash for the job. Thus, the more Abdul does himself, the more money he makes. He makes one important exception however: a young Nigerian reseller, a maternal cousin called Henri, asks Abdul to sell him one of Mrs Oketokoun’s cars, at a favourable price. Abdul complies with the request because, as he explains, ‘Mohammed only sends me cars if he is ready for it; he never asks me when the market here is favourable. This young man here I know, he’s also from my town, and maybe I can do business with him’. Later, it becomes clear to me that Abdul is competing with Mohammed for an inheritance from their Muslim grandfather. This inheritance is probably lost to him, as Mohammed is a Mecca pilgrim and Abdul a recently converted Christian. Furthermore, Abdul’s previous attempts to contact his maternal f­amily – C ­ hristian Yorubas from L ­ agos – h ­ ave been in vain.

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Henri’s request, in addition to presenting an opportunity for profit-­making, therefore represents another chance to re-­establish his maternal contacts. The two men agree on the sale of a 1988 Toyota Corolla for about €1,220. Although the purchase price is not indicated on the shipping documentation given to him by Mrs Oketokoun, in Abdul’s experience €1,150 is a reasonable price for this type of car. The transaction will thus allow him to pocket about €70, which is not a bad return for selling a car these days. In the meantime, the RoRo ship has arrived, and moments later the Toyota Corolla is driven onto the quay by the port crew. As Abdul expects more of Mrs Oketokoun’s cars to arrive, and, as he is afraid that the car will be damaged on its way from the port to the central parking lot, he asks Henri to follow the first car on his moped so that he can oversee the arrival of the other cars. They exchange mobile phone numbers so that Abdul can call Henri when the other cars arrive. Eventually, only one more car is disembarked for Mrs Oketokoun, hours later. Abdul follows it on a taxi-­moto, a rented moped with driver, to the central parking lot where he meets Henri again. Here, they discuss the details of their transaction and Henri immediately admits that he does not have the €1,220 with him. He proposes to pay a down payment of €550 and the remainder the next morning. In return, he demands the duplicate bill of lading, a document generally taken as proof of ownership. Abdul is slow to agree because of the risk involved in not receiving all the money at once. On the other hand, Abdul realizes that this transaction might free him from the tribulations of doing business with Mohammed. As Abdul is making his way home, Mrs Oketokoun calls him on his mobile phone to inquire what has happened to her cars. Even though she seems upset that her son apparently sent two rather than three cars, Abdul reassures her that the two cars have arrived safely and that he will bring them to the market the following morning. He does not yet mention the duplicitous sale of the Toyota Corolla, as he is well aware that he should discuss that at the car market, with Henri to back him up. The next morning, Abdul and Henri arrive just after the car market opens at nine to meet Mrs Oketokoun, who is pleased to find her cars in good shape. Abdul now beckons her to the canteen where he indicates that Henri is willing to buy the Toyota Corolla for €1,150. To Abdul’s great dismay, Mrs Oketokoun immediately turns down the offer, arguing that her son, Akim, paid €1,220 for the car in Bordeaux. Abdul is now presented with an embarrassing situation: not only is the lucrative transaction he had arranged with Henri endangered, but he may now have to spell out the details of his arrangement with Henri, including his handing over of the bill of lading. To avoid the latter, A ­ bdul – n ­ ow accompanied by H ­ enri – ­asks for her final price. Mrs Oketokoun is swift to reply: she will accept no less

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than €1,300, implying that she will pocket a small profit. Abdul takes Henri aside, presses him either to pay the additional €80, or to hand back the bill of lading in return for his down payment. Henri refuses. Abdul later explains to me that, at this point, he realizes that three possible courses of action remain. First, he can admit to Mrs Oketokoun that he made a duplicitous arrangement and risk being denied further shipments from her as well as being labelled as an unreliable trader by his colleagues in the ATB-­2 car market. Second, Abdul can start a row with Henri, which may eventually result in police intervention and the chance of the car being confiscated until things are sorted out. Thus, he would also jeopardize the relationship that he is trying to establish with his maternal family. Abdul decides on a third option, one that results in financial loss. He asks Henri to go to Abdul’s nearby house and to await further details concerning the transaction. He then returns to the canteen and asks Mrs Oketokoun not to sell the car for the time being. Next, he visits Mrs Hassani and asks her to advance him €­80 – ­improperly claiming that he needs money to pay a m ­ echanic – ­in return for repairing three fridges during the next few days. Fortunately, she accepts his offer; Abdul pockets the money and brings it to Henri. What happens now determines the direction that the transaction takes: Henri admits that he has not brought the remaining €670. He explains that another car he had bought a few days before for a client in Lagos is stuck at the Nigerian border. To convince the now angry Abdul, he shows the Beninese customs documentation, proving that he has indeed purchased this car. After a brief exchange of hostilities, the two men work out an arrangement: Henri will pay a total sum of €1,300 to Mrs Oketokoun. A down payment of €550 will be handed to her immediately, and the remaining money will be paid within two weeks. It does not take much to convince Henri to pay the additional €80, as Abdul threatens to withdraw from the deal, claiming that Henri has insulted him by not bringing the money. All that remains is for Abdul to return to Mrs Oketokoun and plead on Henri’s behalf for the delayed payment. She kindly accepts the terms proposed, as she will now receive her final price – €80 more than what she thinks her son paid for the car in Bordeaux. Further, she is aware that Abdul and Henri are tied through kin, and she realizes that ATB-­2 is a small car market where Abdul maintains a business relationship with her sister; she is sure that Abdul will take care of Henri’s payment. After Abdul has handed the down payment to Mrs Oketokoun and Henri has left with his car, out of Mrs Oketokoun’s earshot Abdul complains bitterly about what just happened to him: ‘These days everyone tries to make a quick buck, but at the end of the day it’s me who has to resolve other people’s trouble. This is not fair; all I try to do is to make some money!’

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The next day, Abdul is again to be found at ATB-­2; he repairs one of Mrs Hassani’s fridges to repay the money he borrowed. When asked what he would do next, Abdul says: ‘Who knows, perhaps Mohammed sends me another car, or maybe someone else I know will ask for me again. Like I told you last time: car business is good business!’

Interpretation: Profit-Making as a Klondike Dream Abdul’s story confirms that the car trade is an ordered activity: Abdul and his contacts conduct their business in the port when ships arrive and then move on to car markets where their stay is limited to the opening hours. Abdul therefore waits in the port until the car-­carrying ship docks and, from that moment, follows the car until it arrives at the car market. Administrative artefacts, such as shipping documentation and import licences, further shape the car trade. For instance, Abdul was easily recognized in the port by others as a car seller through the documents he visibly carried. Also, Mrs Oketokoun’s laissez-­passer enabled Abdul to enter the port without much trouble. Such orderly conduct of business has been recorded for informal markets elsewhere, with Geertz’s depiction of a Moroccan bazaar as an often-­cited archetype (Geertz 1978). In addition to these formal organizational features of the Cotonou car market, Abdul’s actions are shaped by the limited options available to him. These options reflect the local ideal of a career in the car trade that is part of the car market’s informal structure. For Abdul, this means that he lacks sufficient business capital and dependable local contacts to allow him to start reselling cars. He further lacks the experience of a business trip typical for importers; his contact with Europe is indirect, through Mohammed. His single option to enter the car trade is therefore to operate as a market runner. As pointed out, market runners are predominantly found in large, ethnically heterogeneous markets. The whole transaction takes place, however, in the port and in ATB-­2 – ­a small and ethnically homogeneous market. Here, Abdul has the disadvantage of not being able to get in touch with other market runners. Furthermore, he cannot benefit from a multiplicity of languages spoken or check prices asked with car sellers. Ethnicity constitutes the third organizational pillar of the Cotonou car market. Most Cotonou car traders refrain from conducting business with total strangers. They collaborate with people from the same ethnic group, as a way to reduce the uncertainties of the trade. This is why Mrs Oketokoun deliberately asks her sister to recommend an assistant from the same socio-­ethnic background: a Yoruba Porto Novian. More elaborate forms of collaboration are found among family members. For example,

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Abdul’s main business partner is his paternal cousin Mohammed, and he seeks to establish a new contact with his maternal cousin Henri. This preference to work with ethnic peers in general, and with kinsmen in particular, does not yet explain the outcome of business transactions. To better appreciate how trading practices interlock with business contacts, we therefore need to examine the social dynamics of these contacts; as we have seen in the case of the Lake Victoria fishermen in the previous chapter, business contacts can make or break a trader. Although Abdul appears to deal with his contacts clumsily, in fact he follows a well-­established pattern of contact mobilization in Cotonou. This means that Abdul and his peers attempt to gain access to market information, regulate the availability of credit and capital, and become established in the car market by liaising with particular car traders. This is discussed in greater detail below.

Market Information Transactions in Cotonou often involve high degrees of uncertainty. For instance, the arrival of car-­carrying ships is erratic and difficult to predict. Also, most West African car traders do not have direct access to prices in European car markets. Although the internet has greatly improved the information problem, because this is an informal market, prices are not advertised on internet fora; and, if they are, not many traders trust them. For price information they therefore depend on their contacts overseas, and this is often problematic. Mrs Oketokoun, for example, does not know exactly how much her son Akim spends on the purchase of a car. This may come across as odd from a Western viewpoint, but, in a West African representation of things, it is common to separate business interests from kinship interests. Moreover, Mrs Oketokoun’s lack of information appears to be rooted in a troubled relationship with her son. According to her, he tends to buy cars that are too expensive and is often not able to send as many cars as she wants. Being a student at a Bordeaux university, Akim soon lost interest in roaming France’s car markets. According to his mother, he has not been very motivated to negotiate good sea-­transport prices, as his purchases are paid for by his father’s inheritance. She voices her concern: ‘My son squanders our money in France. But what can I do? If I call him, he doesn’t answer the phone. Sometimes he even forgets to contact me if he has sent cars from there’. Mrs Oketokoun has difficulty coordinating Akim’s actions abroad, so she opts for selling corn at the Dantokpa market. She does not share her concerns with Abdul, who therefore lacks proper price information. Whereas Abdul has the advantage of being engaged in a transaction where he knows both the potential seller and buyer fairly well, this is hardly

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beneficial to him. He cannot fully grasp Mrs Oketokoun’s relationship with her son for two reasons. First, Mrs Oketokoun is seldom present at the car market because, after the depreciation of the cotton trade in Benin, other agricultural commodities, such as corn, have become more lucrative. Her straddling of the car and the corn trade is further complicated by her husband’s recent death: she can no longer divide tasks. Second, Abdul had no previous contact with Akim. Even though they are related through kin to the Yoruba centre of Porto Novo, they did not grow up together. Abdul therefore cannot contact Akim to verify Mrs Oketokoun’s account of his actions. However, the uncertainties of the car trade result not only from limited access to prices overseas, but also from information about local business partners. The importance of this factor emerges in particular from the transaction between Henri and Abdul. Abdul does not tell Henri that he is insufficiently informed about the price to be paid for the Toyota Corolla. Instead, he relies on his limited experience of car trading and opts for a best guess regarding the selling price. Abdul proceeds with the transaction while concealing his wish to manoeuvre away from his paternal family. Abdul is afraid that if he makes public his previous attempts to re-­establish his maternal contacts, Henri might back out altogether. Henri does not tell Abdul that he needs some form of credit to enable him to buy the Toyota Corolla. He knows from the start that he is too short of cash to pay for the car on the spot, but he impresses Abdul with export documentation concerning another car. Thus, he convinces Abdul to proceed with the transaction. This story proves to be false however: some time after the transaction is concluded, it becomes clear that Henri needs to buy the Toyota Corolla for a Nigerian client, that no car of his is delayed at the border. Henri explains this as follows: ‘Had he looked in my pocket, this guy [Abdul] would never have given me my credit. This lady [Mrs Oketokoun] I didn’t know, but she wasn’t my problem. It’s too bad the trick with the export article didn’t work out’. The experiences of these traders therefore suggest that business contacts in Cotonou, instead of reducing information uncertainties, contribute to reducing access to reliable market information.

Business Capital and Credit The story of Abdul’s transaction shows that car markets in Cotonou are characterized by unreliable supply, small profit margins (about 5 per cent for Mrs Oketokoun) and low turnover due to the time-­demanding nature of car sales. Capital is therefore scarce, and traders like Abdul commonly lack sufficient capital to dedicate themselves wholly to buying and selling

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cars. One way to resolve a shortage of money is to pursue several economic activities simultaneously, requiring a constant switch between various roles in response to varying circumstances. The money earned elsewhere is then often invested in the car trade: Abdul falls back on his fridge work to cover imminent losses ensuing from the transaction. This appears to be a common response: many of the resellers with whom I interacted during the fieldwork had an alternative livelihood. Reinvesting in the car business money that has been earned elsewhere, however, is not often preferred. In the absence of easily accessible formal credit institutions, Cotonou car traders commonly rely on more informal forms of credit. More specifically, they approach their peers or family members. Mohammed, for instance, hands the cars to Abdul, and as a form of credit Abdul is permitted delayed payment, resembling the credit line that many Western entrepreneurs have with their banks. Once Abdul is no longer content with merely selling cars for another trader, rivalry emerges between the two men. Mohammed refuses to inform Abdul about prices paid in Europe and complains that Abdul does not send back the money due in good time. Mohammed comments on these problems as follows: ‘Abdul doesn’t understand my situation; I cannot simply send cars on his request, I’m too busy for that. He also doesn’t understand business, it is not a children’s play in which you can ask all sorts of questions. What I pay for my cars is my affair’. Abdul’s discontent with Mohammed’s refusal to give access to his profit margins further deepens over a disputed inheritance, to the extent that Abdul stretches his wings and seeks contact with a maternal cousin. The competition between Mohammed and Abdul reveals an important problem that Cotonou car traders face in mobilizing trading capital through their social networks: profits from business are usually not shared among business partners.

Market Access Most car traders start their careers in the Cotonou car market via previously established colleagues. This is clear in Abdul’s case: Mohammed introduced him to the ATB-­2 market, convincing him to leave Lagos and to settle in Cotonou. A few years earlier, Mohammed had married a Togolese woman who was granted residence in Germany in the wake of the political upheaval in Lomé during the early 1990s. As Mohammed was now allowed to travel to Germany under a family-­unification agreement, he sought someone to oversee the sale of cars that he planned to ship to West Africa. Following a commonly observed tendency among Cotonou car traders, Mohammed was not keen on working with a male sibling; male siblings, especially older ones, can often successfully make claims on profits. So,

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he needed to look further, and found Abdul, who at that time operated a nearly bankrupt beer parlour in Lagos. As revenue from the car trade in Germany proved to be erratic at best, Mohammed happily accepted a job offered to him by one of Germany’s employment agencies. Even though he did not want to abandon the car trade, he soon found that his new job complicated habitual visits to the German car markets. Consequently, his shipments to Abdul in Cotonou became irregular. After first establishment, Abdul sought to consolidate his position in Cotonou. He is disappointed by the car arrivals from Mohammed, and therefore attempts to turn his trade away from his untrustworthy paternal kin. He does so by betting on two horses. On the one hand, he guesses that re-­establishing his maternal business contacts will not be difficult: the beer parlour that Abdul ran in Lagos was financed with capital from his mother’s family. On the other hand, Abdul joins in with Mohammed’s business success. After his European adventure, Mohammed increasingly came to be considered as what car business insiders call in French a grand, a successful trader. Very few people are aware of the problems that divide the two men, so Abdul can still appeal to his cousin’s success. Thus, Abdul’s prestige is to some extent safeguarded by his association with Mohammed. Candidate car traders need to liaise with an established trader to gain access to the car market, but Abdul’s haggling reveals how opportunistic behaviour results in limited loyalty between business partners.

Valuation of the Car Trade: The Klondike So far, the discussion on how entrepreneurship in Cotonou comes into play in a concrete social situation has focused on the conditions of economic action: market organization and contact mobilization. The analysis has not yet exposed the meaning-­making forces that drive economic action: which opportunities are seized, rather than others? For instance, why would a car trader like Abdul switch from handling the arrival of cars entrusted to him by a business contact to selling those cars? Also, why would Abdul continue in the car business even after suffering a significant financial loss: what makes it worthwhile? These questions are difficult to appreciate through a universalistic notion of entrepreneurial rationality. We therefore need to delve into the culturally specific economic motivations of Cotonou car traders. Abdul’s last remark in the case study gives a clue about why he wishes to continue his efforts in the car trade. Even though he has lost a considerable amount of money trading a car, Abdul has a strong expectation of progress. Car traders like Abdul are well aware of their immediate financial losses,

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but these losses are not perceived as a negative business incentive. Nor are such losses interpreted as a strategic investment in business contacts, or as the cost of insurance against decline of prestige. Cotonou car traders do not invest in their contacts, they manipulate; and although Abdul is keen to keep up appearances in a high-­stake theatrical performance, he does not take into account the possibility that Mrs Oketokoun is well aware of his duplicitous sale. The high expectations and optimism that we find with Abdul appear to be common among car traders in Cotonou. Many of the traders whom I met often cling to the car ­business – e­ ven without making a profit or, yet worse, in the face of financial l­oss – ­because they are convinced that any deal can result in significant profits. The previously mentioned comments by car traders in the port reinforce the general belief in Cotonou that the car trade is ‘successful business’. In Cotonou, it is commonly believed that to become economically successful is to have dealings with cars. Traders like Abdul have therefore developed a propensity to hang around cars and to follow cars from one place to another. Even though several types of goods are routinely shipped to and from Cotonou, the city is in turmoil in particular when second-­hand cars arrive. In addition to preventing theft and damage, car traders legitimate their presence in the port with the idea that ‘being there’ is needed for a successful career in the car trade. Even though theft and damage pose serious problems for most car traders, and divisions of labour could diminish their effects, most people come to the port with high expectations. In summary, Abdul switches from handling to selling because he perceives Mrs Oketokoun’s request for assistance and his encounter with Henri as an opportunity for personal gain. To attain this goal, Abdul withholds the information that he considers relevant for the transaction, but Abdul immediately runs into trouble once Henri and Mrs Oketokoun resort to similar tactics. Such manoeuvring and counter-­manoeuvring is consistent with a wider pattern: car traders in Cotonou do not perceive the sharing of market information or the pooling of efforts as mutually beneficial. Their central experience in business is that of a social game, revolving around strategic manipulation of information and business partners: this is a game, however, that knows many losers, and few winners.

Discussion The second-­hand car trade from Western Europe to Benin has grown spectacularly since the 1990s. It is therefore tempting to understand Cotonou car traders as profit maximizers in a situation of economic opportunity.

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To be sure, this is a valid conclusion for particular groups of car entrepreneurs. Car market owners, for instance, have seen sky-­high profits; some of the larger importers were reaping healthy revenue streams; and, of course, those transporting the c­ ars – ­a handful of shipping companies, usually with few economic roots in the ­region – ­have benefitted from the Cotonou second-­hand car boom. On the ground in Cotonou however, where resellers like Abdul but also intermediaries try to eke out a living, quite another picture suggests itself. There may be lots of talk about windfall gains, yet when one looks beyond the hopeful language, one sees a world where profits are few and far between, and losses are common. That car traders face financial losses, and not only once or twice but sometimes even multiple times, is testimony to the strength of the conviction that real money can be made with the trade in second-­hand cars. The behaviour pattern of gold prospectors in the Klondike, the last large gold rush of nineteenth-­century North America, suggests a useful format to understand why Cotonou car dealers, despite multiple losses, frame the future in terms of high hopes. Gold mining in the Klondike was marked by the absence of a regulative presence that coordinated access to the gold fields. These fields were there for the taking, actually eliciting a movement for which contemporary observers used the term stampede, a metaphor derived from the world of free-­ranging herds of animals. Gold prospectors in the Klondike were therefore free to search promising mining spots. This pattern reminds us of how the Cotonou car trade developed in the context of economic deregulation and trade liberalization after structural adjustment. Although the Beninese government continued to try to get a handle on the ­trade – ­especially when it acquired boom-­like ­properties – ­by limiting the number of entrants through a system of import licences, in practice this amounts to little real regulation given the informal nature of the car business. Car markets therefore overflow with new entrants, explaining also the large crowds amassing in the port of Cotonou when the RoRo ships arrive. Gold mining in the Klondike was further fuelled by rumours of fabulous stocks of gold, waiting to be harvested, bringing about a rush of fortune seekers. Such rumours must be understood in the context of the major technological advances of the nineteenth century: steamship-­ operated shipping lines combined with the fast expansion of railroads dramatically accelerated the pace of travel and, in combination with the transatlantic telegraph, this fostered the creation of a global communications network. Through it, news could thus travel at an unprecedented ­speed – b ­ ut so could what we nowadays call fake news. The news of gold finds in the Klondike thus quickly reached the far corners of the globe, although often without divulging the dark side of prospecting: the cold, the danger, the

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hunger. In Cotonou, rumours of the big profits made in the early days of the car trade fuel current expectations of immediate riches. These future expectations are kept alive because of conspicuous consumption: those who made it in the car business tend to flaunt their affluence. Related to this, car traders like Abdul are aware that others, like himself, are losing money. At the same time, many car traders disappear for a while after losing money, concealing losses from the public eye. Discriminating rumour from fact thus requires in the first place a mindset that wishes to see through the miracle, but few traders are interested in that. Most prospectors usually arrived at the gold fields alone, or in the company of their wives, and they avoided other company; fellow prospectors were considered as adversaries. The artisanal technology of nineteenth-­century gold digging in the Klondike certainly fostered this. Prospectors panned the gold in the various Klondike River tributaries that were considered rich in gold ore, with panning requiring little more than a locally manufactured sieve (Brands 2002). In later stages of the gold rush, once the initial stampede phase was over, collective forms of work gradually appear to have emerged, mostly directed at concentrating the flow of river water in an attempt to achieve an economy of scale (Porsild 1998). Likewise, in Cotonou, some stable forms of collaboration have emerged, mostly ethnic-­based syndicates clustered around the importation of cars and/or the running of car markets. As Abdul’s story indicates, the car trade itself is chiefly carried out by individual traders. Although they are part of a broader network of exchanges, in this network they compete for capital, information and, ultimately, profit. This conjures up an image of trade as a zero-­sum game, but it is important to emphasize the element of time: in the imagination of Abdul and his peers, it is less a question of whether or not they stand to gain from the trade, and more a question of timing; the traders view competition as a claim on being there before someone else. Most prospectors searched in the gold fields with little knowledge of the condition of the soil they worked; striking gold was therefore the result of chance. Geology was still a rudimentary science in the late nineteenth century (for instance, plate tectonic theory, which revolutionized geoscience, appeared only decades later), and the physical conditions under which gold was formed were ill understood, let alone translated from research centres and universities into gold panners’ everyday practices. Finding gold, in the form of nuggets floating in a river tributary or as surface deposits, was therefore a matter of chance. Likewise, Cotonou car traders operate in an insecure economic environment. They have limited access to accurate information about car prices and their business partners. Such information deficiencies are related to the individualism of car traders outlined above, which works against the development of social

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relations as dependable nodes in a trade network. Prices cannot be verified independently given the informal nature of the business, as Abdul’s case demonstrates; one builds up an image of price dynamics from direct experience, from observation of others or, more likely, from rumours that spread quickly around the market. Lastly, whereas prospectors were impoverished to the degree that they left the gold fields empty-­handed, the suppliers of the mining campaigns realized large revenues. Essential items that miners needed in the rugged terrain that they worked led to a manufacturing boom. The miners wore denim pants made by Levi Strauss, they slept in tents produced by Lewis & Clark, and the plates and cutlery that they used came from the department store Macy’s. These companies successfully forged a major revenue flow out of the growing demands of the prospectors, becoming global brands in the process. Compare this with the situation in Cotonou, where those not directly involved in the car ­trade – ­market owners, shipping companies and ­licensees – ­have fared well in the course of the growth of the car trade. Transport fees for the cars have dropped in comparison with the early days of the boom, although this is readily offset by the increased volume of cars; a similar logic operates on the parking fees that car market owners pocket. Cotonou car traders, especially those in the business of reselling cars, face frequent financial losses. To illustrate this, out of the 107 car traders whom I consulted during the fieldwork in Cotonou, only seven succeeded in gaining from the trade; the rest were making money elsewhere, investing it subsequently in the car business.

Conclusion This chapter has sought to shed light on an important riddle that I observed in the second-­hand car trade in West Africa, though I think that it is more common as well. The riddle is as follows: why would entrepreneurs continue to invest money in something that is profitable only in a limited number of instances? Part of that relates to language: in Cotonou, a language evolved that talks about trading cars in terms of its profit-­making opportunities. Real profits are often elusive, but car trading entrepreneurs project the idea of profit-­making onto the future with the expectation or hope that real profits will materialize. This dream or expectation is kept alive by stories of the early stages of the second-­hand car business in Cotonou when large profits were much more common, combined with rumours of those who recently made it in the car business. The image of business success is further strengthened by a tendency not to vaunt disappointing business deals. It stands to reason that few traders will question

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this semiotic system, as they are united in a conviction that it will bring them profits, if not now, then perhaps in the immediate future. The image of success is thus sustained through social forces that individual entrepreneurs, and certainly those who find themselves in reselling positions where they depend on others, cannot control. Whether or not a profit materializes may be considered a miracle, but it is not magical: to the traders, it is apparent where the money comes f­ rom – ­a difference between buying and selling. There is no invoking of higher spirits as the advocates of the occult economies thesis argue. Much time is therefore spent calculating; everyday conversation teems with references to possible profit margins by making constant comparisons with known, past car sales. The possibility of profits is not seen in terms of a zero-­ sum game either. In Cotonou, there is an abundance of cars, and each car evokes a promise of profit-­making; there are enough profits to go round. The challenge is to secure the profit in time: being first when it comes to making a deal is considered a chief resource in business success. Looking for another interpretive model, I inferred the metaphor of gold prospecting from the behaviour of Abdul and others in Cotonou. The prospector’s dream of striking gold animated scores of young aspiring individuals, I argue, precisely because there was a visible aspect to the business success. Nothing stirred the imagination quite as much as the sight of a gold nugget freshly recovered from the river. The more people who share the belief that, eventually, it is possible to strike it rich with the car trade, the more other considerations are suspended. One believer amounts to little, but, in Cotonou, the scale at which the belief in a Klondike miracle operates tends to reinforce itself. For a young aspiring person coming to Cotonou, it is hard not to believe that something special is in the air; if not, then why would so many others be convinced of that? It triggers an explaining away of business failure as the result of luck, and luck may return; the absence of a positive experience in business is thus not seen as a confirmation of a lack of opportunity. Rather, it is seen as a motivation to continue to make an investment and devote effort to it. The Cotonou miracle thus has a broader lesson. The shared belief that I document in this chapter may acquire the property of a perpetuum mobile: a machine that does not require outside energy in order to continue operating. It is a machine that promises a shining future, provided that there is a willingness to relinquish a quest for evidence to the contrary. It illustrates the operation of a powerful mechanism in future-­ work that can derail an entire economy, gobbling up productive funds, meanwhile keeping those in it convinced that what they do makes a lot of sense. And it does, of course, only not in the sense of reaping profits.

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Notes 1. The chapter presents a heavily reworked version of the original case material that was published in Beuving 2004. 2. The Melanesian Big Man model strictly speaking refers to a political system in which groups of men are locked into a competitive struggle in an ongoing process of reciprocity and redistribution where a dominant position is necessarily temporary. Formal authority is non-­existent and whatever position a Melanesian Big Man succeeds in achieving cannot be inherited by his offspring (Sahlins 1963). 3. Most cars end up in the large urban centres of Kano and Lagos. In marked contrast to nearby Nigerian ports, car trade in Benin benefits from the free port status of Cotonou, meaning that trade is permitted before customs declaration. This permission drastically reduces capital requirements for traders: import duties can constitute up to half the value of a car. Further, whereas at the time of the fieldwork the Nigerian government prohibited the importation of cars older than seven years, the Beninese government had not adopted an age limit for cars. This favours the importation of older, and generally cheaper, cars into Cotonou. 4. The best known of these crises is the 1994 CFA devaluation, when the value of this West African currency (used in eleven Francophone countries, including Benin) halved almost overnight. 5. The car trade in Cotonou is characterized by the absence of a lingua franca. Languages spoken include Arabic (Lebanese traders); English, Hausa, Ibo and Yoruba (Nigerian traders); and Fon, French and Yoruba (Beninese traders).

4

Stories with Numbers ° Telling The Social Life of Investment Bankers

Key to derivatives is that those who buy and sell them are each making a bet on the future value of that asset. Derivatives provide a way for investors to either protect themselves, for example, against a possible negative future price swing, or to make high-­stakes bets on price swings for what might be huge payoffs. At the heart of the business is a dance with time. —Gilian Tett, Fool’s Gold (my emphasis)

Introduction Thus far, the stories about entrepreneurship in this study have revolved around concrete things: cars and fish as well as the organizing practices that surround them. This means that entrepreneurs form ideas about the future, and act towards it, based on objects that can be seen and touched and smelled. Whether a fish is too small or has gone off, or a car’s engine stalls or its bodywork is damaged, belong to a common universe of observable facts: there is a readily identifiable link between the stuff that is talked about, or imagined, and that which can be seen. Various interpretations may apply to the same observables: the previous chapters have shown that much of the work that entrepreneurs invest into shaping the future indeed consists of coming to terms with different possible interpretations (was the dent in my car an accident or did a competitor make it on purpose?). In the previous chapters, we have further seen how such interpretations may take the form of myths, dreams or fantasies through which entrepreneurs smoothen the unknown unknowns of the future. This is key to the anthropological analysis of future-­work to which this study subscribes. We have also seen that once these interpretations become detached from a shared world of common ­facts – ­and they often ­do – ­entrepreneurial behaviour may spiral out of control and result in a faltering economy, or even economic meltdown. But what if the objects of entrepreneurial behaviour no

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longer have a tangible quality; what if they cannot be seen and touched in the sense that cars and fish can? How does this then alter the relationship between what entrepreneurs consider as the objects of their business and the future-­work that they apply to it? In order to address this particular problem, the current chapter turns towards the world of investment bankers. Investment bankers work with financial products, and an important quality of these products is that they are immaterial entities. What investment bankers have on offer exists as numbers on a computer screen and/or a sheet of paper; they are numerical, rather than tangible, realities (Abolafia 2001). To be sure, the fact that financial products are immaterial does not mean that they have no clearly identifiable link with the real world. Let us explore this particular problem first with reference to an example with which many of us are familiar: the house mortgage. A house mortgage is a financial product that revolves around a debt. Few prospective homeowners can afford to buy a house with cash (in fact, this would probably be frowned u ­ pon – i­magine what would happen if someone entered a mortgage broker’s office with a suitcase full of cash), and they therefore normally borrow money from a bank or other financial institution to pay for their new residence. By signing a mortgage contract, the mortgagee pledges to repay the mortgage supplier the total sum due, including a fee in the form of interest. Importantly, the money itself remains immaterial: it is transferred as a series of numbers from the mortgage-­supplying institution to the account of the house seller. In return, the new homeowner receives a document, the mortgage deed, that lists the sum of the mortgage principal (the total amount paid), the payback period of the mortgage (specified in months or years) and the interest rate that the bank charges for lending the money. The further lifecycle of the mortgage presents itself as a tabulated list detailing the recurrent payment of interest and instalments of the principal. As follows from this brief example, underneath the mortgage deed there are real ­objects – ­houses, or offices or some other real estate objects, with real persons (hopefully) assuming responsibility for the repayment of the principal, and this allows for computation of the various risks involved. For instance, and as any real estate broker can tell, there may be risks in pricing, such as: how to put a market value on a technically sound building in a bad neighbourhood? Or what if the otherwise impeccable building was previously used for criminal activity? Other risks involve payment: what if the mortgagee lacks a stable income guaranteed through a fixed contract but has a past track record of securing well-­paying projects? And how, for instance, to deal with a sudden illness of a seemingly healthy mortgagee? (Answer: make health insurance or term life insurance mandatory.) These are real ­risks – ­for banks of losing their money and for a prospective

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mortgagee of buying a pig in a ­poke – ­but they also rhyme with what we can observe in the real world. For instance, to price a technically sound building in a bad neighbourhood, real estate brokers may look for doppelgänger: comparable pieces of property sold recently in comparably bad neighbourhoods (Stephens-­Davidowitz 2017). When it comes to payment, credit histories of a mortgage bank’s customers may present a useful proxy to assess the likelihood that a potential mortgagee will repay. Moreover, getting to know the person a little better in an informal setting may reveal important information about personal habits that impact on payment. This vision of financial products as immaterial stuff that has a bearing in a common world of observation changes quite dramatically when we turn our attention to a related, though in many regards fundamentally different, group of financial products, called collaterized debt obligations, or CDOs. CDOs have an older history but are relevant for this study as they gained traction during the closing decades of the twentieth century. They consist of packages of risk-­bearing products such as government bonds, or company shares or, to return to the previous example, house mortgages, which are sliced up. For a graphic image, consider the cutting up of a layered cake into tranches. Each layer has its own distinctive colour, taste and texture; the sensory experience of a tranche combines these together into something new that transcends each distinctive layer (when prepared well). An expert cake eater may still be able to reconstruct the original layers from his/her mouthful of cake, but this becomes more complicated when various slices are yet again combined into something new, something that is probably poor to the taste, and whose original ingredients are difficult to trace. This is precisely what happened with the CDOs. To continue the culinary metaphor, once a CDO consisting of, say, house mortgages, is sliced up twice in the manner described above, who can tell how this still rhymes with the real-­life buildings and persons inscribed in a mortgages deed? CDOs, in themselves part of a yet broader class of financial products called derivatives (their value derives from something else) – in the case of mortgages, a debt backed up by real e­ state – t­ hus no longer have a clearly identifiable link with the real world; they are financial products that lack an intuitive grasp of underlying processes, which are important nonetheless to appraise pricing and repayment contingencies. With a greater complexity of financial products in the manner discussed above (CDOs are but one example; the financial world teems with similar examples), a clearly identifiable link with the real world gets out of focus. This fuzziness raises critical questions about the financial products: what they are precisely, or what they do, and for whom, is not always o ­ bvious – ­not even for insiders. This applies especially to the risks attached to the strange mosaic of colour, taste and texture that the cake begins to acquire

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once it has been recombined a few times. For investment bankers, this tendency towards greater risk complexities means that much of their future-­work revolves around establishing the basic facts of finance. A special concern regarding the layered cake of derivatives is that, in establishing such facts, stories about the future may form that are no longer grounded in observable reality. As will be shown, this fosters storytelling in which risk is reasoned away; perhaps unsurprisingly, the ideal of a risk-­free future became central to twenty-­first-­century financial banking practice. Moreover, whereas some of the emerging future stories are free-­floating – ­just talk and rumours at the coffee machine, good for making conversation, with few real ­effects – ­a distinctive genre of optimistic storytelling materialized that spurred bankers and other financial actors to act collectively. The particular social organization of investment banks appears to have been instrumental in this. Many investment banks, or banks with specialized investment departments, are structured in a socially rigid hierarchy alongside which definitional power increases. Put differently, power in investment banks is expressed in the capacity to influence financial stories, thus pointing to the existence of centralized forces in financial storytelling (Vigna and Casey 2015). Stories about the new financial products, of which CDOs are an example, are of special relevance in terms of how investment bankers construct the future, the broader topic of this study. This is where the ideal of homo economicus kicks in: the goal-­rational individual introduced in the Introduction who makes cool-­headed decisions based on ‘the facts’. The story that I am about to unfold rhymes with a perceptive question that Nobel Prize laureates (economy) Garry Akerlof and Robert Shiller ask in an insightful book: what if the stories become the facts? (Akerlof and Shiller 2010). What then happens with the appraisal of the various pricing and repayment contingencies that bear on the profitability of the investment banking enterprise? This appears to be a relevant question especially because, as this chapter will show, the derivatives-­based financial products that became popular among investment bankers from the 1980s onwards have a tendency to hide their immediate, negative consequences in plain sight, as alluded to in the example of the mortgage-­based CDOs. They are not only intangible, but also complex in their underlying mechanisms. The effects of derivatives-­based products may thus be compared with a stick of dynamite: relatively harmless when untouched, but highly explosive when ignited with the right stimulus: in this case, a small spark. The derivatives-­ based products may have stood on their own when they were pioneered in the 1980s, but over time they became part of a global web tying together a host of other financial products in a way that even few insiders could (or cared to) understand (Rajan 2011). In other words, it was a stick of

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dynamite in an ammunition dump; one exploding stick of dynamite could thus detonate the entire warehouse.1 In the course of the 1990s, it appears that Akerlof and Shiller’s moment had arrived: stories had become the facts. Financial America became caught in the grip of stories that promised uninterrupted wealth and growth without the risk of failure, and bankers began to move towards the promises of a Cockaigne. This narrative turn in finance unfolded in a social environment where the storytelling was monopolized towards the top of the hierarchy. This chapter shows how the more such optimistic story-­ making became severed from what lower echelons could readily observe, namely, that the new financial products entailed unknown consequences in the real economy, the more financial decision-­making became myopic or self-­affirming. This proved to have a particular effect on calculation: the more stories became facts, the more calculation acquired the quality of a ritual with the function of conjuring the future into existence. Social dynamics play into this too. Drawing on analyses of investment bankers’ professional profiles and social networks, this chapter suggests that banking is a tightly closed and self-­centred world: insiders rarely step out (nor do outsiders enter easily). I show how this particular social architecture of investment banking contributes to the replacement of a belief in calculation as a basis for knowing the future, thus obscuring a view on a shared world of common facts. The gradual lifting of the distinction between fact and stories came with social consequences. In particular, it contributed to a build-­up of social tension that exploded when future expectations suddenly evaporated, as was the case during the 2008 financial crisis and its subsequent economic fallout. Sometimes, this had dramatic consequences such as anxiety disorder and even suicide, as this chapter shows. The chapter continues with a short overview of the history of investment banking, centred on Financial America since the 1970s, which is where the derivatives revolution was pioneered and developed. To be sure, investment banking in Financial America is not a global frontier in the sense of this term as discussed in the previous chapters. The previous chapters are situated in capitalist peripheries in which, seemingly without precedent, new economic activity emerges that attracts enterprising groups. Financial America, on the other hand, is central to global capitalism. At the same time, we see that investment banking acquired, in Anna Tsing’s perceptive wording, a ‘savage sentiment’ (Tsing 2005); it instilled a sense of excitement that something new was beginning; or it denoted a future in the making. Because of this, I feel quite confident that a study of investment banking does have a place in a broader discussion about entrepreneurial future-­work in global frontiers. The discussion then continues with a presentation of a case study of one particular senior investment banker, Bill

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Broeksmit. Investment banks are usually large-­scale corporate institutions, and bankers like Broeksmit are salaried employees, of course, rather than self-­employed entrepreneurs. That said, bankers occupying the investment banks’ upper echelons are as independent and as entrepreneurial employees as it gets. Studying them can thus shed light on a corporate entrepreneurship driving investment banking. Broeksmit’s case is reconstructed on the basis of secondary sources, in particular the work of several reputed investigative journalists with considerable expertise in the financial world. Rather than merely summarizing their work, in the analysis of this case study I attempt to infer behaviour patterns from it with a view to shedding light on the problem of future-­work in the context of an intangible product that is expressed in an introverted social world.2

A Short History of Investment Banking in Financial America Investment banking has a long history;3 however, in the form that occupies the interest of this chapter and study, it is associated with the global rise of Financial America. Financial America is a loose term denoting the web of financial practices and institutions that emerged in the United States during the nineteenth century, centring on major debt and equity exchanges, those of Wall Street and Chicago in particular. Financial America remained small in proportion to the global economy, but this began to change in the 1970s. In this financially epoch-­making decade, public sentiments in the Western hemisphere about the role of the government in the organization of the national economy began to change. This change of sentiment followed from dissatisfaction with Keynesianism: an equilibrium model of the economy that links savings, investment, income and interest rates in a series of e­ quations – ­the IS-­LM model briefly introduced in Chapter 1. Keynesian macroeconomic policies struggled to deal with the combination of unemployment and inflation that troubled the US economy in particular towards the late 1960s and early 1970s. Fuelled by the new economic liberalism of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, this gave rise to the political idea that government was part of the problem, not part of the solution (Blyth 2013). The elections of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher further cemented these ideas into macroeconomic policy realities, greatly reducing public oversight of Financial America. Of further importance is the fact that the United States unilaterally cancelled the Bretton Woods Agreement by abandoning the gold standard (1971), allowing the US Dollar to float freely. Abandoning gold as the foundation of the US monetary economy was an emergency response to mounting capital demands that resulted from the Vietnam War. To

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continue to pay for this money-­gobbling overseas enterprise, the Nixon government needed public funds well beyond those of the national gold reserve (Kwarteng 2015). With a freely floating dollar, it regained control over its money supply: printing fresh dollars to pay for an expensive war. The United States’ abandonment of the gold standard can thus be seen as a striking case of Trump’s ‘America First’ avant la lettre. After all, the Bretton Woods Agreement served a collective purpose: it was created directly after the Second World War to avoid the kind of global financial panic that many believed had caused the Great Depression of the Interbellum. Maynard Keynes, the economic thinker whose ontogenetic interpretation of time is central to this study (see the Introduction and Chapter 1) is widely considered to be its main architect. Bretton Woods pegged the globe’s major currencies to the US Dollar, as the US economy had emerged victoriously from the war: a reconfiguration of the global economic order previously dominate by colonial currencies such as the British Pound and the French Franc. Replacing a system of fixed currencies with one of floating currencies created new opportunities for investment banking, especially through the creation of financial derivatives. (Investment banks’ other activities include facilitating the consolidation of two or more companies into a new one as well as brokering the public offering of a company.) A floating currency means that its value, expressed in relation to the value of another currency, changes from moment to moment. A short illustration from the world of international trade can help in an appraisal of economic consequences. Suppose that a US supermarket chain enters into a contract with a Dutch dairy wholesale company to deliver a large volume of fresh milk. The contract for the delivery is written in the Dutch currency, the Euro, at a fixed exchange rate between the Euro and the US Dollar. Now suppose that, upon delivery of the milk, the US Dollar has lost value against the Euro. This means that the US supermarket must pay more for the same amount of Dutch milk, reducing its profit margin. To prevent this from happening, the supermarket can buy a derivatives contract. The investment bank selling the derivatives contract will then find an interested investor who anticipates that the currency drop will not happen. If this investor is right, it can pocket the value of the derivatives contract (what the supermarket paid for it); if it is wrong, it must pay the supermarket the difference in Dollar-­to-­Euro value. The real winner of this type of contracts is obviously the bank: it pockets a fee for setting up the derivatives contract, regardless of the outcome.4 Currency derivatives contracts quickly became popular as companies worldwide realized that they could protect (hedge in financial parlance) their business operations against the risk of unexpected currency

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fluctuations. For a short while, derivatives were traded within a network of close bank contacts, but their trade took off in earnest once specialized exchanges were created, such as for instance the Chicago Board Options Exchange in 1973, where investment banks could conduct their business. Simultaneously, derivatives contracts grew more complex. The invention of derivatives swaps illustrates this. Returning to the example of the house mortgage, suppose that there are two homeowners with a comparable mortgage (same principal, same payback period and so on), with the difference that owner 1 pays a fixed interest rate of 3 per cent, whereas the other has opted for a variable rate. The current market rate is also 3 per cent. Now the European Central Bank announces that it is going to increase its interest rate, and homeowner 2 thinks that mortgage interest rates will follow, meaning that his mortgage will become more expensive. Homeowner 1, on the other hand, anticipates that none of this will happen and that mortgage interest rates will continue to drop, as they have consistently done over the past two decades. Rather than negotiating a new mortgage contract, which is expensive, a bank can broker a deal between our two homeowners. This means that homeowner 1 will pay the mortgage fee for number 2, and the other way around. Ownership remains as it is: the houses are not swapped, only the interest payments. Derivatives swaps apply this same principle to contracts hedging currency fluctuations. The expanding complexity and volume of financial derivatives introduced two new, and closely related, problems in Financial America: (a) how are derivatives contracts priced (the private interest of bankers and their network of clients), and (b) how can the derivatives trade be supervised (the public interest of the government)? Grappling with these two questions has occupied Financial America from the 1970s to the present day. Regarding the first problem, Financial America sought to tackle the pricing problem with a specialist branch in mathematics called predictive finance. Predictive finance seeks to forecast future price developments based on past patterns applying principles of stochastic modelling. Its predictions can be compared to the weather forecast. Rather than saying it will or will not rain tomorrow morning, the weather model expresses the likelihood of rain as a statistical probability: a 50 per cent chance of a 2 mm shower. The more distant the prediction, the lower its probability. As we all know from personal observation, forecasting tomorrow’s weather may be a challenge; but getting a handle on next year’s weather is a statistical impossibility. Who can tell what the weather will be like in, say, a year or so? In predictive finance however, this is exactly what is aimed for: to forecast the likelihood of a price rise or fall in the short or long run. One noted problem of this understandable attempt is that the complex mathematics underpinning the predictive models requires expert training

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that exceeded the capabilities of most investment bankers when the models were first introduced. Another, and perhaps more perplexing, problem, as financial anthropologist Gillian Tett perceptively observes, is that ‘the key simplifying assumption on which the models rested was that the future was likely to look like the recent past’ (Tett 2010: 39). Tett thus underscores how the quantitative modelling of derivatives pricing is rooted in an epistemogenetic idea of time: prices depend on mathematical models based on known outcomes in the past. From Chapter 1 however, we know that investment bankers, like any other entrepreneur, operate in a world where time is ontogenetic, depending not on natural laws but on human interpretation, which defies prediction in the sense that weather forecast models do (Kay and King 2020). One can expect difficulties, therefore, if the future is fundamentally different from the past. It is noteworthy how this inconvenient truth is often explained away. One solution is to assume perfect models or, as a perhaps more realistic alternative, to accept that all models are inherently flawed, yet, when combined together, do offer a reliable proxy for future price developments. In the words of J.P. Morgan’s head of risk management, Andrew Thread: ‘All risk metrics [indicators of change] are flawed in some way, so the trick is to use a lot of different metrics which cancel out the risk’ (Whitehouse 2005). Another solution is to simply ignore the models, especially when they produce unwelcome results. Understanding the broader, social dynamics of this second solution constitutes the subsequent subject matter of this chapter. Regarding the second problem with which Financial America grappled, attempts by the US government to supervise the new financial derivatives trade were compromised by the fact that few financial civil servants could appreciate their inner workings (nor were the investment banks particularly motivated to share their insights with them). The US government had (and has) a solid track record in monitoring the trade in stocks, bonds and other financial ­equity – ­things that have a visible representation as an entry in the balance sheets of companies and banks. This did not appear to be the case with financial derivatives. Investment banks, for instance, successfully negotiated the position that derivatives swaps were not financial equity, but rather artefacts of calculating procedures and therefore exempt from bookkeeping rules (Luyendijk 2017). Hence, the expansion of the derivatives trade took place largely beyond the purview of government observation. The repeal of the Glass-­Steagall Act by the Clinton Administration in 1999 resulted in a further distancing effect. This act reformed banking in the 1930s, seeking to redress the errors in the pre-­Second World War financial system that led to the Great Depression. The act submitted banks to strict supervision by the Federal Reserve, although since the 1970s actual supervision had become increasingly light. The Clinton repeal thus

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made official what in practice had already amounted to an economically liberal approach towards bank supervision. This situation continued until the promulgation of the Dodd-­Frank Act of 2010, which brought US banks again into the purview of close government supervision.

The Rise and Fall of Bill Broeksmit The chapter continues with the life history of an important figure in Financial America: investment banker Bill Broeksmit.5 As will be shown, Broeksmit rose through the ranks of various (American) b ­ anks – ­Continental Bank, Merrill Lynch and ­Deutsche – ­where he pioneered the financial derivatives trade. This trade, many observers believe, contributed to the creation of the financial crisis of 2008 and the economic meltdown that followed it (Ho 2009). Broeksmit’s career can thus offer interesting insights into the various causes contributing to this dramatic outcome. The insights are especially relevant for understanding better how, in investment banking circles, a rosy image of the future began to form that hinges on disregarding or ignoring the problem of risk. In addition to broader, financial consequences, there is personal drama involved too. Broeksmit eventually took his own life, a tragic case of banker’s suicide that generated considerable media attention as he occupied a senior role in a global bank. Bankers’ suicides are usually attributed to the stress of working long hours, perhaps coupled with a sense of remorse, but this study subscribes to another interpretation that focuses on the social dynamics of future-­ work. More specifically, it illustrates what happens when stories about the future that lack grounding in an observable reality begin to circulate in a social environment that is inward looking. Broeksmit’s story may look like an extreme case, yet at the same time it is helpful to realize that bankers’ suicides peaked in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, with over 260 reported cases in the 2008–2015 period. It is, therefore, a story with wider relevance, which I unveil towards the end of this chapter. The ambit of this chapter is thus to work towards an interpretation of Broeksmit’s suicide that is grounded in sketching the circumstances that surround it.

1959–1984: Upbringing and Early Banking Years William (Bill) Broeksmit was born in 1955 into a modest family; this is noteworthy given that he became a prominent figure in Financial America, a world of (white) privilege (Ho 2009). (See Figure 4.1 for further contact details.) Bill’s father, Jake, was a GI-­bill-­sponsored Yale graduate who, after fighting the Germans in Europe during the Second World War, changed

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vocation and became an evangelist minister. He fathered a large family (six children) with not a lot of money to go around: Broeksmit’s mother was a stay-­at-­home mom, as was common in their circles. Broeksmit spent his youth and teenage years with his family in a small town not far from Chicago. Growing up, he did not follow his father’s calling and walk a path of worship; instead, with a scholarship, in 1973 he went to a small liberal arts college in Los Angeles, California, where he became interested in finance. For anyone who cared to see, this was an exciting time in US economic history: the country was breaking away from the Bretton Woods Agreement, and a new economic order was in the making. Upon graduation, Broeksmit moved back to the East Coast where he enrolled in an MBA, at Northwestern University. After graduation, he landed a job in Chicago at a large bank called Continental Illinois, best known for the largest bank run in American history since the Great Depression, in 1984. Broeksmit stayed at Continental right before this unfortunate event happened. Broeksmit arrived at Continental just when a derivatives market was beginning to form. The first major derivatives swap (see above) occurred in 1981 when the World Bank and IBM swapped the interest and principal of a large sum, brokered by the US bank Salomon Banks (Litzenberger 1992). Financial America quickly got wind of it, and commercial banks such as Continental wanted to get a piece of the action too. Broeksmit appeared to have been thrilled by the novelty of financial derivatives, especially by the complex calculus that goes into computing the value of derivatives contracts. At the time, such mathematical leanings were uncommon. In the 1980s, MBAs did not have much of an academic status. They were seen primarily as vocational training for the business-­minded elite where future managers were acquiring practical management skills (Parker 2018). They offered little mathematical training, unlike the situation today: most MBA programmes offer mathematical economics on their curricula. The details of Broeksmit’s derivatives work at Continental are unknown, but it appears that he quickly gained a reputation for being good with numbers, as well as for being a financial innovator. After all, in the land of the blind, the one-­eyed man is king. Broeksmit remained at Continental only a few years. In 1984, not long before the bank folded, he was approached by Edson Mitchell. Mitchell, a few years Broeksmit’s senior, was a charismatic man whose descriptions conjure up Schumpeter’s image of the entrepreneur as a Caruso (see Chapter 1) (Oermann 2013). Mitchell, sharing with Broeksmit an unprivileged background as well as a small-­town, East Coast pedigree, after completing an MBA found himself stuck at a commercial lending department of Bank of America in Chicago, eager to dabble in the exciting world of financial derivatives. In 1984, he landed a position at Merrill Lynch

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Figure 4.1.  Business contacts, Bill Broeksmit. © Joost Beuving.

where he was tasked with the expansion of a newly created derivatives department. He looked for a bright brain to help calculate the value of derivatives contracts, and he knew of Broeksmit via the Chicago bankers’ scene.6 Admiring Mitchell’s boisterous personality (Broeksmit was an introverted person) and seniority, possibly also surmising that trouble was coming Continental’s way, but above all because Broeksmit was enthused by Mitchell’s plans to build a derivatives business at Merrill Lynch, he complied with Mitchell’s request. Broeksmit and his wife moved to New Jersey, where he threw himself into the derivatives business.

1984–1996: ‘King’ of Derivatives Broeksmit spent the next decade at Merrill Lynch as a derivatives specialist. At first, he appears to have been pleased by the central role that he gained in what he considered to be an intellectually exciting development. Merrill Lynch at the time was a far larger bank than Continental, with more financial clout and a wider set of banking networks that could be deployed for trading financial derivatives. Also, his benefactor Mitchell seemed to have landed rather well in the upper echelons of the bank, where he was quickly promoted to a senior rank. Through his association with Mitchell, Broeksmit secured a safe working environment where he could quietly continue his work on financial derivatives. Moreover, the new products that Broeksmit developed were successful, finding a ready circle of eager customers from whom Merrill Lynch profited. Broeksmit is, for instance, credited with inventing ‘Swaptions’, which is an option to a derivatives swap, rather than the swap itself, and it sold like hot cakes (Fabozzi et al. 2002: 264–65). Although the intellectual satisfaction of building new derivatives-­based products still pleased Broeksmit, after a few years he became doubtful

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about the consequences of his work. After all, whereas the derivatives structure originally helped to hedge unexpected events in the economy such as the rise or fall of currency prices that could be harmful for trade and production, it now encouraged a gambling sentiment. Large companies, for instance, began to buy derivatives developed by Broeksmit and his ilk that would hedge the companies against interest fluctuations. Such fluctuations can result in unexpected losses for which the companies normally prepared by setting aside money in a contingency fund. Now feeling protected against these fluctuations, they downsized their contingency funds. Interest derivatives thus came to be seen as a form of insurance, making possible more reckless behaviour. Economists refer to this with the term moral hazard. Consider, for instance, how a bike owner with theft insurance is less likely to lock his/her bike properly, making it more prone to being stolen. This is what Broeksmit observed among a larger portion of Merrill Lynch’s ­clientele – ­lots of improperly locked ­bikes – ­and he was not pleased with it. In the early 1990s, the composition of Merrill Lynch’s circle of customers wanting to invest in the new derivatives business began to change. Initially, derivatives were seen as something for insider institutions such as banks and business companies, but now relative outsiders in Financial America such as pension funds, but also local governments, began to see in them an opportunity to put their considerable funds to what they thought of as better use. With sorrowful eyes, Broeksmit observed, for instance, how Orange County became a Merrill Lynch client and invested heavily in interest derivatives. During talks with its representatives, Broeksmit realized that the Orange County people had only a dim idea about the derivatives structure. Most worryingly, they seemed unaware that, once interest rates developed otherwise than they had anticipated, they risked losing their entire investment, which was public money. Moreover, as non-­ financial experts, they appeared to lack the expertise to anticipate interest fluctuations. Broeksmit brought the matter up with Merrill Lynch’s higher-­ ups. In an internal memo published in 1993, almost two years before the Orange County’s investments collapsed, he warned that this could happen and that it would harm Merrill Lynch’s image (Wagner 1995). The top brass decided to ignore Broeksmit’s warnings, with a reference to the ‘caveat emptor’ principle: buyer, know what thee buys. Broeksmit was troubled, not least because his benefactor, Mitchell, though sympathetic to his worries, seemed unable to influence the top decision-­making. Disappointed, Broeksmit retired (Siconolfi and Jereski 1996) in what turned out to be a total of three retirements, before his untimely death in 2014.

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1996–2007: The Lure of Wallstreet The retirement did not last long however. Mitchell had grown frustrated with the Merrill Lynch top brass too, though for different reasons than Broeksmit. He was passed over for an important promotion and suspected his modest background had played a role (though he was also a graduate from Dartmouth College, a prized Ivy League university) (Follath 2000). Mitchell had also become aware that Deutsche Bank, at that time a modestly sized bank catering especially for Germany’s business community, had big plans to break into Financial America. Deutsche wanted to do it via the derivatives business, which Mitchell had helped develop at Merrill Lynch. He felt confident, therefore, that he was the man to propel Deutsche into the new era. Still uncharted ­territory – ­most American commercial banks remained committed to the tried-­and-­tested bonds and equity ­trade – ­the derivatives industry offered plenty of opportunity for outsiders (Tett 2010). Before long, Mitchell was headhunted by Deutsche and made head of its new derivatives department, with the promise that this would determine the future course of the bank (Oermann 2013). Mitchell, however, needed a trusted alliance in this new world (he was the first non-­German to secure a senior position at the bank) and, once again, he turned to Broeksmit. It seems that Broeksmit could not withstand Mitchells’ repeated pleas, and, after only a few months of retirement, he signed a contract with Deutsche. Around this time, Financial America’s political landscape began to change. The Clinton Administration, riding a wave of unprecedented economic liberalism, had decided to repeal the Glass-­Steagall Act in 1999 (see above). This legitimized the combining of commercial and investment banking to construct one-­stop-­shopping empires (Tett 2010: 84–85). New super banks began to ­form – ­within Financial America but quickly this spread beyond it t­ oo – i­ ncentivized by the benefits that economies of scale brought for profit-­making. Scale, therefore, became the buzzword, and this led to a redirection of Deutsche’s course towards accruing greater capital flows. The new mantra was profits at any price. This ushered in a new spirit that was dismissive of the management of risk, which was Broeksmit’s expertise. Selling derivatives became key to Deutsche’s strategy, and Broeksmit was tasked with overseeing the creation of an increasingly exotic stock of new derivatives-­based products.7 However, Deutsche also began to resort to shady currency deals with rogue states and to insider trading, giving rise to suspicions by financial regulators as well as critical questions from shareholders. It appears that Broeksmit took notice of these mal­ feasances, but felt powerless to act against them. Halfway through 2000, Broeksmit retired for a second time for seemingly similar reasons as the first retirement. Broeksmit was initially hailed as a

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relativizing force in Deutsche’s derivatives t­rade – a­ s Enrich perceptively writes: ‘He was insensitive for the marketing spiel about how great the transaction was. He wanted to understand its essence’ (Enrich 2020: 59). Increasingly however, Broeksmit came to be considered as a Dr No, named after the infamous Bond movie character, a man disinclined to take on risky adventures, especially not when he felt that Deutsche’s ­customers – ­known in the trade as p ­ igeons – ­were clueless with regard to the negative consequences of the complex derivatives products (Meck 2012). Echoing his earlier misgivings about the Orange County scandal, Broeksmit was wary of being implicated in creating products that outsiders did not understand. Whatever feelings of doubt Broeksmit may have harboured towards his decision, the unexpected death of Mitchell a few months later sealed its irreversibility. Mitchell was killed in an unfortunate plane crash in late 2000, and with him Broeksmit lost a close ally in the financial world, in fact, the man who got him where he was before retirement: in a privileged place at one of the globe’s leading financial institutions. During the following years, Broeksmit did some consulting work, especially for his old employer Merrill Lynch. During these years, Deutsche went through several changes that profoundly altered the bank’s face however. First, Deutsche’s new CEO, the charismatic Joseph Ackermann, took the bank to the New York Stock Exchange, propelling it into the stratosphere of international finance. And noblesse oblige: the public offering placed even greater emphasis on making money (in financial lingo: maximizing return on equity), even when this came at the cost of financial prudence. Scandals began to foment, however, beneath the façade of the seemingly successful money machine. The aforementioned rogue state currency deals began to attract the attention of the financial regulators, and there were dissatisfied customers who had bought bogus products and realized that Deutsche had led them by the nose. A further concern was that, within Deutsche, a small group of bankers began to realize that many of the derivatives-­based products that Deutsche so successfully sold yielded profits only as long the global economy expanded. It was anyone’s guess what would happen if growth stagnated or, even worse, reversed. This led Ainshu ­Jain – ­another Mitchell protégé who had come with him from Merrill Lynch but, unlike Broeksmit, had made it to the top l­evels – ­to make an effort to sell the unsavoury inventory. And for that, he needed Broeksmit.

2007–2014: Return to Deutsche and Suicide Halfway through 2007, Jain called Broeksmit and talked him into accepting a second tenure at Deutsche. Although Broeksmit had had good reasons to leave Deutsche several years earlier, he never seemed a happy man during

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his retirement, especially as he appeared to feel obsolete, but above all it appears that Jain’s request struck a moral chord: Broeksmit felt called to duty when he realized how much his analytical skills were needed to avert mayhem for a social circle that he knew well. Before Broeksmit could genuinely appraise, however, how much the Deutsche he knew before had changed, the US hedge fund Bear Sterns collapsed, followed by the failure of Lehman Brothers, setting in motion a cascade of events that were later labelled as the 2008 financial crisis. At Deutsche (as elsewhere in Financial America), all hands were on deck, and Broeksmit quickly became entangled in the ensuing maelstrom that devoured his creative energies. He was tasked with selling Deutsche’s considerable stock of derivatives, which had turned into a tangled knot that few of Broeksmit’s colleagues could grasp. For a while, it seemed that he was finding a new spot for himself by making a name as the person who could solve one of Deutsche’s more testing problems. The global downturn that followed from the 2008 economic crisis had an impact on Deutsche, but less than on many other banks; remember that several of the globe’s major banks (Northern Rock in Britain, ABN AMRO and SNS in The Netherlands) were rescued through nationalization, whereas Deutsche received government support but the German state did not take a government stake in it. This outcome was quickly made central in Deutsche’s success story, which the bank’s higher-­ups eagerly interpreted as evidence of their business acumen. Broeksmit, who worked in Deutsche’s engine room, appears to have been of a different opinion. For instance, he observed that the bank had booked the anticipated profits of derivatives contracts up front. As Enrich explains, this may have looked good on the balance sheet, but these contracts extended for a long time into the ­future – y­ ears, or even decades. Would Deutsche have to return the profits if it was compelled to sell the contracts prematurely? (Enrich 2020: 147). And it seems that Broeksmit was not alone with his doubts. Responding to the widespread public outcry that followed from the 2008 crisis (with the Occupy movement a vocal example), governments began to put the screws on banks, Deutsche included, and they began to scrutinize banking practices. Broeksmit felt the financial supervisory authorities breathing down his neck, but Deutsche’s top brass appeared to have considered this as a nuisance, rather than as the reality check that Broeksmit craved (Meck 2012). In the following years, Broeksmit further cemented his reputation as a meticulous numbers guy who did not shun asking critical questions, perhaps expecting that this would turn the tide of inflated future expectations that continued to taint Deutsche’s upper echelons. His reputation backfired however. For instance, whereas Broeksmit was tasked with selling

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derivatives, during his tenure Deutsche’s stock of derivatives products actually expanded. The image of filling a bucket that is full of holes suggests itself. Moreover, an increasing part of Deutsche’s derivatives had become ‘high-­powered’: that is, they were financed with borrowed money, something that Broeksmit consistently warned against. However, they found a ready demand, motivating Deutsche to continue selling them nevertheless (Tett 2010). Also, Broeksmit appears to have been aware that the earlier currency deals with rogue states had gone into overdrive through an ingenious practice known as mirror trades. Such trades are illegal constructions involving the buying and selling of identical quantities of the same stock through a Deutsche desk in Moscow, whereby Russian R(o)ubles were transformed into Dollars in London, bypassing tax laws, currency rules and anti-­money-­laundering controls (Caesar 2016). Broeksmit’s consistent efforts to highlight these problems were not heeded by Deutsche’s top circles however (Levinson 2015). The year 2012 saw a major reshuffle at Deutsche, as Ackerman stepped down as the bank’s CEO. Jain was appointed co-­CEO, and among his first actions was to nominate Broeksmit for the prestigious position of Chief Risk Officer. Although this would have been in line with Broeksmit’s expertise and professional stature, the German federal financial authority, which has to consent to all major bank nominations, unexpectedly refused. Broeksmit suspected sabotage from within Deutsche, quite likely linked to the growing resentment towards his critical stance, which many considered to be in the way of the bank’s alleged business successes. Not long after, Broeksmit retired for a third time. This came at a bad moment however. Financial authorities were carrying out a serious investigation of Deutsche, and the German police were raiding the bank’s headquarters looking for evidence of malfeasance. Jain talked Broeksmit into remaining affiliated to Deutsche in a part-­time position, heading the Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas (DBTCA). This obscure branch of Deutsche served as the custodial arm for wealthy clients to park money for their long-­term investments (Gray 2016), although in practice it served as a conduit for money flows in the abovementioned Russian mirror trades. Broeksmit may or may not have become aware of it, but what is certain is that the financial authorities’ net was tightening on Deutsche. Their inquisitive gaze focused on the bank’s derivatives trade, and, in autumn 2014, Broeksmit was named as a person of special interest (Connolly 2019). A few weeks later, he hanged himself in his London house, leaving several goodbye notes stuffed in his pockets.

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Interpretation: When Stories Become the Facts When one scrutinizes Broeksmit’s life history, the chief perplexing issue that suggests itself is how he attempted to exit from investment banking several times, while at the same time continued to be drawn towards it. Remember that he retired from banking no less than three times (1996, 2000 and 2013), but he returned to banking three times also. The suicide may perhaps be seen as an ultimate attempt to exit. The specific pattern of entering–exiting that we can see in Broeksmit’s case points to a broader process: investment bankers’ future-­work, which shapes their careers, is structured by centrifugal (away from the centre) as well as centripetal (towards the centre) forces. I superimpose this conceptual model on my interpretation of Broeksmit’s career history as a clash between his assessment of an increasingly risky ­situation – ­which he grounded in an interpretation of ­numbers – ­and optimistic storytelling in circles above him that required a suspension of numbers as the basis for economic decision-­making: the Akerlof–Shiller moment. As I further show below, investment bankers’ specific pathway follows from the relative magnitude of these forces as well as from whether they cancel each other out (and how). Talking about forces may perhaps conjure up an image of investment bankers as powerless puppets, but Broeksmit’s life history in fact points to important junctures at which he executed agency, although probably with less effect than he had hoped for. The following pages consider the working of centripetal and centrifugal forces, respectively, followed by a short meditation on bankers’ suicide in connection with their future-­work.

Centripetal Forces: Remaining in Investment Banking Conventional interpretations of why investment bankers remain in the world of banking emphasize the powerful lure of the bonus (Wawoe 2010). The central idea is that the bonus system presents a strong financial incentive that inspires bankers to future action. It has been suggested that the bonus has a special function in making visible the output of an individual banker or a group of bankers. Remember that investment banking has as its object intangible realities that exist on computer screens and/or paper, and the bonus may be considered a device to make the intangible tangible (Callon and Muniesa 2015). More important for our story, however, is the fact that bonuses comprise what sociologists refer to as a positional good: it is less relevant to consider bonuses as a financial reward in and of themselves, than to consider how they are measured against the size of the figure that others receive. What appears to be a purely pecuniary system in

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reality appears to function as a status system. Furthermore, social status is important with regard to the distribution of bonuses. As one travels up the banking hierarchy, one has a greater say about who gets what. Rank-­and-­ file bankers are very much on the receiving end of this structure, whereas heads of departments, for instance, or branch directors represent a notch up the status ladder; and in corporate banking this culminates in ‘chief’ positions (CEO, CRO and so on). It is noteworthy that Broeksmit made it to the middle level and was rejected for a chief position shortly before his third retirement. The pyramidal structure of banking careers contributes to investment bankers’ mutual dependence. It is difficult, perhaps even impossible, to move up the pyramid without forming alliances with other bankers. The material suggests that this is what Edson Mitchell did: he surrounded himself with a small circle of trusted confidants that included Broeksmit and Jain at the strategically important juncture of departing Merrill Lynch for Deutsche. The alliances may or may not be temporary, but there are important rituals in the social world of investment bankers that work towards the temporary version. Enrich describes how retreats away from the office, often under the guise of strategy meetings, often have an element of hazing: the tasking of junior bankers with impossible errands that have the effect of disgracing them (Enrich 2020: 107). Mirroring similar rituals at college fraternities, the hazing experience (which may be actually gruesome, see Carney 2012; Dzhanova 2021) fosters solidarities among junior bankers as well as helping to ensure that hazed bankers want to get back into the good grace of their senior homologues, often with the effect that the relation is extended into the future, for better or for worse (Luyendijk 2017). Collective drinking is a related ritual. Citing Enrich again, shortly before his tragic accident, Edson Mitchell delivered a Christmas speech to 1500 Deutsche investment bankers, ‘who were all drunk and sang together’ (Enrich 2020: 88). Such collective alcohol drinking is also a common theme in movies depicting banking such as Wall Street (1987), Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) and Wolf of Wall Street (2013); and the internet is replete with stories of former bankers admitting to being functional alcoholics (cf. Clarke 2015; Rolleston 2017). The role of collective drinking in fostering solidarities, however, remains underappreciated in studies of investment banking. The strong interdependencies, cemented through rituals of hazing and collective drinking, contribute to a future that is defined in terms of belonging to a special group.8 This self-­definition comes with consequences. It provides a vehicle for making strong claims to personal solidarity among those in the group. Investment bankers’ alliances are routinely interpreted as relations between self-­interested individuals who

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collaborate on a tit-­for-­tat ­basis – ­the old boys’ network that resonates with the image of homo economicus (McDowell 1997). The material presented above, however, suggests that a social hierarchy operates on these relations that transcends an image of self-­interest. In a somewhat charged representation, Mitchell may be considered a patron whose business successes depended on being surrounded with clients. Consider, for instance, how Edson Mitchell reached out to Broeksmit twice to talk him out of ­retirement – ­an appeal that Broeksmit could neither think nor wish away it seems. Moreover, Broeksmit was not alone. Enrich points to how Mitchell flew to Tokyo to persuade a mid-­level trader to stay on (Enrich 2020: 36–37). Patronage functions through personal loyalty. A clear indication of this is the way in which Broeksmit dealt with Mitchell’s divorce. Mitchell was married to Dara, and she and Broeksmit’s wife, Alla, got along well, but, in 1997, Mitchell began to date Estelle and eventually married her. Consequently, the Broeksmits broke off relations with Dara and her family, and began to support Estelle. Personal loyalty apparently implies sacrificing one’s own moral standards.

Centrifugal Forces: Leaving Investment Banking Not all investment bankers remain within Financial America: Broeksmit’s attempts at retirement do not stand in isolation. Although there is little systematic evidence, the available stock of anecdotal evidence permits the tentative observation that there is a serious undercurrent of investment bankers who bailed out. A brief consideration of the exit structure suggests a three-­tiered pattern. First, there are those who left investment banking in the years after 2009 when the damaging economic effects of the financial crisis became manifest and a career in banking was no longer a success story that sold well at dinner parties. Second, the first two decades of the twenty-­ first century saw the rapid rise of fintechs: companies that specifically aim to compete with traditional financial services providers such as Deutsche (Arslanian and Fischer 2019). This development has been accelerated by the privatization of the money system through Bitcoin, Ethereum and other crypto-­currencies. Together, they have led to the forming of career trajectories beyond the traditional banking pyramid and have become an accepted alternative to it. Third are those who left prior to the 2009 banking crisis; these appear to be in a minority. Enrich’s book, for instance, though peopled with dozens of individual bankers, mentioned fewer than three other cases who left banking around the time that Broeksmit was planning his departure. In that sense, he can be considered a pioneer: exiting from what was still considered to be a prestigious, high-­earning occupation and which, above all, entailed a coveted status.

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Being passed for promotion appears to have contributed to this early wave of exits. In a world where status is expressed by moving up the steep pyramid, not being able to secure a position at the next, higher hierarchical level may be easily explained as personal failure. The irony, of course, is that, in a pyramidal structure, the number of positions shrinks towards the summit; logically this implies that those in the lower echelons outnumber those at the top. Although this is often presented as a normal aspect of banking that follows naturally from cut-­throat competition among opportunistic individuals, there are reasons to be wary of this image. Consider, for instance, the case of the Swedish bank Svenska ­Handelsbanken – ­a major global player that escaped from the financial crisis without a scratch. It was founded in the late nineteenth century and explicitly organized as a decentralized institution: that is, the bank has its headquarters in Stockholm, but relations with the various branch offices have the character of inter-­collegial consultation, rather than of rigid oversight, as is the case with Deutsche (and other banks). This means that Svenska branch directors are granted considerable freedom to act, and in practice they function as a self-­governing unit. The bank further kept the derivatives business to a minimum, as it remained committed to its network of local ­customers – ­private savers and Swedish c­ ompanies – a­ nd it refrained from installing a bonus system, instead depositing annual profits in a fund that in practice functions as a pension scheme for Svenska employees (Kroner 2009). More particular to Broeksmit’s experience is the loss of symbolic capital that he experienced. Initially, he was seen as a valuable numbers guy: he pioneered statistical methods to tackle the slippery problem of pricing derivatives. This quality in the early stages of his professional life advanced his career, leading to more secure positions and better pay. Yet, in the course of ­time – ­the material suggests around 2003 when Ackerman took Deutsche to the ­NYSE – ­this reputation began to work against Broeksmit. His reliance on numbers, for instance to compute the risk of a derivatives contract losing its value before maturity, was increasingly considered as a hindrance. The upper echelons observed that the derivatives were selling ­themselves – n ­ o questions were asked by their customers, and why should they? They felt that the caveat emptor principle excused them from moral introspection. In its wake, numbers were no longer seen as a valuable diagnostic tool for steering clear of undesirable future outcomes; they acquired a new meaning as malleable ingredients in Deutsche’s success story. As Enrich perceptively writes, ‘Executives didn’t want to know why the models were wrong; they just wanted results that would conform the wisdom of the present course’ (Enrich 2020: 160). Once Deutsche had taken this turn, Broeksmit’s computational skills became increasingly relegated to cleaning

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up the detritus others had left behind, with the DBTCA episode as a tragic case in point.

Meditation on Bankers’ Suicide Broeksmit’s career consists of vacillating between forces pushing him out of banking and those drawing him in again, with the latter exceeding the former in force. As a tentative interpretation, I posit that his suicide must be considered in the light of this pattern: a final exit. It appears that what he encountered at DBTCA exceeded his darkest premonitions. Moreover, he had become isolated: his former patron, Mitchell, had passed away a long time previously, and relations with Jain, who also figured in Mitchell’s social entourage for a long time, did not shield Broeksmit from his loss of symbolic capital. Enrich posits that the unfolding LIBOR affair was the last push. LIBOR, or London Interbank Offered Rate, refers to an interest-­rate average calculated from estimates submitted by large banks in London. This rate presents an important ingredient in calculating the price of derivatives products. Deutsche’s top brass suspected that a banker, Christian Bittar, had been manipulating LIBOR to jack up the value of his derivatives portfolio. In 2009, Broeksmit had been called in to review Bittar’s financial practices, and he had okayed them (Enrich 2020: 289). It appears that Broeksmit had reason to believe that his name would emerge from investigations by financial authorities towards late 2013. History proves Broeksmit’s worries to be correct. Bittar was sentenced to a five-­year jail term in 2018 (‘Deutsche Bank Trader Jailed for Five Years for Rigging Lending Rates’, The Guardian, 19  July 2018), though he was released in 2020 on the grounds of good behaviour (Sebag and Milligan 2020). Having sketched the background against which Broeksmit’s suicide happened, let me end this part of the chapter with a short reflection on bankers’ suicide. Broeksmit’s suicide was one among around 260 recorded suicides in the 2009–2015 period, involving senior investment bankers. Although this may sound like a surprisingly low figure, it must not be overlooked that suicide rates in the banking sector as a whole are much lower than national averages. In Wales and England, for instance, between 2007 and 2014, the years when the fallout from the financial crisis became manifest, suicide rates in the financial sector were between a fifth and slightly over a third of national figures (see Table 4.1). This seems to be an indication of good mental health. That said, there are several reasons to be cautionary. First, the suicides are clustered at the top of the banking pyramid, the level of senior bankers and above, where only circa 15 to 20 per cent of the employees are working. Second, suicide is imbued with

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Table 4.1.  Bankers’ suicides key statistics (Wales and England). © Joost Beuving. Year

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

Expected suicides

107

115

108

104

110

113

116

111

Reported suicides

 30

 40

 35

 41

 34

 31

 32

 20

Percentage difference

 28.0

 34.7

 32.4

 39.4

 30.9

 27.4

 27.6

 18.0

Sources: Nasir et al. 2021; O.N.S. 2015; Author’s calculations

social stigma, contributing to an underreporting in national figures. That is true for populations as a whole, but there are indications that the social stigma of suicide increases as one rises in society. Underreporting of bankers’ suicides may therefore be more prevalent than it is among other occupational groups. Third, suicide is positively associated with income. A recent study in the United States, for instance, finds that, for lower incomes levels (below US$34,000 gross), suicide rates are 50 per cent higher than they are for higher incomes, and it is concentrated especially when poorer individuals live among more affluent ones: a keeping-­up-­with-­the-­Joneses effect (Daly et al. 2010). None of this, of course, applies to investment bankers: those who commit suicide often (though not always) feature in the upper income brackets that normally protects against suicide.

Conclusion The suicide of Bill Broeksmit is deeply tragic for those around him, but, as I have tried to show in this chapter, it also tells a broader story in which numbers play a special role. From his life history, Broeksmit emerges as a numbers man: a person who believed in the power of computation and figures to bring the future under control. Nonetheless, the stories he tried to tell with numbers lost their relevance, and he found himself unable to reverse the forming of a new story that envisaged the future as a Cockaigne of unlimited growth. Importantly, this new and optimistic story was no longer controlled by the ­numbers – ­a fact that Broeksmit deplored but few others at Deutsche did, or wanted to. To sum up this fact: the derivatives-­ based products that Deutsche peddled in mountains had become so complex that, apart from a few specialist insiders that included Broeksmit, few could appraise their consequences. As a direct effect, the derivatives structure could work only as long as the global economy was trending upwards; the derivatives structure was vulnerable to downturns. Once this slack happened, many investors lost their money. This deplorable outcome was aggravated by the fact that Deutsche, like many other major banks,

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had been successful in fending off serious o ­ versight – ­internally, in the form of people like Broeksmit and, externally, in the form of government agencies. It is difficult to pinpoint a precise moment when this shift of sentiment happened; rather, it seems to have been a sliding scale. The Orange County scandal at the beginning of Broeksmit’s career shows how, in the relatively straightforward case of interest derivatives, outsider investors were already struggling to understand what went on with them. ­This – ­and comparable scandals (Germany’s notorious Wirecard appears to be another one, see Bergermann and Hasebourg 2020) – sensitized an increasingly expanding group of investment bankers to the possibility that money could be made by playing on the innocence of outsiders. These sentiments were fuelled by a shift from banking based on prudence that involved longer-­term commitment to one’s customers, to banking that looked for ever greater profits. It estranged Broeksmit from his colleagues and supervisors, and at Deutsche the sands began to shift for him. Things took a turn for the worse when the circle of investment bankers that understood properly what went on with the derivatives in creating a dangerous future also shrank in the face of their growing complexity; the insiders were becoming outsiders themselves, though few seemed to realize it. The dramatic end of Broeksmit’s career is thus more complicated than just one man facing the unfettered greed of those around him (Partnoy 2003). It was part of a broader, institutional structure that involved banks and other financial institutions, as well as a particular policy environment. Banks had clear reasons to throw financial prudence out of the window and to embrace a vision of the future that fixated on success. They saw themselves increasingly locked into a pernicious struggle for dominance in an increasingly competitive environment. Liberal economic policies fostered the creation of larger banks. These were needed to reap the benefits of economies of scale, resulting in a race to the top. Larger banks compromised government oversight: banks like Deutsche transformed into bureaucratic colossuses that, in their administrative complexity, strikingly resembled government structures. The increase in scale coincided with heightened investor expectations of uninterrupted future profits, and bankers were gripped by the fear that lowering this expectation would dampen investor enthusiasm and subsequently reduce stock values. In this haywire world, Broeksmit became an isolated individual with little clout; a man whose much-­needed insights, which could have tamed the beast that was eventually unleashed, could easily be ignored. The network of financial clientelism that surrounded Broeksmit’s patron Mitchell had long disappeared, and there was no one to protect him from the excesses of the toxic pressure cooker that Deutsche had become. The skill that

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once paved Broeksmit’s way into the top of investment b ­ anking – b ­ eing good with ­numbers – ­was no longer in demand; in fact, his reputation as Dr No was seen as a liability to the advancement of Deutsche’s global ambitions from which many of his colleagues and peers sought to benefit. At the same time, Broeksmit knew well what was happening inside the belly of Deutsche (the DBTCA and LIBOR affairs are cases in point), and he had good reason to believe that, soon, he would be held accountable. What ultimately killed Broeksmit, however, was not the resulting stress, or anxiety, or remorse. This chapter suggests instead that his suicide must be understood as a dramatic, ultimate attempt to get out of a world that is very difficult to get away from. Broeksmit became lost in a closed world where factual and fictional accounts of the future are locked into a toxic game of musical chairs, with reason as an early victim.

Notes 1. In 2005 for instance, Indian economist Raghurama Rajan gave a prescient speech at the annual Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium where financial pundits, several central bankers included, met. Rajan warned against financial-­ sector-­ induced turmoil (Rajan 2005: 1), yet his grave message gave him the moniker of an antimarket financial Luddite whose inconvenient truth should be ignored (Lahar 2009). 2. The Epilogue offers a fuller methodological justification. It focuses on the question of how entrepreneurial behaviour may be reconstructed from secondary sources, which is a point for wider consideration when reflecting on the social study of entrepreneurship. Investigative journalism gets close and studies investment bankers in a way that resembles the claims of anthropology, raising evocative questions about anthropology’s epistemological surplus value. As this is not a chapter in a methodology textbook, I decided to relegate this important matter to the Epilogue, hoping that it will stimulate intellectual debate that can hopefully contribute to a better understanding of entrepreneurial behaviour. 3. Investment banking in its contemporary sense emerged during the early modern era, and it intertwines with the rise of capitalism and the building of nation states in Europe. Italian city states during the Renaissance sought, through trade, to expand their spheres of influence beyond the confines of the medieval city walls and the lands that directly surrounded it. Rather than carrying large volumes of cash, which was heavy to carry and prone to theft, Florentine bankers pioneered the letter of credit: a piece of paper promising to pay its holder a certain amount of gold at a prescribed date; and at step further in time, in the age of imperial conquest, European adventurers brought new worlds into the European sphere of influence, thus effectively creating a global ­web – ­the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, Southeast Asia (McNeill and McNeill 2003). Conquest depended on enormous volumes of capital with unknown future returns, financed with loans from wealthy family, usually securitized against the state’s future income in the form of taxes.

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4. Financial derivatives were moulded on commodity derivatives. Among the better known of these are futures, and they originate in agriculture. A future contract for, say, potatoes, implies that the holder of the contract is to pay a contractually prescribed price for a crop of potatoes on harvest day, which may be lower than the actual market price of the potatoes, resulting in a profit, or in a loss when potato prices plummet (for instance when harvests are particularly good). Futures trading exchanges date back to the sixteenth century, and they are typical for major commodities such as corn, wheat, soybean, but also cotton and even gold. 5. I obtained most of the basic facts about Bill Broeksmit’s life from David Enrich’s (2020) acclaimed Dark Towers, documenting the rise and fall of Deutsche Bank. I have added a new interpretation of these facts with a view to clarifying the future-­ work of investment bankers. Other sources consulted for context information are referenced in the main text. Gillian Tett’s Fool’s Gold (2010) deserves special mention for illuminating the history and working of financial derivatives. 6. Financial anthropologist Caitlin Zaloom describes the Chicago financial world as a tight-­knit community, making it plausible that the two men knew of each other. Broeksmit by that time had a reputation of being a ‘nerdy’ banker; this was at a time when banking required people skills more than mathematical aptitude (Zaloom 2006). 7. The creation of increasingly exotically named derivatives products was connected to the patent system. A financial innovation is patentable as long as it can be demonstrated to have practical value. A key problem is how to describe that with enough specificity to avoid it being classified as an abstract idea, at the same time avoiding it being so narrow that competitors can avoid patent law by varying from the implementation details and not the concept (Walmsley 2001). The exotic naming thus contributes to shrouding what derivatives actually do. 8. This sense of privilege helps to foster a strong in-­group identity, which can contribute to the myopia discussed in this chapter. For instance, when the bankers were facing widespread calls for reform when the economic fallout from the 2008 financial crisis became apparent, a common response was one of profound disbelief that outsiders to the banking world could shape its future. The Dutch bank ABN-­ AMRO presents a well-­documented case. The bank occupied a central place in the Dutch banking system and, to avoid its imminent collapse, as an emergency step it was nationalized in 2008 (Smit 2009). In 2015, ABN went back to being a stock-­exchange-­listed company, but the bank quickly became mired in in-­fighting, compelling the Dutch state to again intervene. Even after the nationalization was a fact, ABN bankers could not believe that the state would intervene again and that the bank could be run well by civil servants (Bökkering and Couwenbergh 2020).

5

Relevance of the Policy Context ° The Aquaculture Entrepreneurs in Greece

Planning concerns man’s efforts to make the future in his own image. If he loses control of his own destiny, he fears being cast into the abyss. Alone and afraid, man is at the mercy of strange and unpredictable forces, so he takes whatever comfort he can by challenging the fates. He shouts his plans into the storm of life. Even if all he hears is the echo of his own voice, he is no longer alone. To abandon his faith in planning would unleash the terror locked inside him. —Aaron Wildavsky, ‘If Planning Is Everything, Maybe It’s Nothing’

Introduction In this chapter, we broaden the story of entrepreneurial behaviour to include the macroeconomic policy environment in which it features.1 In macroeconomic policy-­making, the entrepreneurial supply response appears to be an important notion: the optimistic idea that, when some special mix of economic policy measures is put into place, entrepreneurs respond by investing their funds in productive avenues that foster capital accumulation, thus triggering economic development. Or ‘Liberalization or free entry into m ­ arkets – e­ specially those for agricultural p ­ roduce  – ­brings an end to the extraction of rents by a parasitic state through restrictions and regulations. As a result, producers will get a larger share of world market prices and thus stimulated to produce more’ (Dijkstra and van Donge 2001: 851). In other words, if the economic environment in which entrepreneurs function is adjusted or tweaked, entrepreneurial behaviour can be engineered by targeting sectors or enterprises, resulting in a ‘big push’ (Murphy et al. 2016). Targeting sectors takes the shape of a new set of bureaucratic rules or directives (often geared towards a more liberal business climate that, for instance, seeks to remove bureaucratic obstacles), enforced through the legal system, which all entrepreneurs are expected to follow obediently. Targeting enterprises revolves around direct money

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transfers such as grants or subsidies, which function as nudges towards desired economic behaviour, while still attributing to entrepreneurs a degree of economic choice. Importantly, both the policy-­formation and the entrepreneurial-­response sides of engineering efforts share the idea of the goal-­rational actor discussed in the introductory chapter: a person who is expected to act in his/her own interest, automatically responding to prevailing factor prices, not unlike the way in which chemicals behave when a catalyst is added to a reaction vessel. This chapter agrees with critics of the big push interpretation in macroeconomic policy, pointing to considerable problems in orchestrating whole economic sectors (Ezeala-­Harrison 1996), informational complexities in planning markets (Adelman 1999) and democratic issues in transforming an economy’s software such as customs and institutions; in short, that it disregards empirical realities that distort the effects of reform policies (Gore 2000). In more detail, these critics emphasize that (a) economies are complex arrangements, and intervening in them through policy produces numerous unintended consequences which work against entrepreneurship (Easterly 2007); (b) entrepreneurial responses are embedded in non-­market institutions such as legal practices and welfare arrangements, which vary sharply between countries (Rodrik 2008); and (c) whether or not State presence in the form of subsidies and protection can boost entrepreneurship is an open question (Krugman 2009). At the same time however, the study is critical of the critics’ analysis. Although they reason beyond the  efficient market theorem of big push reasoning, they still subscribe to the idea of a knowable future: a future in which the planning of entrepreneurial behaviour makes sense, even though in practice it is fraught with practical and sometimes also moral problems. From the viewpoint of the ontogenetic interpretation of time that inspires this study, the idea of triggering entrepreneurial behaviour through policy-­making is an anachronism. Policy-­making broadly defined revolves around making some planned intervention with the objective of achieving a desired future state; in that sense, all policies are Utopian. Planned policy interventions are usually not conceived of as a shot in the dark; rather, they follow from thinking through expected outcomes (Long 2001). Once the actual outcome deviates from the desired outcome, a round of policy adjustments usually follows (Mintzberg [1994] 2013). All of this assumes that it is somehow possible to make epistemic claims about the future, but subscribing to an ontogenetic interpretation of time, as explained in the Introduction and Chapter 1, implies that the future can only be truly known once it presents itself as the present. We can relate to the future in many different ­ways – ­as conjecture, or dream, or ­fantasy – ­but that is not knowledge. In the face of that epistemic impossibility, it is easy to

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declassify all policy planning as fiction, perhaps having a place in serving the ‘terror locked in him’ as Wildavsky argues in the quotation above, but that is not the position that I adopt in this study. Instead, I subscribe to a vision on policy-­making (and planning) that focuses on its role in creating the future by stabilizing particular interpretations of it. Macroeconomic policies thus occupy a distinctive place in our discussion about future-­ work. As I shall show, the future-­work that goes into macroeconomic policy-­making revolves around the selection of a particular vision of the future and advancing that vision through money flows, policy documents and media coverage of it, and inspiring public talk about it. The macropolitical context obviously plays an important role in the three cases discussed thus far in this study. The second-­hand car trade in West Africa, the export of fresh fish from Lake Victoria, and the creation and sale of derivatives are all informed by pro-­business policies. To understand the consequences of macroeconomic and sectoral policy-­ making, I turn to yet another case: the aquaculture sector in Greece. The empirical details of the case are elaborated later on, but a short preview may be in order. Greece has depended on marine fishing for as long as recorded history documents (Dalby 1996), but its shift to fish farming is as recent as the 1980s when the country shook off a bloody history of civil war and dictatorship and normalized relations with the European Economic Community (EEC), the precursor of the European Union (EU), which it joined in 1981. Its EEC entry coincided with a diversification of the rural economy (until then dependant mainly on olives/olive oil and cheese exports plus tourism), most importantly through the establishment of fish farms. These aquaculture companies specialize in two commercial ­species – ­seabass and s­ eabream – ­that have found their way into overseas markets, generating substantial revenues that contribute significantly to the national economy. Initially, the expansion of aquaculture production and overseas exports happened in the context of business-­ friendly macroeconomic policies that purported to trigger economic revival through state intervention. These policies specifically targeted local Greek entrepreneurs through the vehicle of sectoral policies. It is relevant that Greek policy-­makers classified aquaculture as a new and promising economic sector: Greece had no prior track record in it. What followed at first appeared to be a classical supply response: thousands of enterprising Greeks set up (or tried to set up) aquaculture firms, boosting exports in a manner that resembled an economic boom; few survive today (Vlachvei 2002). In a later phase, the numerous firms that resulted from the initial boom clustered into a more ordered pattern of a handful of very large companies combined with a few smaller ones. The few remaining large companies appeared to fuel

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their expansion with debt however, to the extent that in the course of the twenty-­first century they faced imminent bankruptcy, whereas the smaller firms appear to be in a financially healthier state. This phase coincided with economic policies promoted by the neoliberal reform agenda known as austerity. Its central premise was to create a favourable business climate by limiting state involvement in the national economy (Blyth 2013). A major shift in economic policy orientation from interventionism to austerity thus resulted in divergent outcomes. The Greek case therefore raises important questions about the relation between economic policy and the outcome of business activity: a mechanistic explanation whereby entrepreneurship is primarily seen as a response to a macroeconomic environment may be flawed. The chapter continues with a short exposition of the political-­economic forces that led to the creation and subsequent rise of the aquaculture sector in Greece, including a reflection on the macroeconomic and sectoral policies that made this possible. Greece had relied on an inwardly oriented (mainly rural) economy for a long time, and it is therefore of particular interest to find out how it opened up to the world. Subsequently, the chapter presents extended company histories of two selected aquaculture firms, Galaxidi and Selonda, which are analysed with the purpose of uncovering how the latter got caught up in pernicious group processes, whereas the former succeeded in remaining free of this. The chapter ends with a reflection on the consequences of macroeconomic policies, suggesting how the outcome of macroeconomic policy-­making is not so much the result of the policy itself as of how the policy interplays with particular entrepreneurial realities, bringing into focus extra-­economic forces in entrepreneurial behaviour, those of future-­work in particular. This conclusion does not in any way obviate the need to make economic policy: it is difficult to see how, without it, the aquaculture sector in Greece would have taken off in the first place. It sensitizes us to the message that policy-­making has its place in the reaction vessel of entrepreneurial practices, though perhaps not as centrally as policy-­makers like to see it. Policies function in a broader context of societal realities and they compete with other forces, particularly those that find expression in how entrepreneur anticipate the future.

How Greece Opened Up to the World Since the creation of the modern (second) Greek republic in 1924, Greece’s economy has been characterized by a strong reliance on rural production. Its cities, with an accompanying services economy, did not begin to grow

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until the 1960s: urbanization is a recent process that is still remembered by older Greeks. Throughout, the focus remained on subsistence farming and fishing, with a slowly increasing reliance since the end of the Second World War on the commercial export production of olives/olive oil and cheese and on international tourism since the 1960s, which flourishes especially on Greece’s numerous islands. There were isolated pockets of industrial activity, such as car manufacturing (Tzaferis 2010), the processing of tobacco for cigarettes (Myrtsioti 2003) and, of course, shipbuilding (Vatopoulos 2002). (A case in point: shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis who is best known for his 1968 celebrity marriage with Jackie Kennedy.) It appears that the Marshall Plan funds, dispensed by the US Senate to resuscitate the devastated Greek economy (the country suffered badly from the war), were well ­spent – ­amongst other things on the upkeep of road infrastructure and the modernization of ­industry – ­as the period between 1950 and 1973 became known as the Greek miracle (Vetsopoulos 2002). However, even during this episode in Greece’s recent history, agriculture remained the mainstay of the national economy. Between 1968 and 1974, Greece was in the grips of a bloody dictatorship, a military Junta. The Junta came to a chaotic end, and the country took several years to get back on its feet, but one of the first steps of the democratically elected Caramanlis government was to request access to the EEC. This was urgent, as the EEC was considering a second enlargement that would involve several Mediterranean countries, and Greece hoped to tag along (Karamoutzi 2014). After joining, the country immediately secured access to a large and thriving consumer ­market – ­important for the promotion of agrarian ­exports – ­and to special funds devoted to developing its rural sector, including fisheries. The ratification of the Integrated Mediterranean Programmes represented a special boost: it comprised close to the equivalent of €7 billion, of which the Greek government obtained roughly a third (Papageorgiou and Verney 1992). It is difficult to say how much of this funding ended up as financial support for aquaculture companies, but it is significant that the early 1980s saw a rapid accretion of aquaculture companies: the Orbis database of business information on companies worldwide has 264 aquaculture firms on record (Greek government data mention the even higher figure of 370 companies), three-­quarters of which were created in the 1980s (few exist today).2 This development matched a modest revival of the wider Greek economy: exports, including non-­agrarian ones, rose, and the country saw a steady growth in national income beginning in the mid-­1980s and accelerating towards the mid-­1990s. This was offset, however, by high inflation rates and an expanding government debt, resulting in a mixed picture overall (Bosworth and Kollintzas 2001).

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In 1999, Greece switched to the Euro (then still known as the Ecu) as its currency, backing its economy with a much stronger currency than the Drachma which it had used since the mid-­nineteenth century. The local business community eyed the currency switch with considerable concern, as it was anticipated that the Euro would make its exports more expensive. For aquaculture entrepreneurs, these worries proved in part unfounded, as overall exports into the EU (many EU countries had adopted the Euro by then) expanded considerably, but in part they also created a new fish-­ farming opportunity for neighbouring non-­EU Mediterranean countries with comparable ecological conditions, Turkey in particular. The consequences of this are further considered below. In a second development, the central states of the EU, Germany and France in particular, began to advance a neoliberal policy agenda emphasizing a level playing field for all EU member states. In practice, this agenda implied a tightening of fiscal policy measures, aimed at bringing down Greece’s government debt to the 60 per cent prescribed by the 1992 Maastricht Treaty and closing the budget deficit gap to a stipulated 3 per cent (it was much higher). Throughout the 1990s, to the contentment of the EU’s financial pundits, Greece appeared to be improving its government budget status and was seen as being on the pathway to budgetary normalization. The 2008 financial crisis brought immediate budgetary problems for the Greek government as the ensuing global credit crunch saw prices for international capital borrowing skyrocket. Moreover, general elections in 2009 saw a change in political wind in favour of the social-­democratic PASOK ­party – P ­ ASOK and the conservative New Democracy had been locked in a game of political musical chairs since the 1970s. Among his first public steps, newly elected Prime Minister Papandreou surprisingly announced that the national debt, still considered high by EU standards, in fact was at least twice as high as the earlier government had announced. This created a shock in the international financial world, to the effect that the country was cut off from international money. After several tense months of mounting social unrest, Papandreou negotiated a loan package that would keep the Greek government afloat. A second rescue package quickly followed, yet it seemed impossible to reverse the tide. In 2015, the county defaulted on its payment of government debt, a historic event, and national bankruptcy seemed imminent. Public chaos followed, and ordinary Greeks queued at ATMs trying to withdraw their savings, fearing capital controls. A third rescue package was negotiated in 2018 with the Troika composed of the IMF, the World Bank and the European Central Bank. But rescue came at the cost of stringent economic reforms, a consequence of economic policy-­ making steeped in austerity. The Greek parliament could do little else but accept these serious conditions, albeit with teeth clenched.

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The economic consequences of this were immediate, and also impacted on the aquaculture sector. Greek banks were ordered to restructure their portfolio of debts, meaning that deep cuts were made in credit lines on which many firms depended for their day-­to-­day functioning. Moreover, Greek companies saddled with very large debts were mandated to hand over a majority of their shares to the bank in return for a suspension of payment obligations. In other words, bank-­ indebted companies were nationalized, among them some very large aquaculture companies (more on this below). The nationalization wave, which happened in 2016, sent shock waves through the community of Greek aquaculture entrepreneurs: many feared that this would effectively destroy their sector. Much to the surprise of outside observers however, aquaculture production, measured in both mass units and monetary value, grew at a steady pace in an overall imploding economic environment. Some argued that this testified to the ingenuity of Greek entrepreneurship, whereas others argued that the sector was reaping the fruits of a combination of direct and indirect pro-­business macroeconomic policy, with its origins in the financial injections of the 1980s and the removal of obstacles to trade during the 1990s. As we shall see, this chapter subscribes to yet another interpretation, which focuses on the differences in entrepreneurial responses to a similar macroeconomic policy environment that yielded quite different outcomes. To solve this riddle, the following section presents two extended company histories. It is not the explicit objective of the histories to tell all there is to tell about them. Rather, they are constructed for the purpose of this study (for more on the methodology adopted for this chapter, see the Epilogue) with a view to getting a better grip on how the companies respectively responded to a dramatically changing policy environment in Greece and on the responses that reveal the inner workings of aquaculture entrepreneurs’ future-­work.

Company Histories: Galaxidi and Selonda Galaxidi Marine Farming Close to the historic town of Delphi (home of the oracle), along the northern coast of the Corinthian Gulf in central Greece, roughly a two-­and-­ahalf-­hour drive from the capital Athens, we find Galaxidi Marine Farms (Figure 5.1). Access is via a small tarmac supply road that branches off the well-­maintained provincial road snaking its way along the gulf towards Patras, Greece’s third-­largest city, a good hour’s drive away. The assembly of small buildings that constitutes the firm, mostly unassuming constructions of cinder-­blocks topped by corrugated iron sheets, is spread over an

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area of about a hectare. The area curves along a small bay that protects it from the strong winds and waves that occur in this part of the Corinthian Gulf. Winds and waves can damage aquaculture equipment, and protected bays are popular locations for establishing farmed fishing operations. Out in the sea, five large plastic rings, contraptions of about 25 metres in diameter, bob in the seawater. The rings demarcate the upper part of circular cages that extend over 80 metres below the surface of the sea, holding millions of fish. The water in the cage is normally placid, following the pattern of waves from the sea around it with the fish barely discernible. This changes dramatically when workers arrive from the shore with small

Figure 5.1.  Greece and important points in the company histories. © Joost Beuving.

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motorized vessels at the edge of the cage and cast handfuls of fish feed into them. The surface then breaks open into a frenzy of fish heads and tails and fins flipping about, struggling for a mouthful of food. Once the fish have devoured the food, tranquillity returns to the cages, the sea quietly flushing its waves over the plastic rings. Galaxidi has an interesting history to consider for the purpose of this study. The firm has been owned since the mid-­1990s by a woman whom many consider to be the matriarch of Greek aquaculture, Nancy Panteleimonitou (see Figure 5.2 for contact details). Panteleimonitou is now in her seventies and, although she originates from Athens, she is well liked in the area: she contributes generously to the annual flour-­throwing festival in the nearby village, eponymously called Galaxidi, organized on ‘clean Monday’ in the Greek orthodox religious calendar (see also Dawson and McLeod 2021). Moreover, a large percentage of the ­workers – ­Galaxidi employs around 150 administrative and technical ­staff – ­hail from the Delphi municipality to which Galaxidi belongs politico-­administratively and were mostly retained throughout the financial crisis as well as during the Covid pandemic. Panteleimonitou had no specialized background when she entered the world of fish farming in the 1980s, but she comes from an enterprising family: her father owned Greece’s first Ford dealership after the Second World War. As a young woman, she received advanced training in economics and business m ­ anagement – ­unusual at the time for a young ­woman – a­ nd via her father’s business connections she landed a job at a newly founded fish-­farming company, Selonda (we return to Selonda later). Because fish farming was a new economic activity that was seen in terms of advancement and progress, for an educated young woman with the right connections, as Panteleimonitou was, starting a career at a fish-­farming company made a lot of sense. Although Galaxidi is Greek today, it has distinctive Norwegian roots. Long before Greece entered the EEC, its possibilities for marine fish farming had been contemplated by the international aquaculture community (Bardach et al. 1974). The relatively high temperature of the Mediterranean Sea coupled with a long coastline divided up into fjords, interspersed by bays that provide shelter against wind and waves, make it ideal for fish farming from a biological viewpoint. Norway came into play as, during the 1970s, it went through a stage of pioneering commercial marine aquaculture, focused on the offshore cultivation of salmon. As seen in Chapter 1, Norway saw its herring fishing decline around this time and it sought an alternative commercial marine resource. It had experience with salmon fishing but wanted to avoid reliance on wild salmon. Fish farming, although for a long time considered a thing of the ­future – ­interesting but not practical (Rice 1989) – gradually came to be seen as an essential

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Figure 5.2.  Business contacts, Galaxidi. © Joost Beuving.

candidate to avoid the uncertainties of open-­sea fishing (Greenberg 2011). The time seemed ripe as well: marine aquaculture requires high-­tech materials (durable metals and plastics that can take a beating from the elements) as well as advanced chemical (pH scale, salinity gradient) and biological knowledge (reproductive cycle of fish).3 Moreover, the Norwegian government quickly realized the importance of commercial aquaculture and put its considerable weight behind the budding sector, showering it with seed money and creating a relaxed legal environment. The career of Norwegian fish entrepreneur Bjørn Myrseth (1944–) presents an important case for our story. Myrseth trained in fishery biology at the University of Bergen during the 1970s and initially opted for an academic ­career – ­he rose to the rank of associate professor. Later that decade however, he left university for a career in commercial fish farming by securing a job at the Norwegian company Stolt Sea Farm A.S., founded in 1972 by a Norwegian ship-­owning family (Stolt-­Nielsen). Myrseth at the time was hired as a technical specialist, and he was tasked with overseeing the expansion of Stolt Sea Farm’s operations to other countries. Myrseth, through his international network of marine fishery experts that he had built up during his university years, contacted Greek businessman John Stephanis. Stephanis comes from a cosmopolitan family with branches stretching into the United ­States – ­where he received university ­training – ­and became part of an internationally oriented elite that connected him to Myrseth’s circles. At the time, Stephanis was running an advertising agency in Athens with modest success but, riding the early waves of the aquaculture boom, began to form plans to start a fish-­farming c­ ompany – e­ ventually this became ­Selonda – ­but he did not know how to do so. The men worked out an arrangement whereby Myrseth could make use of Stephanis’ local contacts and knowledge of Greece’s byzantine administrative procedures; in return, Myrseth would bring capital and knowledge of aquaculture

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technologies. There was money to go round as well. Myrseth remembers: ‘The Greek government gave grants, they got it from the EU. You had to submit a proposal and got half, or a third. But some people got clever: they inflated the costs so they were more or less covering their own equity’. Around this time, Myrseth came into contact with Panteleimonitou, who had risen to a senior management rank at Selonda, and in practice handled many of Stephanis’ daily concerns, including those involving Myrseth: his command of Greek was rudimentary, making it difficult for him in practice to converse with technical staff. At this point in the story, things get somewhat murky, but it appears that, motivated by Selonda’s fortunes, Panteleimonitou began to have plans to start her own fish-­farming company, supported by her father’s funds. Meanwhile, Myrseth grew tired of the collaboration with Stephanis, who, Myrseth felt, was not treating him on an equal footing. It is significant that whereas Myrseth eventually became an important figure in global aquaculture circles (he has been showered with various international awards) and is interviewed frequently, he rarely mentions his early days at Selonda. Panteleimonitou subsequently helped Myrseth to establish an aquaculture company elsewhere. It is also noteworthy that whereas Selonda had selected a site on the Saronic Gulf, right opposite Piraeus, Greece’s main seaport in close proximity to Athens, initially believing that they would sell the farmed fish on the local Greek market, Panteleimonitou immediately envisaged the export of farmed fish to Italy. Rather than looking for a new site in the Athens area, they began considering western Greece, especially those areas with good road connections to Patras, Greece’s second seaport with close connections to Italy, which is a major buyer of marine fish in the Mediterranean. Further, Italy in those days had early successes controlling the notoriously difficult reproductive cycle of seabass and bream in specialized hatcheries (Greenberg 2011), which they sought to monetize by selling fish fry: the earliest stage in a fish’s lifecycle. Settling near Patras thus brought them closer not only to major export markets, but also to the source of a major input in aquaculture production. Things went alright for a while, but, halfway through the 1990s, the local ­church – ­whose land the newly formed Galaxidi company had leased for its business ­operations – ­began to eye the company’s commercial successes with increasing interest and subsequently began to demand higher payment for the lease. It appears that Myrseth became bogged down in the negotiations with the local church, which spiralled out of control. At the same time, Stolt Sea Farm, to which Myrseth remained attached, had expressed a wish to look for new farmed fish opportunities beyond Greece, which it eventually found in Spain. Whether or not Panteleimonitou was implicated in the church fracas remains shrouded, but what happened

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next is that Myrseth sold Galaxidi to Panteleimonitou (this happened in 1995) and thus abandoned his Greek adventure. His departure preceded by a few months the creation of a hatchery by Galaxidi, thus bringing under its control an expensive input that hitherto had to be procured from outside sources. Building the new hatchery appears to have revolved around the expert knowledge that Myrseth had brought into the business arrangement. Galaxidi’s building of a hatchery was part of a broader wave of technological advancement in Greek aquaculture in which the technical knowhow of international technical experts seems to have been instrumental (Greece initially lacked advanced training in aquaculture technology). During the remainder of the 1990s, Galaxidi’s fortunes generally followed an upbeat pathway marked by expansion and growth: it increased the number of cages (the contraptions in which the baby fish live once they have outgrown the hatcheries), it extended hatchery capacity and it recruited a larger technical staff from the area (although senior management remained mostly a matter of kinship: Panteleimonitou brought in a sister, for instance, to help oversee the expanding company, and a first cousin, Alexandra Kontellis, is a major shareholder who sits on the board of directors). The upbeat pathway matched growing output: Galaxidi’s balance sheet for the year 2000 registers a revenue of just under €6 million with a profit margin of 15 per cent, which is good, certainly when compared with other Greek companies at the time. The year 2000 was also important in that it was when the company began to prepare for listing on the Athens Stock Exchange (ASE). This went along with a broader tendency across the Greek aquaculture landscape (more of that below in connection with Selonda): many other fish-­farming companies did likewise. Galaxidi issued 3.7 million shares at €0.30, thus netting slightly over €1 million, followed by another issue a few years later, yielding around €3 million. With the capital thus raised, Galaxidi invested in an Italian fish-­trading firm with subsidiaries in Patras, effectively cutting out an intermediary. It made further investments in cages and upscaled its hatchery to the point that it began selling fish fry to other aquaculture companies, mostly in Greece, further boosting revenues. From a business perspective, all of this may look glorious, but the financial-­administrative and also social consequences of being a stock-­ exchange-­listed company created a trail of problems too. As Galaxidi’s senior financial figure, Spiros Giannoulatos (earlier in his career he was affiliated to the Patras subsidiary), confided: ‘Each year, we paid around €150,000: to pay the accountants, there are fees to the stock exchange, specialized employees who keep track of the accounts; it is too costly and it creates too much of a noise in the company!’ In addition to such stock exchange-­related costs, early in the millennium a disjunction emerged

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between operations on the ground and the financial image of the company. During the heyday of the early 2000s, when the company was listed on the ASE, profits were healthy; when expressed as a percentage of revenue, they reached just over 10 per cent on average. During the following decade however, profits plummeted; they averaged just below 2.5 per cent and never exceeded 3.5 per cent per year (author’s own calculations). This was the consequence of falling selling prices, in turn related to changes in the structure of the Greek aquaculture sector, which is discussed later. Although the company remained profitable, in 2009 it began to suspend paying dividends to its shareholders. When this happened again in subsequent years, the shareholders grew irritated, voicing their discontent at the annual shareholders’ meetings. Running the company became hence increasingly seen in terms of keeping shareholders satisfied, rather than running the business for its own sake. Giannoulatos remembers many a tense meeting with shareholders’ representatives as well as with ASE officials demanding an explanation about the diminishing profit base, over which he lost considerable sleep. At this point in the story, Galaxidi turned to the Greek government for financial help. It maintained close relations with the government, especially through the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research, which sought testing grounds for its experiments in aquaculture technology. Galaxidi’s balance sheets reveal that, since 2007, Galaxidi has received considerable government grants, in total around €4.5 million. (In 2007–2008, this amounted to €1.5 million per year; in 2013 and 2014, €1 million in total, and in 2019, €0.5 million.) To put this into context, the grants amount to around 20 per cent of the company’s profits during this period. We should further note that these funds are in addition to the major, though undisclosed, sum of seed money that the company received from the EEC via the Greek state when it started operations in the 1980s. The image of diminishing profits combined with continued government support made stock investors suspicious, and they eventually lost interest in Galaxidi; this, in turn, obstructed yet another share issue for badly-­needed funds. In an ultimate attempt to turn the tide, the company delisted itself in 2017 by buying back its shares. The funds for the buyback were obtained from its own savings coupled with a bank loan. When I quizzed Giannoulatos about this in 2018, he displayed a sense of relief. In his words: ‘Many consider the ASE to be a good thing, but in fact it has given us a lot of trouble’. Since then, Galaxidi has sought to emulate its previous pace by looking for new ways to sell fish. This, too, is part of a broader pattern: several Greek fish entrepreneurs whom I interviewed for this study indicated that they were scouting for new opportunities, which they define as ‘finding markets’. For instance, at the 2019 Seafood Expo Global conference in

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Brussels, I got into conversation with Katarina Hekimian, a paternal cousin of Panteleimonitou, employed in Galaxidi’s communication team but previously living in Bulgaria where she ran a car dealership, Agripan Bulgaria. Together with her husband (a Bulgarian national who is now on Galaxidi’s board of directors), they were trying to interest fish restaurants in the capital, Sofia, in seabass and bream from Galaxidi, with some success. As part of the same pattern, during one of my visits to Galaxidi, I noted how a small group of Chinese prospective fish producers and traders were being shown around the Galaxidi perimeter. Giannoulatos remained sceptical however: ‘in China, all business is run by the state, but that is not how we do business here in Greece. So, they remain suspicious about our work’. And, as an interview with a sector representative in 2021 seems to suggest, the Chinese investment interest has not yet materialized into something concrete, evidenced also by Greece’s national export figures in which China features marginally, if at all (‘Greek Fish Producers Eyeing Chinese Market’, Kathimerini, 6  July 2021, retrieved 27  September 2021  from https://www.ekathimerini.com/economy/1163980/greek-­fish-­pro​ducers-­ eyeing-­chinese-­market/). Nevertheless, Galaxidi has reasons to be optimistic, as profits appeared to be on the rise again towards 2018, when the fieldwork for this study ended.

Selonda In a quiet and prosperous residential block in Athens, just northeast of the Acropolis, sits a beautifully renovated nineteenth-­century villa, residence of John Stephanis (see Figure 5.3 for Selonda’s contact details). The handsome outside appearance of the building does not fully prepare the visitor for what is yet to come however. Inside, the villa is packed with paintings, sculptures and other works of art, most of them by nineteenth-­century

Figure 5.3.  Business contacts, Selonda. © Joost Beuving.

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Greek artists, but there is also older Greek work, and a few classical European masters too, as well as pottery dating back to classical Greek times. Stephanis is especially proud of an ancient fish hook that forms the basis for the Selonda company logo. In combination with the spotless parquet floors and wooden panelling, the place has the feel more of a museum than of the headquarters of an international business empire, which it in reality is; or rather was. Around the time of my visit, in 2015, Stephanis had just been told to step down as Selonda’s director as the company was on the brink of being nationalized. Under Stephanis’ directorship, the story went, Selonda had accrued close to €0.5 billion in bank debt, and his presence was seen as an obstacle in the debt restructuring process. Stephanis’ acceptance of my invitation to be interviewed may be seen as an attempt to come clean with a tainted history, but the interview also contains relevant information that could be verified independently. John Stephanis (1944–) hails from a renowned family of businessmen; for instance, his father made a fortune trading timber, and an uncle transformed Greece’s building landscape by running a string of concrete factories. He received a university degree in economics in the United States, where he studied at the private New School for Social Sciences in New York. Upon returning to Greece in the early 1970s, right after the military Junta ended, he initially opened a branch of the renowned advertising firm, Thompson, in Athens; Stephanis had become acquainted with them through an internship while in the United States. Towards the end of the decade, when the democratically elected New Democracy government in Greece began to consider EEC membership, Stephanis had grown tired of the advertising industry. He remembers a conversation in the mid-­1980s with a friend, Marinos Yeroulanos, then a high-­ranking civil servant, who was well placed to watch how the wind was blowing with regard to Greece’s accession to the EEC. Yeroulanos confided in him that technical experts in the EEC were warming to the idea of trying aquaculture in Greece, previously already contemplated by the international aquaculture community. EEC accession implied getting access to structural and investment funds, money to use for maritime and fisheries development (amongst other things). Supported by capital from his younger brother, Visilios, John Stephanis decided to cross the Rubicon and set up an aquaculture farm. The remaining years of the decade saw almost uninterrupted growth, but things began to change during the early 1990s when three new developments interlocked. First, Stephanis became embroiled in fierce competition with Aristide Belles, another veteran aquaculture entrepreneur who founded the company Nireus around the same time that Stephanis began with Selonda. Stephanis and Belles were no friends. In interviews, Belles, who is about the same age as Stephanis, would barely mention Stephanis’

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name; and during a national food conference in 2019, which they both attended, the men were never seen ­together – ­not even during light moments such as the various meals that were served. Unlike Stephanis, Belles hails from a modest family from Chios, an island in the northern Aegean Sea. His demeanour is less polished than Stephanis’, and he lacks his cosmopolitan pedigree (he was educated in Athens). Nevertheless, he eventually became CEO of one of Greece’s largest aquaculture companies. Stephanis and Belles both vied for supremacy in the business, and, as part of that, they lobbied ASE regulators intensively to have their respective companies admitted to the stock market. Both Belles and Stephanis were looking for cheap capital (bank interest rates were high at the time), but non-­ economic motivations prevailed too. In Belles’ words: ‘The stock market is the tool for the dreamer, for the visionary!’ And Stephanis admits that an important reason for requesting ASE listing was that Belles had similar plans: ‘We did it, because Nireus did it too’. The money that Selonda acquired from the stock market was used in part to invest in more cages as well as to start operations in other locations, but especially to buy up smaller companies. Selonda’s balance sheet during the 1990s shows an uninterrupted pattern of gobbling up aquaculture companies, including their expensive equipment, trained staff and production licences. The latter is especially relevant. Since the early days of fish farming, the Greek government had sought to regulate it by mandating the use of production licences, obtained via the Ministry of Agriculture. Such licences, tied to a weight maximum, can in principle impede business expansion. However, as Thanassis Frentzos, a veteran aquaculture technician who rose through the ranks of another well-­known fish-­farming company, Kefalonia, once confided: ‘The licence is the reality of the government, but in the reality of the company, it is difficult to know exactly how much is in the cages’. Thus, buying companies, including their production licences, can be seen as a way to ‘officialize’ fish ­production – ­a problem that pertains especially to larger companies as they are more likely to be in the crosshairs of government monitoring. Selonda, in this way, procured numerous fish-­farming companies from the mid-­1990s to the mid-­2000s.4 The national Greek press alongside international news coverage picked up Selonda’s various mergers, but the company’s international expansions during the 1990s were what made true headlines. Two of those stand out in particular. Halfway into the decade, Selonda took on a consultancy job in Kuwait. Kuwait has a long history of fish farming, directed at domestic consumption, and after the end of the Gulf War in 1992, which resulted in an almost total destruction of aquaculture equipment, it sought to rebuild its production infrastructure (Tagaris and Georgiopoulos 2013). Via its

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network of international contacts, the Kuwaiti government got wind of the Greek success story, and it made contact with the Federation of Greek Mariculture, an umbrella organization of which John Stephanis was the first president (its presidency rotates). Riding a wave of what can only be described as investor optimism, Stephanis took on the job, hoping also that he could thus obtain a foothold in a part of the world with, from Stephanis’ viewpoint, great potential. He was quick to discover, however, that business in Kuwait is not for the faint-­hearted, as it is deeply intertwined with politics, obstructing an easy expansion of Selonda into the country. Many years after this fact, Stephanis still appears fazed by the troubling experience of this failure.5 During the same period, John Stephanis also began to invest some money in Turkey, especially along the country’s western coastline, stretching between Bodrum and Izmir. This was an audacious step (although inspired by Nireus’ similar undertaking), especially in the light of historical sensitivities: Greece fought a war of independence in the early nineteenth century against Ottoman rule, the predecessor to the modern Turkish state; relations between the two countries are hardly cordial. The experiences of Antonio Coli, Selonda’s hatchery director, are worthy of consideration here. He holds an MA in fisheries biology from Stirling University (many of Greek aquaculture’s technical experts are trained there), and he first worked a while for Nireus (the importance of crossing between companies will be explained later), especially for the company, Seafarm Ionian, which Nireus had incorporated not much earlier. Coli remembers how fish farming during the 1990s in Turkey resembled that of the early days in Greece: ‘they used wooden cages, they lacked hatcheries, and had large mortality rates in the cages’. Coli explains how, drawing mostly on a local network of Turkish employees, they sorted out production problems, as they had done earlier in Greece, and got production going. Things went alright for several years, but it appears that, eventually, the Turkish government got wind of what was going on in its backyard, and it resolutely banned Greek companies from running their operations from Turkish territory. Stephanis and Coli, and many others to whom I talked, characterized the 1990s as turbulent, but their stories about the 2000s suggests a more chaotic course of events, and this is even before economic mayhem hit Greece’s economy in the 2009–2016 period. Some of the chaos emerged as a response to unexpected price developments. Prices during the 1990s had been fairly stable, yet, to the surprise of many insiders in the aquaculture sector, they began to drop from around 2000; and in a few years they were slashed by about 50 per cent. Lara Barazi, director at Kefalonia (she holds a degree from Harvard Kennedy School and is married to one of Yeroulaos’

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sons), remembers: ‘For many years, prices were good; there was growth everywhere and we thought that the sky was the limit!’ In hindsight, this ought not to have come as a surprise, perhaps. Production figures during the decade had seen a steady, upward climb: a consequence of improved production t­ echnologies – ­especially greater control over the reproductive cycle through modern hatcheries so that more healthy baby fish entered the ­cages – a­ nd expanded production capacity (especially more cages). However, a cursory glance at world farmed fish figures shows that elsewhere around the globe a similar pattern was unfolding. Many of my Greek informants appear not to have realized that the world was not necessarily waiting for fish from Greece and that seabass and bream were competing with demand for other marine fish species, farmed or wild. Of further relevance, aquaculture in Turkey began to take off. After ousting the Greek companies, the Turkish government had taken things into its own hands. Greatly helped by the technical expertise that was left behind in the form of trained Turkish staff, this began to pay off in the early 2000s. A salient detail is that today, Turkey’s aquaculture production rivals that of Greece. Moreover, the structure of retailing began to change. Whereas previously the companies could strike profitable deals with fish wholesalers (Patras’ economy thrived on this for a long time), supermarket chains increasingly began to incorporate large-­scale selling of fresh fish worldwide. Riding the wave of global capitalism, supermarkets thus began to function as price-­setters, negotiating prices down in the process: various of my informants estimated that about three-­quarters of all marine fish from the Mediterranean are sold through supermarket chains. Facing shrinking profits, the larger companies, Selonda included, turned to Greek banks for financial support. Falling prices affected profitability, and Selonda, in a development that mirrors that of Galaxidi, began to suspend dividend payments, thus blocking another share issue. Greek banks appeared happy to step into the breach and began to open up new credit lines and expand existing ones. Various Greek b ­ anks – A ­ lpha Bank, Eurobank Ergasias and Pireus Bank in p ­ articular – t­ hus became involved in the financing of aquaculture production in Greece (Tallaksen 2014). Selonda began to unravel around this time, and the Stephanis brothers lost control over it. Since its stock exchange listing, Stephanis had created an entire internal department in order to conform to ASE administrative rules. With the growth of Selonda, this department expanded too, sucking up productive funds. Moreover, Selonda employed increasing numbers of administrative and technical staff (in their thousands), who needed oversight in the form of a specialized HR department, adding to the costs of production. Further, Stephanis was increasingly summoned by external parties to explain why a large company such as his, with a turnover running

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into hundreds of millions of Euros, was losing its capacity to make a profit. A case in point: Selonda stopped paying dividends to its shareholders in 2005. Stephanis found himself confronted by anxious senior bank managers, under the prying eyes of the Ministry of Agriculture and, in his capacity as a senior figure in the aquaculture umbrella organization, was summoned to Brussels several times to give chapter and verse. During these meetings, suggestions about consolidation, perhaps in the form of a merger, were discussed, which Stephanis (and also Belles) kept at bay. Coli remembers: ‘We rarely saw Stephanis, he was always in meetings, long sessions with guys in suits, rarely coming down to where the real action is: the cages and production sites’. To complicate things even further, relations within the Greek community of aquaculture entrepreneurs turned sour. Senior people in the business, like Panteleimonitou, began to voice their concern at the fact that the sheer size of a company like Selonda, followed in its wake by Nireus and later also by Andromeda, had contributed to a race to the bottom that they considered to be harmful for all involved. This spilled over into the board of directors overseeing Selonda, and, when major shareholders began to voice the sentiment that Stephanis was part of Selonda’s problem, it was decided that Stephanis had to go. It is worth noting that together with his wife, Pavlina Pavlidou, a Stirling-­trained aquaculture expert who had risen through Selonda’s ranks, Stephanis immediately established a new fish farm, Epidavros/Apidaurus, which appears to have operated successfully since then. This dramatic turn of events culminated in nationalization, mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, directly connecting the world of high politics in Brussels/Athens in the wake of the financial crisis to the fate of leading figures in Greece’s aquaculture sector. As became apparent, Selonda (with Nireus and Andromeda) had accumulated huge amounts of bank debt, initially to finance expansion, but later this money was increasingly needed to keep the companies afloat in the face of diminishing profits (in part because of the rising costs of servicing the bank debts). It remains to be further studied how the toxic marriage between bank and company unfolded, but what happened next is that the Greek government, at the onset of Tsipras’ election victory and under pressure from the Troika, prepared new bankruptcy laws (Bouras and Granitsas 2014). These new laws, which came as a big surprise to the Greek business community (bankruptcy laws were notoriously lax), would enable banks to enforce a debt-­for-­ equity swap, a technical arrangement that makes banks de facto owners of indebted companies through a majority share (Mereghetti 2017). Amidst much public media clamour, the nationalization became effective in the course of 2015. The impression is that senior figures were not prepared to face this prospect. Marketing and export manager Basil Sudborough, for

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instance, commented in April 2015: ‘The future is looking good. We will be back to sunny days after the big storm’ (Fisher 2015). This brings us to the last episode of the Selonda story. To better understand the dynamic that began to unfold, my participation in the national aquaculture conference of June 2019 proved instructive. The conference, attended by around 200 participants, opened with a short word by Prokopios Pavlopoulos, Greece’s then president. He talked about aquaculture as a matter of national importance, conveniently sidestepping the issue of nationalization. The mood in the audience was upbeat, further fuelled by the news that broke right before the conference began that an exit deal had been brokered between the Tsipras Administration and the Troika, which was seen as the country taking back control. Pavlopoulos cleverly framed the aquaculture business as strategic in leading the recovery. Towards the end, to appreciative nodding in the audience, he hinted at how an international company had shown an interest in Selonda/Nireus. This point was made more concrete by the following speaker, Giannis Tsironis, a member of the left-­wing Ecologist Greens and then acting as the Alternate Minister for the Environment and Energy. He put a name to the interest, that of the US private equity fund Amerra Capital, which plays an important role in a worldwide trend in private investments in food production (e.g. the Gates Foundation is reported to have invested in Greek aquaculture) (Manifava 2020). The mood in the audience was jubilant (although the announcement was not a surprise, see Mereghetti 2018; White 2016), I could see how Giannoulatos listened to the various speeches with a frown on his face. He later confided in me, ‘Those big companies, they made a mess out of it, and now they expect another big company to rescue them. I don’t think it’s a good sign for the future’.

Interpretation: Reliance on Outsiders In order to structure the analysis, I now look at the extended company histories through the lens of future-­work by closely considering the social practices, language and rituals as they emanate from the empirical material. These core components of future-­work were briefly introduced and discussed in the Introduction and Chapter 1. The pages that follow may be seen as an attempt to apply these components to what we have learnt so far about the case of fish farming in Greece as it can be gleaned from the two company histories. Through this analysis, which focuses especially on the social construction of the future, I hope to familiarize the reader with two different images of entrepreneurial behaviour: one in which entrepreneurial practice is grounded in a common world of observable facts

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(represented by Galaxidi); and one that is structured by a more myopic view of the world imbued with a strong, though unfounded, belief that reliance on external forces is essential for entrepreneurial success (represented by Selonda). The latter image appears to resonate with the idea of a cargo cult and, in the case of Greece, has resulted in what I have described in the Introduction as an economic meltdown. To make the juxtaposition work, it is necessary to emphasize how both companies belong to the same class of phenomenon; several important similarities justify their analysis in tandem. Both evolved during the same wave of establishment and expansion of aquaculture in Greece (Selonda was established in 1981, Galaxidi a few years later), in which future fortunes in aquaculture seemed self-­ evident, fuelled by business-­ friendly macroeconomic policies that placed emphasis on entrepreneurs’ business acumen. Both followed the pathway of specializing in two species (seabass and bream), producing for export markets and drawing on comparable production technologies: hatcheries to produce baby fish that then grow to maturity (a cycle of 24 to 36 months) in large circular cages placed in the sea. The technical complexities of their businesses notwithstanding, none of the founding figures had a specialist background in fishing or aquaculture; reliance on outside expertise was therefore imperative. Easy access to cheap money in the form of EEC structural funds was important in order to overcome the initial hurdles (those of aquaculture technology included), and they both expanded their financial basis by listing on the ASE, as well as by opening credit lines with (national) banks and receiving government support. Nonetheless, their respective fortunes diverged sharply, and this divergence appears to be a matter of differences in future-­work.

Social Practice A cursory glance at the material shows that Greek aquaculture entrepreneurs are not isolated individuals; rather, they are embedded in a network of colleagues/competitors, their staff of administrative and technical workers, government officials, representatives of banks and other financial institutions, and technical experts. It is salient that this network overlays the scattered landscape of Greece’s jagged fjord coast with considerable travel distances between the various companies and their business sites: hatcheries, packing stations and so on. Consequently, few of the figures that feature in the company histories can meet on a daily basis, and their meetings are largely confined to those coinciding with company relations. Admittedly, there is the telephone, email and social media but, as the reader will come to appreciate, this is very much a world of physical ­encounter – ­with the exception of conferences. The limited frequency of

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between-­company social interaction notwithstanding, this is not a world of strangers. In fact, the overall impression is one of a community whose members are surprisingly well aware of what is going on elsewhere in their world. This particular feature is magnified by the fact that the relationships between key figures in Greek aquaculture go back several decades and they enjoy ties of friendship or enmity. Closer consideration of the patterns in the social networks on which Galaxidi and Selonda draw and depend yields the following. In Galaxidi’s case, the network appears to be clustered in a single location: that of the company premises facing Galaxidi Bay. Here, we find the head office, hatchery and packing station clustered on a single site, which overlooks the bay with the cages in it. All employees must travel the same supply road to the premises, and they park their cars in the same car park; there are no special parking places reserved for senior staff. Because of the clustering in one location, one can constantly see what is going on, and this appears to foster a sense of togetherness. This sentiment is further strengthened by shared meals: on the premises there is a canteen where workers can eat together at lunchtime (and they often do); dinner is also served here when there is a need to work overtime. Obviously, a corporate hierarchy distinguishes between white and blue collar, but at mealtime mingling can be observed. Also, during my several visits to the company, the overall impression was of friendly relations between blue- and white-­collar workers; for instance, Panteleimonitou could be seen wandering about the premises talking here and there. That most of Galaxidi’s workers were retained during the two crises of the twenty-­first century reinforces this impression. This contributes to construing the future in terms of belonging to a community. In Selonda’s case, the company is spread over various places: headquarters in Athens, the Stephanis villa plus a spacious building in Athens’ uptown Marousi suburb, over twenty fish farms scattered across Greece, and six hatcheries alongside several packing stations in yet other locations. Coli’s remark that Stephanis is a man who appears absorbed in high-­brow meetings with representatives of banks, the ASE, the Greek government and later also EEC/EU ­officials – ­and is not, in his words, ‘there where the action is’ – marks a sharper distinction between blue- and white-­collar workers than we see in Galaxidi’s case. This social distinction rhymes with another difference: changes in staff composition. A brief study of professional profiles on LinkedIn (totalling 491 individual persons affiliated to a Greek aquaculture company) shows how in the Selonda case, but also in the Nireus case, staff mobility is high: it is common for employees of the larger companies to move between employers; Antonio Coli’s job hopping thus represents a broader pattern that appears driven by opportunity. Those connected to the smaller companies, on the other hand, tend to

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stay longer (but they are underrepresented on LinkedIn and it is therefore difficult to make firm claims). Thus, the clustering of activity in a single location that we see in Galaxidi coincides with what appear to be more collegial relations and appears to coincide with a greater permanence of occupation. The relationship in the Selonda case appears to engender the opposite.6 Kinship has a special place in the two companies, tying into differences in presentation of the self. Galaxidi likes to stress its identity as a family firm (its website mentions the ‘family spirit of the company’), which makes sense given that kinship relations among administrative and technical staff recruited from the Delphi area appear to be common (informal talks during a tour of the firm confirmed this). At more senior levels also, multistranded ties that include kinship are evident; consider, for instance, how Panteleimonitou promoted a cousin to the board of directors (she is also a major shareholder) and depends on that cousin for market expansion into Bulgaria. This squares with the ideal of a community. Within Selonda, there are also kinship ties to consider, yet this does not appear to be part of the company’s identity: the company positions itself as a modern business enterprise. This emanates, for instance, from its website, which emphasizes production figures and the pursuit of research-­based practices. But kinship is there. For instance, Stephanis started Selonda with his brother, Visilios, who held several key positions on Selonda’s board of directors; and Stephanis married a former management assistant, Pavlina Pavlidou, and her importance is stressed by the fact that she is now marketing director (and a major shareholder) at the newly formed Epidavros fish-­farming company. It is relevant that the presence of Visilios and Stephanis’ marriage to Pavlidou came to be seen as nepotism, whereas this allegation was absent in the stories about Galaxidi. The unfolding animosity and envy between Stephanis and Belles is a final social factor that appears at various junctures.7 For instance, it appears that Stephanis warmed to the idea of listing Selonda on the ASE only when he realized that it could enable him to gain a superior position over Nireus. It is relevant that amidst much shareholder critique (the Dutch private equity firm Linneus, a large shareholder, voiced open threats to sell its shares if Selonda were to go ahead with its expansionist strategy) (Tallaksen 2012) and concerns from ASE officials, Stephanis never considered delisting Selonda; he continued to the bitter end. When interviewed, he emphasized that remaining ASE-­listed, even long after dividend payments were suspended, was paramount to Selonda’s business success. Stephanis ignored my critical questions about this point, instead emphasizing how Selonda, when first listed, was 120 times oversubscribed. Giannoulatos, on the other hand, treats the stock exchange with far more trepidation. ‘We made a

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huge and expensive mistake’, he once told me: ‘We got carried away by the mood of the day. And make no mistake: once you’re in, it’s difficult to get out’, he added. This suggests that Stephanis came to view the future of Selonda through the narrow lens of a zero-­sum game with two major players: himself and Belles.

Language Looking at the various statements of key figures in the company histories points to relevant differences between Galaxidi and Selonda. In what follows, I distinguish between two types of language: economic language and future-­ narratives. Distinguishing these types is to some extent a research artefact as, in the practice of everyday life, they frequently overlap; the distinction is made for the purpose of exposition. A further disclaimer concerns the relation between language and practice: language is considered inasmuch as it helps to shed light on differences in entrepreneurial behaviour that can be observed in the two cases. That is, out of the many hours of interview material that I collected, and the documents, websites and other stores of language that I studied, I have selected those aspects that embody important economic decisions around which both companies organized themselves. The reader will remember from Chapter 1 that connecting language to practice follows from the turn in British analytic philosophy towards language analysis that is steeped in observable properties of social life. Let us begin with a closer look at the respective websites, which are valuable repositories of language. Selonda’s website (www.selonda.com) opens with a historical timeline called ‘­Milestones … ­during a successful trajectory of over 38 years’. Directly below it, there are short descriptions of its achievements, presented as a list of mergers and acquisitions, suggesting that the absorption of other companies is what makes the company tick. An earlier version of the website (which I stored in a digital repository) was peppered with hyperbolic terms such as ‘first’, ‘biggest’, ‘best’. Then there is the short company clip. It takes the viewer as a bird flies to several smaller bays where we see nothing but a neatly arranged cluster of rings against the backdrop of Greece’s beautiful fjord landscape, accompanied by peaceful music. It is relevant that we see no humans, or equipment, or even fish. It is a hyper-­sanitized portrayal of fish farming, completely reduced to its aesthetic qualities that project an image of order and tranquillity. The Galaxidi website (www.galaxidimarine.farm) opens with close-­up footage of a cage with the fish clearly visible, and people, equipment in view; it emphasizes fish farming as an activity and place of work. Admittedly, there is hyperbole, but this is less grand than that of Selonda: it posits itself as ‘one of

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the first’ and an ‘exemplary fish farm’. What stands out in particular, tying also into the previous section, is the emphasis on communal values: the relations with the Galaxidi community and taking care of employees. There are references on Selonda’s website to workers, but as ‘human resources’, workers as ‘flexible and skilled, eager for great achievements’, employees as instruments in a quest for a greater ­purpose – ­expansion – versus employees as part of a team. My informants’ language rhymes with these observations. In Selonda’s case, the economic language teems with references to business adventures. The Kuwaiti deal presents an example. In the interview Stephanis emphasized the audacity of the plan, without actually revealing that he had never been there, knew no one on whom he could rely and in retrospect did not have a clear grasp of how the attempted establishment of a fish farm failed to materialize. The overall impression is one of acting on impulse. The Turkish story is part of the same pattern. Here too, Stephanis emphasized how Selonda did something that no one had tried before. What Stephanis did not relay, but Coli did in a later interview, was that the company did not have a plan; the realities on the ground surprised those tasked with making a success of Selonda’s expansion into Turkey, Coli included. When one scrutinizes Galaxidi’s evolution, what strikes one is the measured language of both Giannoulatos and Panteleimonitou. Giannoulatos admitted to a Turkish connection: the Italian fish-­trading firm had several Turkish employees. For a while, they traded with Turkey through them, but ‘it didn’t make sense economically, and we abandoned the whole thing’. A related pattern may be gleaned from the attempt to connect with fish restaurants in Sofia: cautiously following known networks. Regarding the future-­narratives of both companies, we find the differences observed above reflected in them. Selonda’s marketing manager Sudborough’s comment – ‘The future is looking good. We will be back to sunny days after the big storms’ – has wider significance. In it, we can see an incantation to exorcize the inevitable: by the time he made his remark, Selonda’s nationalization was well under way; the specialist trade journals UnderCurrent and IntraFish had begun contemplating this possibility about a year prior to that event. Stephanis himself bubbled with optimism, right before he got the sack (I happened to interview him shortly before). He summarized Selonda’s difficult situation thus: ‘We worked with the banks, and we came up with a plan; there was no problem continuing’, which somehow resembles Wildavsky’s ‘shouting his plans into the storm of life’. In my conversations with Galaxidi staff, such references to the future were absent. Again, measured language prevailed. This appeared most strikingly in a conversation with Lara Barazi, Kefalonia’s director, in connection with equity funds’ professed interest: ‘Private equity funds are

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in for short-­cycle profits; but aquaculture has long cycles, so who knows when they will pull out!’ This is not a language of high optimism, but of a cautionary warning. These various languages of the future manifested themselves visibly at the national aquaculture conference. The fact that the conference was organized by the trio Andromeda–Nireus–Selonda in close consultation with the various aquaculture umbrella organizations (which the trio largely funded) explains the prevalence of the mainstream language. This language is generally used to talk about the aquaculture sector as a great success and places a premium on advancement through expansion (increased production to exclude the Turks) and a reliance on external forces (banks, equity firms), even when there are few observed realities in support of such claims. This again evokes the idea of a cargo cult: an outside miracle of unknown genesis miraculously comes to the rescue (Sillitoe 1989). In the margin of this miracle narrative, we find figures such as Giannoulatos and Panteleimonitou, whose measured language emphasizes the various contingencies that go into a business operation, carefully grounding subsequent steps in known practices and networks, aborting what seems not imminently advantageous to the overall project. Their cautionary narrative, incidentally corresponding to the behavioural ideal of homo economicus as discussed in the Introduction and Chapter 1, furthermore ties into a language that emphasizes community, which may be seen as a way to disperse contingencies in the volatile world of aquaculture production.

Rituals When the company histories are scrutinized, what stands out immediately is their ASE listing. In the language of anthropology, becoming ASE-­listed is a passing ritual that manifests the companies’ access to a world of high capitalism. Through it, they symbolically distinguished themselves from the cloud of aquaculture companies that was forming during the 1990s; only a few other companies did likewise. With the ASE listing, Galaxidi (in 2002) and Selonda (in 1994) thus entered an aristocracy of aquaculture companies in ­Greece – ­or so their leaders thought at the time. It appears that Galaxidi, rather soon into the process, realized the disadvantages of their ASE listing: it brought with it large administrative overheads that came at a high price. Also, the company became more vulnerable to the whims of the stock market, in effect contributing to a greater future uncertainty. A few years after Giannoulatos entered the company, in 2005, he began to lobby against it and eventually convinced Panteleimonitou as well as the Galaxidi board that delisting was in the company’s best

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interests. It is significant that, in the company’s public outside presentations, few references remain about their ASE-­listed history (fifteen years in all). A rather different image emerges when the Selonda material is scrutinized. As indicated, the company remained ASE-­listed, even though no dividends were paid for a number of years, and major stockholders (such as Linneus) began to revolt. Selonda prides itself on being the ‘First aquaculture company worldwide to have its shares listed on a stock market’ (Selonda website). Also, the full-­colour coffee table book that Selonda published to celebrate its thirtieth birthday overflows with pictures of the ASE launch, and Stephanis, in my conversation with him, remained impervious to my critical questions about it; he saw it as a direct reference to his company’s successes. The passing ritual of the coveted ASE listing thus had real consequences: it contributed towards a belief that reliance on external forces is necessary to achieve the apex position in the social hierarchy of aquaculture companies. Being the top dog, Stephanis and his chief competitor Belles appear to have thought, was essential in order to ensure future fortunes. Unlike in the Galaxidi case, in the senior management circles surrounding Selonda, the future was construed as an attempt to deliberately expose themselves to outside financial forces. Paradoxically, the stock market listing eventually contributed to Stephanis losing control over the company. Stock-­listed companies in Greece (as elsewhere) are mandated by law to periodically make public their financial state of affairs in quarterly and annual reports. This is an important ritual too: the company recurrently prepares itself for an outside performance, often with the intention of placating investors in expectation of securing their continued trust in the company. The Galaxidi website presents its reports in a simple list, with each corresponding to a basic balance sheet. These sheets present the financial state of the company in retrospect: they offer no prognosis for the future. Giannoulatos once explained to me how the company’s plans for the future were outlined in short management reports, discussed at annual ordinary shareholder board meetings with representatives of the main shareholders present in the modest environment of the company premises. This takes the form of a conversation between partners. In the Selonda case, the annual financial report is a full-­colour book of more than 100 hundred pages, with frequent references to the future (for instance, that term appears on a fifth of all pages of its 2013–2015 annual financial report), often in the sense of promises about certain stated objectives such as output or growth. Its presentations were nothing short of a spectacle, organized in fancy surroundings, often luxury hotels in downtown Athens, with a long list of speakers celebrating the company’s stated business

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successes. This suggests that by publicly presenting itself as a success, Selonda sought to enforce future fortunes. Considering the two company histories from the viewpoint of their respective future-­work suggests a marked distinction between an entrepreneurial behaviour that is cautionary, more inward looking, taking current experience and practice as a yardstick to take small steps towards the future, and a more exuberant entrepreneurial behaviour that is driven by a belief in external forces. Explaining why these two distinctive entrepreneurial behaviours materialized over time was not part of the objective of this chapter, and it remains a point for further study that requires more detailed information about the sociogenesis of the network encapsulating both companies. On a related note, I imagine that a closer look at the Greek aquaculture sector may reveal an even greater diversity in entrepreneurial responses than is recorded in this chapter. For instance, there remain numerous very small aquaculture companies, tucked away in remote places along the Greek shoreline, which rely completely on the reinvestment of profits and/or financial inputs from the close social circles in which they function, catering mainly for a local market; and there are also companies that left the aquaculture industry long before the tide began to turn in the early 2000s. All are somehow part of the same world as Galaxidi and Selonda, although it is reasonable to assume that they are driven by yet other forms of future-­work.

Conclusion In light of the fate of aquaculture in Greece as represented by output figures, recent history seems nothing short of a success story. A national aquaculture sector overview published by FAO during the early 2000s captured this positive sentiment as follows: ‘Major European Union (EU) funding programs and a few entrepreneurial individuals that have undertaken the challenge have led to a rapid increase in production and Greece becoming the largest producer of these species in the world’ (FAO 2005: 2). Likewise, a 2012 McKinsey report optimistically noted that ‘In a 10 year horizon, the growth potential of aquaculture as a “rising star” is significant as the sector’s GVA could more than triple from €0.4 to €1.4 billion creating more than 20,000 new jobs’ (McKinsey 2012: 2–3). However, compare the optimism of the FAO and the McKinsey publication with this sobering quote from Dutch economist and MEP Paul Tang: ‘[In Greece] the introduction of the euro led to low interest rates, speculative investment, and inflated growth figures. In retrospect, the country lived on credit, nurtured by overly optimistic expectations about future returns’ (Tang 2018: 114).

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The influx of external ­capital – ­a mix of EEC grants, bank loans, share issues and government ­grants – ­helped to establish aquaculture’s reputation as a new frontier with the promise of new fortunes. Alongside the pecuniary considerations, the EEC funds were also conceived of as a form of positive attention from abroad. The influx of international experts of the kind represented by Myrseth and his international network added to the public sentiment that aquaculture enterprise comprised a promising avenue. It may be seen in the light of Greece’s claiming a new place in the world, which it felt it had lost since its incorporation in the Ottoman empire during the fifteenth century, a broad sentiment in Greek society aptly captured in Kostas Kostis’ History’s Spoiled Children (2018); or, in another vocabulary, as shaking ‘off the shackles of crypto-­colonialism’, this time in relation to the European polity (Herzfeld 2002: 15). This is also how representatives of both Galaxidi and Selonda remember the early days: as an episode of opportunity and new chances, when something new was in the air that many had been craving for a long time. Selonda and Galaxidi both responded to these sentiments, but in different ways. In Galaxidi’s case, encountering the future was envisaged in cautionary terms, as a path riddled with possible obstacles. Selonda organized itself around an image of future fortunes as the result of unknown miracles. The reader may note the similarity with the Cotonou case in Chapter 3, where the idea of an unexpected windfall gain drives entrepreneurial behaviour. The Greek case thus shows that in the same economic policy environment, various entrepreneurial responses may unfold. This may result less from inconsistencies, or even flaws, in the policies themselves than from how they articulate with particular networks of entrepreneurs and those around them, where ideas about the future are formed. Such ideas find their way into social practices, language and particular rituals, which taken together normalize entrepreneurial behaviour, which is a force that can be stronger than the shared realities that anyone can observe. This helps to elucidate the important reality, registered here in the Greek case but also beyond it, that entrepreneurial ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ are not mutually exclusive outcomes but often emanate from the same social reality.

Notes 1. A first step towards documenting the business elite that is presented in this chapter was published as Beuving 2019a. 2. This pattern resonates with my interview material. One fish entrepreneur remembers: ‘it [the 1980s] was a crazy time, everyone with a bit of money, not only the big businessmen, tried this thing with the fish. It was like everyone owned a fish farm!’ A writer summarized this period as the ‘seabass gold rush’ (Greenberg 2011: 36).

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3. A short visit to the Norwegian coast underscores the country’s successful expansion of commercial marine aquaculture: the country’s southern fjord coasts are dotted with fish cages, and it ranks very highly on international production and export statistics. In fact, Norway’s salmon cages are so large and numerous that the circular shapes of the cages are readily visible from the sky to anyone flying along the coast by commercial jet plane on a bright day. 4. Mayor acquisitions include Riopesca in 1994 and Diaz and Hellenic Fish in 2011, alongside a string of minor companies that were incorporated such as Aquanet (2006), Lesvos Aquaculture (2007), Koronis Aquaculture (2006), Interfish Aquaculture (2011), Stefanou Aquaculture (2007). A similar pattern emerges from studying Nireus’ history. (Data from Orbis database.) 5. The failed Kuwaiti experience did not discourage Selonda from pursuing other overseas adventures; for instance, it tried similar constructions in China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Oman and Singapore. As far as I have been able to ascertain however, none of these was particularly profitable. Also, there was an attempt at diversification, a joint project with Nireus in connection with the Libyan state, involving tuna fishing; this too failed. 6. The proportion of blue-­collar workers in the total workforce is another key variable that underlines the greater sense of community at Galaxidi. During the 2006–2017 period, it remained around a quarter; in Selonda’s case, it was considerably higher, around a third (author’s calculations based on study of company balance sheets). 7. Admittedly, this is not unique to our case. See Glenn (2000) for a similar analysis of such corporate competition between chocolate companies Hershey and Mars, and Isaacson (2015) for the competitive struggle between Apple’s Steve Jobs and Microsoft’s Bill Gates.

° Conclusions [Society’s] economic well-­being rests upon the actions of irresponsible, nearly neurotic individuals. Entrepreneurs vacillate between frenzied excess and anxious withdrawal, taunted by fantasies of triumph and apocalypse. In boom times, their dreams of glory propel them to ever more ephemeral investments. In slumps, they refuse to commit, preferring to clutch at moneys [sic] eternal promise of future riches, instead of constructing factories, inventions or skyscrapers. —Kim Phillips-­Fein, ‘The Good Life’

Introduction As this study draws to a close, it is time to take stock of its main contributions and ramifications. To help assess this, I first summarize the study’s main theoretical contribution. This contribution, which revolves around the future or, more precisely, how the future as a social construction drives entrepreneurial behaviour, has suggested several new ideas about how entrepreneurs conjure into existence the future through their work. With this particular theoretical ­contribution – ­future-­work – ­the study has looked for a solution to the epistemic problem that the entrepreneurs presented in the study are constantly seen to face: that life is full of surprises and that much of what they attempt, or purport, to effectuate often yields unintended consequences, or downright failure. Positive outcomes of entrepreneurial behaviour in reality are part of a multitude of possible outcomes, it appears. Being able to forecast what happens next therefore remains an elusive ideal in practice. The study developed this theoretical idea in the context of a specific empirical c­ ontext – f­rontiers of global ­capitalism – ­yet various reasons suggest themselves to try and further develop this idea in other empirical contexts too, as I discuss briefly in a subsequent passage. The chapter ends with a short meditation on how seeing entrepreneurial behaviour in the light of future-­work has implications for economic practice, such as

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that of economic policy-­makers and those running enterprises. Firm and company activity often remains an elusive black box, as various chequered recent experiments with economic reform policies as well as ongoing corporate malfeasance worldwide seem to underline. To steer global capitalism towards healthier, productive outcomes, and thus away from the Dantesque image suggested in the quotation above, it is high time to shed new light on the inner workings of companies or firms.

Summary of the Argument The main theoretical ambition of this study is to interrogate homo economicus or rational man: a popular model in economic thinking and practice that is quite often seen as a useful approximation for entrepreneurial behaviour. It is widely accepted that rational man is an imaginary figure, but, despite this, it is one with surprisingly far-­reaching consequences in the real world: many economic policies and management textbooks predicate on it. As a behavioural model, homo economicus is usually presented as an opportunistic individualist, who is ultimately driven by the maximization of utility (often, though not necessarily, monetary gain), and he/she strides towards the future through the calculation of costs and benefits. In a more radical manifestation therefore, homo economicus evaluates each and every decision against expected benefits and foreseeable fallout, so that, consequently, his/her vision of the future is defined by the opportunity structure in which he/she finds him/herself. Statistical laws of probability operate on the opportunity structure: some events and outcomes are more likely than others. When expressed in time, this means that entrepreneurs’ problems of choice in the immediate future are characterized by a narrower risk spread, with fewer expected benefits, whereas more distant times show a broader spread with possibly greater benefits. Graphically, this resembles the probability plume of the weather forecast. It is not difficult to imagine why this model has been so popular, and presumably will be in the foreseeable future: it seemingly settles the issue of the unknown unknowns of the future. Recently, homo economicus has got new wind in its sails because of ongoing developments in new and exciting scientific fields such as artificial intelligence (Halpern 2022), brain imaging (Somers 2021) and, of course, big data (Stephens-­ Davidowitz 2017). Combined, these are increasingly considered to be the Holy Trinity of modern behavioural sciences. Importantly, they bring with them the promise of the prediction of future human behaviour. The reasoning goes that the way in which humans step into the future resonates with their actions in the present and

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the past. Once its chief parameters are established, it is argued, extrapolation is possible. We may perhaps not be there yet, its advocates insist, but with greater computing power (quantum computing, according to digital pundits, is around the corner), the availability of ever-­greater amounts of behavioural data (thanks to the mass worldwide embracement of social media and other internet applications) and, of course, new generations of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM)-trained university and polytechnical students, predicting behaviour is (or can be) only a matter of time. The combination of more data, cleverer number crunching and better models to feed into more advanced behavioural algorithms must surely result in a better extrapolation of past trends, bringing future society (if not human experience itself) within the purview of the knowable. Exit future unknown unknowns and out of the window with epistemic qualms: the taming of the future is the capstone of the European Enlightenment that has already brought so much good to so many of us. Or is it? The position that this study adopts is quite sobering as to this behaviour-­tech optimism. More data, enhanced computing power and improved behavioural algorithms on a fundamental level do not change the epistemic problem that the future does not present itself until it has become the present. This study has argued that whereas the future may resemble today and yesterday to a considerable degree, that is not always or necessarily the case. (If this were otherwise, it would be difficult to see how societies could change at all.) We have seen in the various ethnographic cases of entrepreneurs presented in the study that they are rife with unexpected turns of event: sometimes with pleasant surprises but more often with unexpected outcomes. The study has argued that this is because societies, such as the global frontiers documented in this study, unlike natural systems, are hermeneutically dynamic. In other words, their occupants (traders, businessmen and businesswomen, and other enterprising actors) respond to their own ideas and view of the future as well as factoring in how others do likewise; or they anticipate the ideas and views of others too. This ongoing process of perception–anticipation is sometimes a matter of isolated individuals, though, as the cases without much exception demonstrated, it is more typical for this to happen in collective units such as social groups or networks. Moreover, the process does not stop at merely reflecting about the future. Entrepreneurs act according to their own ideas and those of others; they consequently create the future by stepping into it. Shedding light on this complex of perception–­anticipation–action, which I have called entrepreneurs’ future-­work, has been the chief objective of this study. Presenting entrepreneurial behaviour as a hermeneutically dynamic response may be seen as contradicting the maxims of homo economicus

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outlined above. The message of this study has rather been that whereas homo economicus may be seriously flawed as a descriptive model of entrepreneurial behaviour, it functions as a powerful behavioural ideal. In other words, many of the entrepreneurs portrayed in the study self-­identify as opportunistic individualists who are driven by profit and cost calculation. How to resolve this intellectual paradox? Or, to phrase the question in terms suggested by economic anthropologist Stephen Gudeman, how can entrepreneurial behaviour be ‘house’ (logic of exchange in circles of social affines) and ‘market’ (logic of buying in the absence of social commitment) at the same time? To resolve this challenging paradox (and one that has occupied economic anthropology for a long time), I proposed to approach homo economicus as a presentation of the self: a behaviour or action made with the intention of influencing or changing how other people see one. Whether or not this is successful in its outcome is less relevant than the attempt itself, especially how this operates in the social frames in which entrepreneurial behaviour is formed. Viewing entrepreneurial behaviour through the lens of a presentation of the self has an important implication in that it invites one to look behind the performance as rational man. Juxtaposing the difference between how entrepreneurs present themselves to others, and what they actually do in their everyday lives, therefore comprised an important challenge for this study. I attempted to do this by distinguishing three interrelated hermeneutic spheres: entrepreneurs’ social practice, including the antagonisms and solidarities that come with it; language as in entrepreneurs’ storytelling about themselves and others; and the various rituals through which entrepreneurs purport to tame the future. In the various ethnographic cases, this deconstruction of homo economicus has worked out as follows. Looking at the fish entrepreneurs of Lake Victoria, Uganda, has shed light on individualism seen as the tendency to avoid close ties with others. This tendency, when applied to the organizing of a fishing business, was shown to result from a self-­fulfilling prophecy of anticipated deceit. This is how it works. Those in hierarchically superior positions, in particular captains and boat owners, recruit employees based on the premise that they cannot be trusted. Consequently, employees are given minimal responsibilities, and they are fired at the slightest infraction. This tendency to treat employees with great suspicion finds expression in attributing to lack of character what in reality is the consequence of ecological or price uncertainty, which in most cases is not within the control of employees. Being treated in such negative terms triggers an opportunistic behavioural response among employees: rather than collaborating with their bosses, they deliberately look for loopholes in the supervisory structure. This is compounded by the fact that, once on the lake, little real supervision is

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possible. As a result, employees in fact behave according to what their bosses surmised in the first place: they trade fish privately for their own account. This fuels the original suspicion, bringing about a tense social atmosphere that is at odds with the need to collaborate to overcome the complexities and uncertainties inherent in fishing. The future is thus the self-­fulfilling outcome of the anticipation, which in the case of a world marked by deep uncertainty compromises capital accumulation. Observing West African car dealers turned attention to notions of profit-­ making. Entrepreneurs are in the business of making money, although the form this money-­making takes depends on the particular expectations that entrepreneurs have of future fortunes. Two major factors compound this. First, putting a monetary value on second-­hand cars is not so easy. A car may be technically good, justifying a high selling price, or it may be a ‘lemon’, which could sell at a loss. This therefore leaves considerable room for different interpretations, contributing to a sense of indeterminacy. Second, although exceeding the technical concerns in importance, the world of the second-­hand car trade is highly international, embedded in circuits of overseas migration. Distant business partners whose whereabouts and motives are not always known or easily scrutinized impact on everyday experience. The car dealers studied resolve such social and technical indeterminacies by talking about the car business as a great success. In addition to talk, the car dealers endlessly hang about the cars, thus magnifying the impression that something special is going on. It appeared that by talking about the trade as a success and by acting towards the cars correspondingly, they nurture a deep-­felt sentiment that, one day, success will be theirs too. This means that through the symbolic vehicle of language, they keep alive a dream of a fortune. Language has thus become an important ritual in car dealers’ social lives: it is the incantation of future indeterminacy. Scrutinizing the social world of investment bankers in Financial America brought into focus price and profit calculation as an entrepreneurial practice. The object of calculation appeared to be of importance. The bankers studied specialized in financial derivatives, which are risk-­bearing products where a clearly identifiable relation with the real world becomes blurred. A large part of investment bankers’ future-­work therefore consists of coming to terms with what derivatives represent. In the ensuing interpretive void, a genre of stories emerged that idealized the future as a risk-­free reality. These optimistic future stories became detached from common-­sense considerations, so as to avoid trading products whose future consequences cannot be anticipated. The chapter further showed how such storytelling went into overdrive once power dynamics began to play a role. That is, the higher echelons of major banks became increasingly myopic about the

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sober realization that risk-­free financial trading is a fallacy. The earlier reliance on computational models that helped to appraise the risks inherent in financial derivatives was gradually suspended, giving rise to optimistic storytelling that lacked a footing in reality. It is further relevant that the magnification of myopic groupthink was accompanied by a growing fixation with the inner circle, solidified by social rituals such as hazing and collective drinking. This contributed to a self-­congratulatory sentiment that immunized the investment bankers against reality checks, for example that the derivatives structure could work only as long as the global economy remained buoyant. The fallout from the 2008 financial crisis is a tragic reminder that there were real risks to consider. How the above considerations work out in economic reform policies is the topic of the chapter detailing the case of aquaculture entrepreneurs in Greece. Greece saw a rapid expansion of aquaculture (farmed fish) production and overseas exportation that happened in the context of business-­ friendly reform policies that sought to trigger economic revival. Later, the pendulum of economic policy ideas swayed towards austerity, deliberately seeking to roll back state influence and usher in market forces. The outcome was more variegated than the policy reform model had in mind however, and the chapter subsequently showed how this can be meaningfully related to differences in entrepreneurs’ future-­work. Some Greek aquaculture entrepreneurs, in response to the new business climate, began to make major investments in a series of grand gestures that included listing on the Athens Stock Exchange and securing funds from overseas investors. This led to a bull market whipped up by a sentiment of relentless expansion, but with little concern about how to sell the fish. As production expanded beyond demand, prices dropped, putting the profitability of the rapidly expanding large companies under pressure. Once the fallout from the 2008 crisis hit Greece, the various credit lines on which the companies depended came under close scrutiny, and the companies were exposed as idols with feet of clay; they were nationalized, ultimately. Other, much smaller, companies fared much better, and their future-­work was characterized by taking small steps into the future, relying on refinancing from company profits. Here also, the Greek state played a major role, though more favourably. It provided targeted subsidies that cushioned shocks and helped the smaller companies to survive. A final comment that suggests itself from a review of the four ethnographic cases regards structure in the passing of time. From the cases it appears that progressing from the present into the future is never a straightforward process. Time advances at various speeds, sometimes slowing down, at other times accelerating; when we factor in direction, sometimes we see a linear pattern, but more often we see something that

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resembles a complex loop. The central point, it seems, is that views of the future are both an input for, and an outcome of, entrepreneurial behaviour. In other words, my analysis gives rise to a dynamic image of entrepreneurship as one that moves through hermeneutical cycles, whereby the consequences of a previous cycle are presented as conditions for future behaviour in a next cycle; time advances as an iteration of hermeneutic cycles. Particular views about the future lead to particular economic actions, interlocking into social formations. The sum of this is what constitutes the frontier society. The force of the social is phenomenal: it works via the experiences of individuals; to them, the frontier seems as real as anything else in their lives. Abdul, for instance, on entering the world of second-­hand car dealing in Cotonou, was immersed in a prevailing idea of the car trade as a successful business. He adopted the practice of hanging around the cars and resorted to talking about the trade as a ‘good’ one. This formed the backdrop against which his social network of personal contacts unfolded, resulting in obstacles, such as his migrant cousins’ insistence on producing cash, but also enabling him to remain in a world of which he wanted to be part. Looking at entrepreneurial behaviour dynamically through the lens of iterative hermeneutical cycles does not imply that there is only one possible interpretation of the future. In fact, in all the cases, we have seen that entrepreneurs struggle, with themselves as well as with others, o ­ ver – t­o paraphrase the classic American sociologist W.I. ­Thomas – ­the definition of the future situation.1 The Bill Broeksmit case perhaps illustrates this point most evocatively. The quantitative models for pricing CDOs and appraising the risk of harmful price developments that he helped to develop give rise to caution. Broeksmit realized quite soon into the process that the CDO business could thrive only as long as the global economy remained buoyant. Yet he noted how the world around h ­ im – h ­ is superiors at Deutsche in ­particular – ­became myopic about future risk; a belief in a risk-­free world began to settle in, which he warned against. His warnings met with irritation and growing friction, which ultimately proved fatal to Broeksmit. Hence, two parallel interpretations of future developments struggled for dominance, with one prevailing and the other one faltering; that is, till the 2008 crisis proved Broeksmit to be right ex post facto. Broeksmit’s case is also a sharp warning against voluntarism: the erroneous idea that the force of the social can be willed or wished away. Once crystallized, societies (in this case, a network of senior investment bankers) exert pressures on entrepreneurs that may be infinitely stronger than their individual wills. The outcome of struggles over a particular interpretation for the future thus presents the start of yet another iteration of the hermeneutic cycle.

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Social Construction of the Future beyond Global Frontiers The theoretical idea of future-­work in entrepreneurial behaviour came about in a study of global frontiers, tentatively defined as places of new economic activity, often away from the globe’s main metropolises, where new groups of enterprising actors congregate. As was argued in the Introduction, such frontiers typically embody the notion of an open future: the future as a symbolic tabula rasa upon which new ideas of the future can be freely projected. Might this idea also have relevance for entrepreneurial behaviour beyond frontiers? The quest for an answer to this question begins by realizing that frontiers occupy a special position in a hermeneutic gradient of many possible social constructions of the future. One other ideal-­typical position on this gradient is those instances of economic life when not much happens but the passing of time; islands of economic stasis where novelty is eyed with mild suspicion and generally shunned. ­Another  – ­in many ways diametrically ­opposed – ­position regards situations where a Utopian vision of the future takes centre stage, associated with economic millenarian movements. For the purpose of demarcating the theoretical space of the global frontier, I briefly discuss both ideal-­typical positions below.

Island of Economic Stasis Thomas Mann’s ([1901] 1994) acclaimed novel Buddenbrooks presents an interesting example from world literature. This is the fictional (though thoroughly researched)2 three-­generation story of the rise and fall of a wealthy north German Protestant trading family. The first generation is represented by the family patriarch, Johann Buddenbrook, who specializes in a grain business in Lübeck, a former hub of the international Hanseatic League concentrated around the North Sea and the East Sea. The book opens with scenes of a tranquil business enterprise, situated in the early nineteenth century, in which Johann operates a fixed network of trusted suppliers and customers with nothing much happening beyond the patriarch’s daily wanders to the Lübeck stock exchange where he scrutinizes grain prices. When prices are low, he buys; when they are high, he sells; there appears to be little else of interest in the world of business, and the future appears cast in iron, with tomorrow resembling yesterday to a striking degree. Things get interesting though, when, with the passing of time, Johann’s world begins to crumble. Towards the mid-­nineteenth century, Germany entered a phase of rapid industrialization and urbanization, and, with it, the circumstances of running a grain business shifted dramatically.

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Brilliantly captured in Mann’s insightful portrayal, Johann Buddenbrook initially appears to resist the modern era by pretending it is not happening. Ultimately however, he fails to keep the forces of modernization at bay. Rapid changes in communication and t­ransportation – ­such as the telegraph speeding up bourse information and steam-­powered ships and trains speeding up delivery t­ imes – c­ annot be wished or willed away. Moreover, his two sons have different ideas about the family enterprise than Johann has, with one of them squandering the family fortune, eventually ruining the grain business. In other words, underneath the apparent tranquillity of a seemingly timeless business lurked social forces to which Johann Buddenbrook failed to respond. As noted in the Introduction: ‘Every step and every moment of the multitude, even in what are termed the enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future’ (Ferguson [1767] 2007: 164). From the perspective of this study, an interesting question is then: what happens when seemingly predictable conditions suddenly change and those in situ must come to terms with it? Studying this class of case brings with it the particular challenge that not much appears to happen: tolerating ennui then becomes a chief strategy for research. In these circumstances, one has to have the luck of being there when something begins to stir, or, alternatively, to bring historical depth to the study that allows one to scrutinize change. For instance, replacement of a goal-­rational logic may proceed at an imperceptibly small pace of which entrepreneurs themselves are only dimly aware, in which case this has to be pieced together from historical narrative (the Epilogue elaborates the accompanying methodological problem of reconstruction). A special case applies when change is apparent to the observer, although those in the situation itself do not appreciate it as such. However, the possibility must also be entertained that an image of stability may be the projection of a particular presentation of the self. Leaders in a business may benefit from the status quo and adhere to an image of timelessness, and seeking to change it may be seen as an attempt to challenge the premium positions that they hold. This is what happened when Johann simply ignored for a while the fact that the world around him was beginning to shift, perhaps foreseeing that this would compromise his stature as a respectable member of the Lübeck business community.

Economic Millenarian Movements Nesara is a millenarian movement organized around global debt. It originates in a book, Francis Harvey Barnard’s Draining the Swamp: Monetary and Fiscal Policy Reform (2005), which argues that debt is the root cause of society’s economic advancement. The book proposes nothing short of

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a wholesale economic overhaul: replacing income tax with sales tax, abolishing compound interest on secured loans and changing the monetary system. Barnard developed his proposal into a text for a legislative act, called National Economic Security and Recovery Act (N.e.s.a.r.a.), but this died a quiet political death. Barnard’s ideas were subsequently picked up by US internet celebrity Shaini Goodwin (avatar: ‘Dove of Oneness’) who began to spread the false rumour that the act in reality was alive and kicking and being quietly prepared for introduction. This would then take the form of a global reset, with as a consequence the nullifying of all outstanding debt and the pegging of all worldwide currencies to the same standard: gold or silver. But powerful elite forces worked against this, she claimed. She pointed out, for instance, how Nesara’s planned introduction coincided with the Twin Towers terrorist attack: an attempt by the Bush Administration to prevent Nesara from happening. Thus, Goodwin reframed Nesara as a conspiracy theory, an image that she began to peddle through various social media channels. Goodwin subsequently began to make online requests for money; she allegedly needed it to orchestrate a political campaign to lobby successive US Administrations to come clean about Nesara. Although it was packaged in a message of hope, those observing Goodwin critically felt that this was not a neutral request. They pointed out how, before Goodwin got involved in Nesara, she was associated with a sham investment scheme that defrauded thousands of smaller investors out of a total of US$12.5 million. For this, Goodwin was convicted. She was further accused of filing for bankruptcy to evade paying taxes, living in a mobile home, thereby making it difficult for the authorities to apprehend her. It is unknown how much money she accumulated through the Nesara story (Goodwin passed away in 2010).3 Following her death, a second cycle was set in motion. One of the plan’s r­ ecommendations – t­ hat all of the world’s currencies would essentially have the same value, guaranteed against the stock of precious ­metals – l­ed to a surge in demand for ‘cheap’ currency. The basic idea is that, once Nesara happens, the ‘cheap’ currency will suddenly represent a considerably larger value. This triggered a demand for rare and cheap currencies; Iraqi dollars, Zimbabwean dollars and Vietnamese Dong appear to be in especially high demand. Numerous traders specializing in the rare currency trade nowadays thrive in this new business, an unintended consequence of the Nesara conspiracy theory. Economic millenarian movements differ from frontiers in the sense that they are predicated on the idea of a wholesale change, rather than being new (although this certainly plays a role). In this case, Goodwin, considered a charismatic leader in her circle, succeeded in mobilizing followers who were willing to pay for the promise of a better future. She

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came across as a very capable broker, a clairvoyant visionary bolstered by a successful claim about knowing the future; and that future was shaped into the distinctive form of a heaven on earth. Nesara may be an extreme case, but it is not so hard to see a resemblance to the promises of Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes: cheap blood tests for the masses (see the Introduction). Here too, a picture was painted of a new dawn that was right around the corner, only requiring sufficient funds to make it into present reality. What connects these cases is the making of big promises in the absence of evidence. This appears to be specific to economic millenarian movements: the future is willed into existence by a charismatic individual, resulting in the suspension of sensible considerations; in another context, this has been referred to as the creation of a reality distortion field (Isaacson 2015). The challenge for research is apparent: avoiding the collective effervescence that is central to it without being seen as an infidel who must be avoided. It may be worthwhile also to consider adding centrality as an extra dimension to the gradient of possible social constructions of the future. It is not difficult to see how, worldwide, there is an increasing concentration of economic activity in the hands of a shrinking group of mega-­companies: Amazon, Apple and Google control large parts of the global economy. (Incidentally, Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy published in 1942 already foreshadowed this tendency.) It remains an open question as to how such centralizing tendencies in the global economy contribute to particular images of the future. The larger-­scale cases surveyed in this study (Greek aquaculture, Financial America) suggest an accompanying monopolization of future images. It is not without significance that others have likened Steve Jobs’ product presentations to religious sermons, conjuring up an image of CEOs as the high priests of global capitalism. On the one hand, this may be considered a worrying development: monopolization, when left unchecked, can degenerate into pure fantasy and speculation, as we have seen in the Theranos case. On the other hand, mega-­corporations may be the vehicles needed to confront the world’s challenges, as they concentrate the money, skills and technology that are required. Critically following their future-­work, and when necessary correcting this through democratic means, seems an urgent challenge facing us all.

Implications for Economic Practice Although the ambit of this study has been to contribute to a new theoretical perspective on entrepreneurial behaviour that explicitly acknowledges

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the ontogenetic character of time, I end the chapter by making several suggestions for economic practice, in the sphere of economic policy-­making and the running of an enterprise in particular. As we saw in Chapter 5, this study subscribes to a Keynesian idea of government policies having a role in stabilizing a particular interpretation of the future. From this, it follows that a study of macroeconomic policy-­making benefits from an analysis of the future-­narratives that are implied in it. This involves looking for imagery and figures of speech such as metaphors that point towards the future. This suggestion contradicts conventional ideas of macroeconomic policy-­making that focus on incentives for entrepreneurial behaviour. As I have shown, particularly in Chapter 5, the conventional idea is essentially timeless: it mystifies entrepreneurial behaviour as a cost-­benefit analysis without regard for what entrepreneurs think can happen tomorrow. Following from the ontogenetic interpretation, entrepreneurs may catch on to a particular future-­narrative, an idea about the future to which they can relate and subscribe, or, in the negative, that they abhor and stay away from. With this comes a hermeneutical challenge. Rather than understanding the policy narrative in itself, it must be considered how entrepreneurs who are the target audience of the policy see it and how their interpretations translate into observable behaviour. Of particular importance in the study of economic policy-­making, as Chapter 5 indicated, is to avoid the temptation to regard members of some entrepreneurial community as one and the same thing. To return to an earlier observation, the analysis of policy-­making must focus on carefully delineated social groups and other social units (networks, firms) that function as hermeneutic units. The formal representation of an economy as an organogram may present a first indication, but, here too, it must be considered that it is part of a presentation of the self. Particular groups of entrepreneurs may be more central to the organogram than others, and looking at marginal groups may be as revealing as a focus on central groups. And what to make of professional networks that transcend the confines of the firm or even entire economic sectors? Business studies are often sector-­centric, but it remains to be seen whether entrepreneurs view their own future-­work in relation to the confines of economic sectors. Further, whereas some government policy may be organized around one and the same future vision (at the moment the Dutch government advocates for economic greening programmes), various groups of entrepreneurs may arrive at a markedly different interpretation of it and may consequently resort to a different behaviour. One and the same economic policy can (and in fact often does) therefore result in a far larger diversity of responses than was intended in the policy.

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Similar lessons apply to the analysis of business management and accountancy. Firms and companies have a formal representation in the form of a business organization’s organogram, but from this study follows that the business organogram is central to a presentation of the self. For instance, the typical business organogram looks like a pyramid, with the implicit idea that power increases as one moves towards the apex, and that it decreases towards the base where rank-­and-­file workers live their lives. However, that does little justice to how in practice relations between apex and base are often the consequence of negotiating, rather than of overpowering. For the analysis of future-­work, this implies that whereas a particular vision of the future may be decreed from the apex, when this meets with indifference at the base probably not much will happen in terms of moving forward. Moreover, various hermeneutical units within companies or firms may be at odds with one another, subscribing to radically different versions of the future. There is a long history of organizational inertia that has puzzled many observers, and appraising the various future-­work practices that one encounters among various hermeneutic units holds the key to understanding this. A special, practical contribution regards the valuation of a company. In the capitalist economic order, the stock price is widely accepted as a default proxy for a company’s value. In an ideal representation of things, stock prices follow an accounting logic: from financial information synthesized in the balance sheet, one can compute company value as debt plus equity minus cash. In accountancy circles, there is much discussion as to what rules are followed to label some economic property as debt, or equity, and cash. Accountancy as a modern professional practice emerged at a juncture in human history when accounting tended to follow a productivist logic, focusing on tangible input and output: the ideals of blue-­collar capitalism. The post-­productivist turn of the second half of the twentieth century riding a wave of financial capitalism compromised earlier accountancy ideals. For instance, how to factor in the depreciation of derivatives before they reach maturity? An even broader question: how to value companies whose economic activities are not immediately apparent, for instance because what they have on offer is merely a promise of great fortunes in the future? Such promises can be solid, and the stock value that develops consequently may indeed be a realistic reflection of some useful service, technology or product in the near future. We have also seen, however, how the anticipation of future fortunes can acquire the meaning of what sociologists refer to as a positional good: something that becomes the object of desire simply because others desire it. In such cases, gleaning the value of a company from the stock price that it commands makes no sense.

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To avoid unfounded stock-­value optimism, this study proposes the inclusion of what is going on inside a company or a firm in terms of future-­work in any consideration of the company’s or firm’s value. This begins by looking into those entrepreneurial events where claims about the future are particularly pronounced. Official venues such as product presentations, board meetings or business conferences present fruitful starting points: these are the frontstages of the economic theatre where entrepreneurs can be expected to make the strongest claim about a knowable future. Such venues further make visible the key nodes in the hermeneutical network in which ideas of a knowable future are formed and reverberate. Attention for the recruitment of new members into such networks as well as for the exclusion of those considered outsiders, is an important next step: hermeneutic networks and groups are subject to both fission and fusion, thereby having an impact on the configuration of goal-­rational and value-­rational behaviour. In a next round, the various backstages of the entrepreneurial spectacle need to be considered: the intimate social circles and settings where there is more room to contemplate future indeterminacy, and where there is less need to uphold a favourable image of a visionary foreteller. Making future-­work central in the valuation of companies or firms is not the same as disregarding financial information. A study of balance sheets, annual reports and other textual artefacts of high capitalism is in fact essential for understanding how entrepreneurs consider the future. As discussed in Chapters 4 and 5, numbers are part of the story that entrepreneurs (like to) tell themselves and others. It is difficult to understand numbers as stories in and by themselves: there is a risk of imputing a logic where there may be none. That would be to fall into the trap of the very epistemogenetic interpretation of time of which this study is critical. Numbers require contextualization in the social world in which they are formed and circulate. This begins by sitting down with entrepreneurs and taking stock of their interpretation of the numbers in their version of the story. Paraphrasing Clifford Geertz, the study of entrepreneurial behaviour is not an experimental science in search of laws but an interpretive one in search of meaning. This remains just as much a challenge today as when these words were written half a century ago, as we grapple with the challenges of entrepreneurial behaviour in the twenty-­ first century. I come to the end of this study. The problem that I sought to address appears to be as relevant today as when I began my inquiry into entrepreneurial behaviour more than two decades ago. That is, whereas capitalism can be a productive force bringing prosperity and welfare to many of us, its recent history shows that this positive outcome is neither automatic

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nor self-­evident. Entrepreneurial behaviour can go haywire and bring economic ruin. The economic fallout from the 2008 financial crisis is a stark reminder of the possibility of destructive failure in capitalism; and even a gentle scratch on the surface of modern world history unveils several other evocative examples (Galbraith 1994), suggesting a pattern of normal accidents in global capitalism (Perrow [1962] 1999): the pattern of frenzied excess and anxious withdrawal of entrepreneurs alluded to in the quotation at the start of this chapter. It has been argued that a new normal accident may be in the making (Foroohar 2019). Consider, for instance, the unbridled growth of mega-­ tech companies that make grand claims about the future. In 2021, Facebook launched the Metaverse: a 3D version of the internet that is presented as a Utopia of constant global interconnectedness. Another example is the rapid rise of financial apps such as Robinhood that, under the guise of the democratization of stock trading, open up a lucrative world hitherto reserved for a small group of experts, although in reality blurring the boundary between investing, gambling and gaming (Kolhatkar 2021). Virtual currency such as Bitcoin presents a final example. Such currencies bring with them a promise of money free of government regulation, originally inspiring especially the libertarian minded, yet in reality virtual currencies appear to follow the tide of speculative force (Vigna and Casey 2015). Seeking to steer capitalism away from negative outcomes is often the reason for widespread calls for economic regulation: more regulation, if one is inclined towards the political left, and less regulation, according to those with liberal-­conservative political leanings. Understandable as these calls may be, this study casts a slightly different light on the regulation problem: as an important ingredient in social constructions of the future. This insight comes with the important consequence that attempting to regulate entrepreneurial behaviour through external intervention without considering the future-­work that goes into the behaviour is not likely to stave off a new round of normal accidents. Those who call for a stronger regulatory role for the state can see evidence in this study of how state intervention becomes part of entrepreneurs’ future-­work in a way that defies simple prediction. Rather than assuming some positive effect (as is often the case), the findings presented in this study instead give reasons to investigate how entrepreneurs see the state’s efforts to shape the future. State intervention, as we have seen, may be a key ingredient in stabilizing particular expectations of the future. This study furthers suggests close consideration of how, under a similar regime of economic reform, various different entrepreneurial responses may form. How this plays out in various cases cannot be inferred from a

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priori precepts about economic behaviour. In one sentence: we need more case studies, not conjecture. Those who call for a weaker state role, often hinging on the argument of self-­regulation as the way out of stifling overregulation, will find evidence in this study that the crystallization of entrepreneurs’ future expectations into a stable pattern of economic decision-­making is not a matter of course. An important precondition for this to happen, according to this study, is that such expectations are moored to an observable reality that can be checked by all interested parties. Severing the tie between an observable world and ideas about the future may set in motion cycles of speculation and unfounded fantasy. Future expectations are often fickle, in which case entrepreneurs’ future-­work rests on quicksand and may blow away at the slightest breeze. It seems that those moments when the hard sand suddenly loses its carrying capacity and turns fluid should occupy our special attention. In either c­ ase – m ­ ore regulation or l­ess – f­uture-­work emerges as a process rather than as a fixed thing; and inferring it from law-­like regularities in the sense of the laws of physics would seem to be a problematic assumption in light of the evidence presented in this study. This logically follows from the ontogenetic interpretation of time that underpins my analysis of entrepreneurial behaviour. A more comprehensive understanding of future-­work in entrepreneurial behaviour hence presents a special challenge in our understanding of the twenty-­ first-­ century capitalism needed to steer it towards a healthy future. With this study, I have tried to make a small though meaningful contribution to resolving this challenge. I hope that others will follow.

Notes 1. The Thomas theorem is as follows: ‘If people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences’ (Thomas and Thomas [1928] 2017: 571–72); or, people act according to the meaning that they impute to situations. Once enacted, these behavioural consequences or social formations have an impact on how people define future situations, on how they continue to think and act. 2. Four years after Buddenbrooks was published, Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ([1904] 2001) appeared. Thomas Mann immediately recognized the strong parallels between the two ­books – ­one literary, the other historical and sociological (Ridley 1987). 3. Most of this information is gleaned from a BBC Trending podcast discussing Goodwin’s role (Griffin 2021). There is also a 2007 documentary, Waiting for Nesara, which portrays ­the – m ­ ostly former M ­ ormon – ­followers of Nesara. Goodwin’s media presence can be gleaned from a long presentation in Los Angeles in 2005; see

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osSOuhsh9p4 (a copy is stored in the author’s digital repository). Unum Quadraginta’s Tier 4B: Profiting from the Global Currency Reset and Currency Revaluation in the Age of Gesara (2020) was also consulted for this chapter.

° Epilogue Value and Validity of the Case Study Method [The case study method] requires a greater emphasis in fieldwork on the recording of the actions of individuals as individuals, as personalities, and not just as occupants of particular statuses. … When the case material is later presented in the analysis, the As, Bs, and Cs of so many of the situationally ‘apt illustrations’ will regain their identity as Tom, Dick, and Harry, or Jack and Jill: they are now actors in a series of different circumstances who make greater or less use of an element of choice to suit the requirements of a particular situation. —Jaap van Velsen, ‘The Extended Case Method and Situational Analysis’

Introduction This study is steeped in the ethnographic case study method, based on which I have offered several suggestions for rethinking entrepreneurial behaviour. There is considerable confusion about the knowledge claims of the case study method and a fuller account of it is therefore in order. Important epistemological questions that suggest themselves are: is the case study method a scientific method and, if so, then what is the scope of the findings presented in the case? Is it, for instance, possible to generalize case study research beyond the confines of the case, and what is the relation with what we conventionally call social theory? In methodological parlance, these important questions point to problems regarding the value and validity of case study research, which are discussed more fully below.1 First, however, we must come to terms with the important question: why use an ethnographic case study approach in the first place? After all, there appears to be little consensus in the social science community about the epistemological grounds of case study research, including the methodological procedures that go into crafting cases as well as into judging whether ethnographic cases yield valid insights. So why adopt a methodological approach that comes with its own set of problems (Gerring 2007)? Those are relevant points, but, as I will argue soon, the ethnographic case study ­method – ­sometimes called the analysis of a social drama (Turner 1980) – offers an advantage over and beyond other methodological approaches in

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the social study of entrepreneurship. Briefly noted, this advantage consists of interpreting detailed observations of particular events or junctures in terms of wider frames of reference, such as implied in the van Velsen quotation at the beginning of this Epilogue, in a way that other social science approaches cannot (Zussman 2004). Social structure plays a special role in what follows. In studies of entrepreneurship, we often find references to structural regularities as they emanate from the prevailing economic system (in the twenty-­first century: global capitalism), or from macroeconomic policies (in the age of economic reform: austerity), or from the prevailing culture (in the neoliberal era: the spirit of rational choice). These structural regularities are seen to play out in entrepreneurial behaviour, but the relation between structure and behaviour or action is a contested issue. It appears that the way in which studies of entrepreneurship deal with social structure is important in the various methodological approaches that they embrace; this presents an important backdrop to my usage of the case study method. To foreshadow the discussion that follows, here I distinguish between structured approaches, which attribute primacy to pre-­existing social structures and depend on apt illustration and thin description as their chief methodological devices, and social interactionist approaches, which view social structure as an emergent property, corresponding with the case study method. These distinctions come with important ramifications for linking the image of entrepreneurship developed in the case study to wider frames of reference in a process often referred to as generalization, which is a central ingredient in the discussion. After thus clarifying the value and validity of the case study method, I continue by raising the question of how the case study method can work together with other research strategies, especially those that belong to a very different intellectual tradition. For instance, entrepreneurs rely on numbers such as those represented in the balance sheet. Also, their daily language teems with references to numbers and the manipulation of numbers through calculation (this is key to homo economicus; see the Introduction and Chapter 4). Numbers are hence an important ingredient in how entrepreneurs, and the companies and firms with which they work, present themselves to themselves and to the rest of the world. The study of numbers is typically considered the domain of accountancy however, which is methodologically not a natural bedfellow of ethnographic researchers. Further, in a study of twenty-­first-­century entrepreneurship, the internet, especially social media, is ubiquitous. Yet, the study of social media is considered the specialist domain of communication and media studies, and less so of ethnography. To enrich the case study method with such non-­ ethnographic strategies, I propose making use of the methodological term

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‘social symphony’. This term advocates a multidisciplinary collaboration along the lines of a musical symphony, in which social science disciplines are likened to the various instrument groups comprising the symphony orchestra. The Epilogue ends with a short meditation on the purpose of the case study method, especially how it connects with a processual understanding of time in entrepreneurial behaviour.

Structured Approaches in the Study of Entrepreneurship Structured approaches in entrepreneurship reason from external social structures towards entrepreneurial behaviour. In this group of approaches, social structures are considered as part of an independent, or exogenous, reality that is rigid in proportion to the forces locked inside entrepreneurial behaviour. Hence, the way in which the structure acts upon the behaviour is considered a central problem for research, whereas the opposite direction of the relation is considered a less acute problem. Structured approaches in entrepreneurship studies appear to come in two different flavours: overstructured approaches that infer entrepreneurial behaviour from macrosocial structures, and understructured approaches in which entrepreneurial behaviour is related to the microstructures of interaction. They come with different ideas about studying entrepreneurship, especially about the relation between description, interpretation and explanation, to which I now turn.

Overstructured Approaches and Apt Illustrations The central epistemological idea of overstructured approaches is that social structures present themselves to entrepreneurs as a set of incentives or nudges that steer behaviour towards a particular direction. The idea is further that the nudges and incentives are mentally internalized and naturalized, and in the analysis of entrepreneurial behaviour they are consequently considered unproblematic. My study critically examines this mode of explanation at various places in the book. For instance, a central tenet of economic reform as we saw in Chapter 5 on the Greek aquaculture sector is to foster a pro-­business economic environment to which enterprising actors are expected to respond by making investments, setting in motion an entrepreneurial supply response. Likewise, as can be gleaned from Chapter 1, it can be argued that global economic frontiers are critical junctures in human history where one set of economic structures is replaced with another one through the vehicle of

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innovating individuals who introduce new labour-­ saving methods or technologies. When applied to the broader problem of this study, it is perhaps not difficult to see how the overstructured approach rhymes with the epistemogenetic interpretation of time. Remember the central premise of this interpretation: the past and the present offer a sufficiently dependable basis for entrepreneurs to project the future. An analysis of entrepreneurship thus begins by appraising the structure of incentives and nudges, which are then used to explain the behaviour. This type of approach is central in the survey method, which is popular in entrepreneurship studies today. The work of organization scholar Geert Hofstede presents a case in point of the reasoning that underpins the survey approach. Hofstede reconstructs what he terms ‘national cultures’ through large-­scale nationwide surveys in which standardized questions are submitted to a statistically representative sample of informants. Part of the national culture is ‘uncertainty avoidance’, which Hofstede identifies as: ‘The extent to which the members of a culture feel threatened by ambiguous or unknown situations and have created beliefs and institutions that try to avoid these’ (Hofstede 1997: 21). The uncertainty index constructed from the survey questions is subsequently statistically related to reported entrepreneurial activity in a society, functioning as an explanation for economic growth or decline. In uncertainty-­adopting countries, so the reasoning goes, entrepreneurs are prodded towards innovation and the making of new investments, thereby contributing to economic growth (de Jong 2009).2 The uncertainty index is a calculated average, which means that there may be considerable variation in responses on the level of individual entrepreneurs (Venaik and Brewer 2010), but in the end these responses cancel one other out statistically. It can certainly be argued that the future bears a resemblance to the past and the present, and it stands to reason that this follows from the resilience of society’s structures: the wider economic environment, the prevailing culture and so on. Such structures are important institutional anchors upon which entrepreneurial action rests. However, whether social structures have a compelling, inescapable character in the sense that the terms ‘structure’ and ‘nudging’ often seems to suggest (for a widely cited critique of this point in Hofstede’s work, see McSweeney 2002), to a considerable extent determining entrepreneurial behaviour, remains a point for further inquiry. The cases presented in this study rather suggest that reasoning along the lines of continuity ought to be treated with considerable hesitation. For one thing, the ethnographic material presented in this study exposes how entrepreneurs rather ascribe continuity to the passing of time, and they do this in an attempt to control the future: making the future through claiming it has something to do with the past. This suggests that

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the notion of temporal continuity is actually part of a social construction of the future and that it cannot be seen as some natural property of the economic landscape where entrepreneurs live their lives and prepare their further steps. Imputing great importance to the role of structures in understanding entrepreneurial behaviour has methodological consequences, in particular in terms of how empirical evidence in support of it is gathered and presented. Typically, the overstructured approach is reliant on apt illustrations. Apt i­ llustration – a­ term coined by South African–British anthropologist Max ­Gluckman – ­describes a simple event or action in such a way that it serves as a persuasive illustration of some general principle (Gluckman 1961; see also Evens and Handelman 2008). Gluckman coined that term to pinpoint the intellectual flaws of structural functionalism, which occupied the social sciences during the middle decades of the twentieth century, portraying society as a functionally integrated system (Kuper [1973] 2015). Although structural functionalism no longer occupies the social sciences as a central problem, it can be argued that its central premise, namely, that society is a system of structurally integrated social institutions that all serve a function in holding together society, still reigns in much economic thinking. Market economics, with its reliance on equilibrium prices, represents one example; new institutional economics focusing on how social institutions such as kinship and religion save costs represents another (Jackson 2002). Apt illustrations are popular in the corpus of social literature on entrepreneurship, yet from a methodological perspective we must ask the question: how can we relate them to other apt illustrations; in other words: how can we link them to the world outside the one that is described with the illustration? Again, structures play an important role. Remember that the researcher selects the apt illustration to shed light on social structure in entrepreneurship. Looking for a typical case is therefore an important task in this approach. Thus, he/she puts an a priori framework in place that drives the sampling process of the apt illustration, and that same framework also functions as the basis for making generalizations. In fact, because of the a priori nature of selecting that part of the social structure deemed relevant for understanding entrepreneurship, it can be argued that the structure itself is the generalization. Thus, the explanans and the explanandum are essentially of the same kind. A special methodological problem of this approach, in addition to the quest for a typical case, is how to avoid tautological reasoning and instead adhere to falsification: an important scientific test according to which the validity of explanation is measured by its capacity to withstand rival explanations. Apt illustration may have its merits on the level of describing entrepreneurial behaviour,

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but because of the a priori nature of identifying the social structure, its real possibilities for generalizing are therefore limited.

Understructured Approaches and Thin Description Understructured approaches in the study of entrepreneurship look for particular behavioural properties in entrepreneurial behaviour, such as the propensity to take risks or the capacity to innovate. Such behavioural traits are considered in the context of the microstructure of the economic decision problem. Key to entrepreneurs’ decision problem is the information that he/she can access. Economic information can be flawed and encompass only partial knowledge of the properties that are relevant for making a good deal (such as whether what you have on offer is what a buyer wants) (Stiglitz 2000), or it may be asymmetric when one party commands greater access to knowledge/information (such as whether a car is in good condition or is actually a ‘lemon’) (Akerlof 1970). Or information may be absent, and the task ahead for the entrepreneur, in that case, consists of conjuring it up in a future presentation of things. Of course, information plays an important role in my study too. For instance, in Chapter 3 we have seen how finding out about price differentials is central to making successful car deals, and in Chapter 4 we have seen how information in the sense of predictions from derivatives pricing models altered the face of banking. The understructured approach, like the structured approach, bears a resemblance to the epistemogenetic interpretation of time. By reducing entrepreneurship to an economic decision problem, questions of information take central stage. Information may be perfect or not, and there may be varying degrees of information availability. On the decision-­maker’s side, there may be limits to the information-­processing capabilities of entrepreneurs: information can be too complex and exceed cognitive limits, or cognitive limits may be hampered by anxiety and stress (Mullainathan and Shafir 2013). In spite of this, for proponents of the understructured approach, there appears little doubt that there is a knowable world out there. In fact, what passes as knowledge is seen readily in terms of information (Beuving 2013); consequently, when there is none, nothing very sensible can be further said about entrepreneurial behaviour. Entrepreneurial behaviour beyond the confines of the known knowns or the known unknowns is seen as perhaps an interesting universe for academic speculation, but not something that warrants serious study. A special class of studies specializes in precisely this ­problem – ­what to do with entrepreneurial behaviour when real information is ­absent – ­but it adds a new problem to the methodological riddle, namely, that social structure plays an even more reduced role. Such studies focus on laying

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bare the cognitive or mental foundations of entrepreneurial behaviour by asking the question of what it takes for a person to act in the absence of future knowledge. They make much of a special behavioural property, termed business acumen, which is seen in the light of seeing new and profitable economic opportunity in a way that others cannot. Such foreseeing obviously yields strategic information through which an economic advantage may be acquired. Chapter 2 explained how this view is akin to the interpretations of Barth and Schumpeter. Barth stressed that successful entrepreneurs anticipate the social behaviour of others, allowing them a peep into the future; Schumpeter portrays entrepreneurs as figures who can somehow foresee the future benefit of introducing new technologies or combining existing ones into something new. Exploiting future events that few others can see or foretell is hence central to this strand in the understructured approach to entrepreneurship, thereby making much of the special psychological qualities that go into entrepreneurial behaviour. Steeped in cognition and psychology, understructured approaches, methodologically speaking, bear a resemblance to what was termed in another publication ‘thin description’ (Beuving and de Vries 2015: 30). Thin description means describing without attempting to move beyond immersion in the empirical record that includes the structural context in which a particular behaviour unfolds. For the strand that focuses on the role of information, description usually does not include the task of clarifying the parameters of the decision-­making problem. The behavioural economics discipline seems to be the most closest aligned to this idea. Behavioural economists discovered in specially designed experimental studies that the specific formulation, or framing, of the information problem matters for the decisions that follow (Tversky and Kahneman 1981). This is coupled with the idea that decision-­makers are more averse to possible losses than responsive to possible gains (which in their vocabulary is called the response asymmetry). Hence, much attention is devoted to analysing language: to appraising the relation between using a particular vocabulary or metaphors in the framing of the decision problem and the resultant economic outcome. The particulars of the various economic decision-­makers are not considered especially relevant, nor does it matter much where in the world the decision problem is situated: it looks for universals in economic behaviour. The strand in the understructured approach that emphasizes the special psychological traits in entrepreneurial behaviour looks different on a descriptive level than the experimental approach of behavioural economics. Presented as biographies or company histories, they usually feature particular individual e­ntrepreneurs – o ­ ften successful business people whose business successes inspire awe, or particular companies or

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firms that are held in high esteem, or that have made some significant contribution such as the development of a novel product. The corpus of business literature specializing in such studies often focuses on the unique qualities of the described business person or company. These are often descriptions without much reference to the policy environment or to the global political-­economic conditions in which entrepreneurship functions, making the description thin not in terms of pages devoted to the description, but in terms of paying attention to the underlying social structures. Such thin descriptions are not without merit, as they may be worked into a more comprehensive description that acknowledges the social structure in entrepreneurial behaviour. Yet, reading this requires close attention to the structure thereby revealed: observations implied in the description of the functioning of social networks or the consequences of policy (Wennekers [1994] 2017). I now turn to the generalization problem of the understructured approach. The strand that construes entrepreneurial behaviour as an information problem looks for universals. In the behavioural economics methodology, for instance, in an ideal representation of things, the maxims of randomized sampling are followed, meaning that the findings of the experimental decision problems may be considered statistically representative of the larger population. In practice, this is a flawed representation however, as convenience sampling is often applied. Researchers resorting to the framing approach alluded to previously, for instance, recruited their university students as informants for the experiments, based on which they published their ground-­breaking work. It has been suggested that this severely hampers the generalizability of their findings, especially the degree to which economic decision-­makers are loss averse: a higher level of education attainment appears to make humans less loss averse (Lewis 2017). Despite such reservations, this is not a fundamental problem from the viewpoint of the procedure of generalizing through a randomized procedure. From the viewpoint of this study however, a fundamental point is that this study does not look for universals in entrepreneurial behaviour, but rather seeks to understand better the various interconnections of goal-­ rational and value-­rational entrepreneurial behaviour, including the social conditions under which they emerge. The second strand of this approach presents yet another challenge in considering generalization. This strand, as indicated, tends to emphasize the uniqueness of the setting that informs the entrepreneurial behaviour. In other words, it sees each company, business enterprise or entrepreneurial initiative as an independent reality: a microcosm that generates its own behavioural patterns. We frequently see this approach in company histories or in biographies of particular entrepreneurs. The companies are portrayed

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as one-­of-­a-kind, and usually little reference is made to the broader sector or network of companies in which it functions. Likewise, biographies of entrepreneurs written along these lines are more inclined to emphasize their protagonist’s special talent for identifying business opportunities than to show something of the world in which such talents are organized. The key message is that the uniqueness of the case prevents it from making a contribution to broader processes that go into entrepreneurial behaviour. Consequently, understructured approaches have little significance beyond the empirical context described and usually offer little in terms of a more general, or greater, understanding of entrepreneurial behaviour.

The Interactional Approach and the Analysis of Social Situations In the interactional approach that informs the social study of entrepreneurial behaviour, social structure is also considered of central importance.3 However, unlike overstructured and understructured approaches, structure is not seen as an external reality that is given a priori; instead, social structures are considered an emergent property of social life. Hence, this approach considers how the structure acts upon the behaviour, at the same time focusing on the opposite direction of the relation: the consequences of behaviour for structure. Being akin to the hermeneutical tradition of interpretivism (Winch [1958] 2008), it is particularly interested in gleaning how social interaction can coagulate into something that is larger than the situation of the interaction itself and, in some special cases, even acquire structural properties. In the Conclusion, I made a similar point when positing that the consequences of a previous cycle of social interaction present the conditions for future behaviour in a next cycle, with time advancing as a sequential iteration of the various cycles. When observing entrepreneurial behaviour, one thus observes more than just the behaviour itself; what one actually sees is structure in action. Embracing this dynamic view of structure, i.e. as an expression of everyday social interaction, is what occupies us in the further discussion of the interactional approach. It is not difficult to see how the interactional approach is steeped in the ontogenetic perspective of time. Its basic premise is that the future is a social construction, meaning that entrepreneurs work towards what happens next through social practices, rituals and language. The analysis of entrepreneurial behaviour thus begins by asking questions about how entrepreneurs consider time, especially the unknown unknowns of the future; and subsequently, how their understandings find expression in those with whom they interact socially, in ritualized practices that smooth

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or balance out future uncertainty, and in what they tell themselves and others to the same effect. Consequently, there is no assumption of a knowable world that is waiting out there to be discovered; instead, the vista is one of shared understandings that may evolve into a collective belief about what the future has in store. Such shared beliefs, in turn, have the capacity to animate entrepreneurial behaviour, for instance by inspiring particular groups and individuals to invest in new technology, or to hire new hands, or to open credit lines with financial institutions. Through these motions, the future actually unfolds, riding the tide of social interaction. To capture this particular aspect of entrepreneurial behaviour, the interactional approach relies on the ethnographic case study method. This method was coined by Max Gluckman in contradistinction to the apt illustration, treated in the previous sections on the structured approaches. Gluckman offered the following insightful definition: ‘The case study is a method that seeks to illuminate principles of social organization by examining in detail a single social event, or case’ (Gluckman 1961: 13). Thus, rather than making a priori assumptions about the working of particular social structures such as economic systems, or economic policies, or entire cultures, such structures are seen as having a place in the hermeneutical cycle alluded to above. That is, entrepreneurs make sense of social structures and they orient their behaviour towards them, in the process recreating or changing the structures. Gluckman himself elaborated this method with a portrayal of the events around the opening of a bridge in colonial South Africa. Through his detailed description of the various groups that were present as well as their various interactions, one can glean the everyday manifestation of racial distinctions that occupied South Africa at the time (and still does) (Gluckman 1958). Thick description, a term popularized by the US anthropologist Clifford Geertz (though actually coined much earlier by the phenomenological philosopher Gilbert Ryle), is central in the ethnographic case study method. Geertz denoted with it the combined hermeneutical practices of description, interpretation and explanation in what has come to be seen as the yardstick for good ethnographic work (Geertz [1973] 1993). Thick description differs from thin description in that it adds interpretation and explanation to a description of some behaviour or event. Interpretation can be understood as an ideal that attempts to see the world through the eyes of the entrepreneurs themselves, seeking to capture how they make sense of it. Explanation connects the interpretation to the world of social science discourse: the universe of abstract stories about society. Unlike thin description, which has little interest in connecting with wider frames of reference, thick description thus considers society’s structures as key ingredients in what ultimately becomes a three-­tiered

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approach in entrepreneurial behaviour that includes, but is not limited to, description. Generalization of case study research consequently differs from what we have seen in the overstructured and understructured approaches. Most particularly, the conditions for making wider inferences are not specified a priori, but rather allowed to emerge from the empirical findings (Flyvbjerg 2006). Whereas the researcher may enter his/her study of entrepreneurial behaviour with preliminary ideas about the structural aspects that go into that ­behaviour – i­n fact, I would argue that this is an important element of preparation, also doing justice to the hard work of our f­orebears – ­these are deliberately treated as preliminary ideas, or as foreshadowed problems. The British anthropologist Malinowski coined this latter term to denote the universe of concepts with which one enters the field, thereby pointing towards a central problematique as tentatively formulated problem fields (Malinowski [1949] 1979). In the case of my study, how does future time manifest itself in entrepreneurial behaviour? The usual suspects for the study of entrepreneurship are, as we have seen, the policy environment, or the economic system, or the culture that can be expected to operate on entrepreneurship, but what comes out of it cannot be predicted beforehand. Once the social structure has been allowed to reveal itself in a study of entrepreneurial behaviour, more abstract ideas about it begin to form, for example, in this study, how entrepreneurs shape the future through their collective future-­work. This is important, as the vehicle for generalization is on the level of abstract reflection, not on the level of empirical detail. A reference to the structural context of the economic sector makes this clear. Economic policy-­makers like to think of entrepreneurs and their companies as being organized in economic sectors: particular clusters of economic activity that outwardly present themselves as a unitary, functional whole, such as the second-­hand car sector in Benin, the fishing sector in Uganda and so forth. But the key question that is pertinent in a case study methodology is this: what does the sector as a structure look like to a particular group of entrepreneurs? The studied entrepreneurs may feel part of a sector, and the sector may delineate the broader network of their interpersonal social relations upon which they draw and depend in their everyday lives, and in that case, it stands to reason that one should begin formulating questions about what holds the sectors together as a functional whole and how this shapes entrepreneurial behaviour. Yet, as we have seen in this study, there is also a real possibility that sector will emerge as an outsider term, popular among policy-­makers trying to comprehend economic events, yet with limited significance in the daily lives of entrepreneurs themselves. In that case, one has to look for other frames of reference in which entrepreneurship functions.

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A further problem considers the logical limits of the generalization: how to stave off overgeneralizing the findings of one’s case. We must remember that in interactionist approaches, case studies are selected to expose the working of a particular aspect of the social structure, not the entirety of the structure itself. By learning about this particular aspect, we can begin to formulate new questions that can be addressed in a subsequent round of case research, hopefully yielding a greater understanding of the social structure; such is the nature of scientific advancement. Atypical cases have a special role in tackling this methodological conundrum, as they can contribute to revealing the limits of the social structure. US sociologist Howard Becker’s seminal Outsiders (Becker [1963] 2018) deserves special mention. Becker studied groups in US society that were considered marginal at the time, such as marijuana users. Becker was interested in grasping the role of social rules in holding society together. However, rather than focusing on those social structures that work towards the enforcement of the rules, he considered the opposite process of rule breaking. By carefully selecting cases of what he termed deviant groups, Becker thus began to appreciate the boundaries of rule enforcement, especially by considering how dominant society, which thrives on the idea of rule enforcement, sustains this idea by relegating deviant groups to the fringes of society where they are less visible. In my own study, the Bill Broeksmit case may be considered atypical: his was a lone, warning voice in an ocean of banker confidence, unveiling the operation of centrifugal and centripetal social forces in banking. Yet through it, we learnt important lessons about the social forces locked inside investment banking. Two more considerations inform our discussion of generalization: the nature of explanation and the construction of thick description. Let me begin with an explanation. You may remember that it is not so much that the thick description of the case study revolves around a full description of entrepreneurial behaviour and the broader field in which it functions, but rather that the description must be considered as a heuristic device towards interpretation and, ultimately, explanation. In case study research, the explanatory principle is that of scientific explanation, not causal explanation. This is important, as the two are often confused. A causal explanation looks at how designated factors in a social structure operate on some behaviour. Such factors are considered external to the behaviour itself, and analysis typically consists of making an inventory of statistical regularities that structure the relation between the factors and the behaviour (Winch [1958] 2008). The work of the aforementioned Geert Hofstede once again comes to mind. The uncertainty index constructed from the survey questions was causally related to reported entrepreneurial activity in a society, functioning as an explanation for economic growth or

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decline (de Jong 2009). In uncertainty-­avoiding countries, so the reasoning goes, entrepreneurs are not likely to innovate and make new investments, thereby contributing to economic stagnation. Scientific explanation, on the other hand, reasons from the case material, and ‘it focuses on the process through which the analyst draws conclusions about the essential linkage between two or more characteristics in terms of some explanatory schema’ (Mitchell 1983: 199–200; see also Small 2009). Hence, scientific explanation rhymes with the principles of grounded theory: allowing abstract thoughts to gradually emerge from empirical findings (Glaser and Corbin [1998] 2008). The difference between scientific explanation and causal explanation is illuminated by my study of Greek aquaculture. Greece scores 100 per cent on Hofstede’s uncertainty index, suggesting that Greek entrepreneurs completely avoid novelty and risk: they sit on their hands and wait for better times, so to speak. Within this context of uncertainty avoidance, various outcomes may be observed, however; entrepreneurial behaviour is not a mechanistic response. The company histories of Galaxidi and Selonda showed how, whereas the former worked towards the future with great caution, step-­by-­step, considering a range of possible outcomes, the latter resorted to grand gestures with the purpose of enchanting the future. I argued that this is the consequence of differences in future-­work: the social relations, language and ritual that structure entrepreneurs’ perceptions of the future and its associated uncertainties. In these two cases, different ideas of the future formed, resulting in major differences in entrepreneurial behaviour. Scientific explanation that considers carefully the figurative logic of the behaviour can thus add to a causal explanation, as it makes visible behavioural factors that operate beyond the context, analytically relating the variation in the observed entrepreneurial responses to the entrepreneurs’ meaning-­making practices. Despite these differences in intellectual ambition, causal reasoning is not irrelevant to the case study method. Parts of the entrepreneurial behaviour described in this study cannot be explained with reference to future-­work alone. The Greek case once again presents a clear example. The fallout from the 2008 financial crisis compelled the European Central Bank to step in and sanitize the banking system. The banks had to make serious cuts in their credit lines, resulting in a drying up of much-­needed funds for the struggling aquaculture companies. This fundamentally altered the context in which the aquaculture entrepreneurs operated, although the increased ECB supervision was not a result of a particular view of the future. There are further law-­like regularities in the economy that impact on entrepreneurial behaviour. Consider, for instance, Schumpeter’s thesis that capitalist development tends towards the creation of monopolies, ultimately putting

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a break on innovation (Schumpeter [1942] 2010). Something along those lines seems to have happened in the Greek case, although it is important to mention that this study identified major digressions from this pattern too. Considering how entrepreneurs interpret such external patterns, and respond to them, is thus a vital ingredient of the ethnographic case study method. Regarding the construction of thick description, the particular narrative form of case study research may be confusing.4 On the one hand, we can see how well-­written thick description conveys an element of co-­ presence – b ­ eing ­there – o ­ r reading a narrative about some behaviour as if one had been there to see what the ethnographic researcher observed (Hannerz 2003). That, however, is not the same as saying that everything that happens in an extended case unfolded in exactly that way. For one thing, a case study needs elements of fiction to become palatable. Merely reporting the facts of the social structure is not likely to win over the audience: the social structure needs to be given meaning to resonate with the audience’s frames of interpretation (Beuving 2021).5 To be effective in that, the facts of the social structure need to be interwoven into a story that has a plot and a narrative arc, attributes motives to protagonists and clarifies relations between them, and works towards a narrative climax that brings intellectual revelation. Case study research is thus storytelling, though for obvious reasons, for it to be acknowledged as a scientific practice, it must be committed to the reporting of social facts while at the same time adding the extra layers of interpretation and explanation in a thick description. Mixing elements of fiction into a thick description is of course not an invitation to fabricate or selectively omit facts: the interpretation must not contradict what can be observed. Restudies of published ethnographic cases offer a useful entry into this particular problem. In Zambia, Dutch anthropologist Han Seur visited farmers that Norman Long had studied two decades earlier (the importance of Long’s work to my study is discussed in the Introduction). Long’s central observation was that farmers affiliated to the local Jehovah’s Witnesses church were more successful economically than non-­members (Long 1968). Long explained this binary outcome with reference to religious structures, thereby referring to Weber’s work: Witness membership fosters a capitalist entrepreneurial spirit, Long argued. Yet Seur discovered that, twenty years later, Witness farmers had run out of economic steam. It appeared to Seur that whereas Long’s description of the facts may have corresponded with what farmers remembered, his explanation did not fit. The farmers explained that, as Witnesses, they were convinced that they had a guaranteed place in God’s kingdom, in contrast to Protestants who doubted this and had to resort to their plan B of working hard during their lives (Seur 1992). Economic

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success turned out to be a by-­product of their religious ethos; there was correspondence but no causation. Specific to this study, however, is yet another problem associated with the reconstruction of the case study: the use of secondary sources. In addition to my first-­hand observations of entrepreneurial behaviour, I have also reconstructed behaviour from what others have observed and written about. Chapter 4 stands out in this regard: it rests entirely on what others have written about Bill Broeksmit and those around him. The guiding principle of my reconstruction was as follows: can I write about Broeksmit’s life in a way that does not contradict the facts as they can be gleaned from published sources, and, if so, then what can be learnt from his biography that inspires our thinking about future-­work? Identifying motives for behaviour presents a particular problem in a vicarious reconstruction. Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal, in his acclaimed study of chimpanzee political behaviour, struggled with a similar problem: he could not check his observations of chimpanzee behaviour with their own reflections on that behaviour. Instead, de Waal relied on inference through testing. When considering a range of motivations for a particular behaviour, can I specify conditions under which this behaviour manifests itself, and, if these particular conditions reappear, do I observe the same behaviour as I did earlier (de Waal [1982] 2007)? In Broeksmit’s case, the to-­be-­explained behaviour revolved around his failed attempts to quit the world of finance, leading me to new questions about the nature of the social network in which such decisions are formed: in this case, a network where patronage appears to play an important role.6 With the value and validity of the case study method hopefully more fully clarified, we can now turn to a discussion of its relation to other approaches in the social study of entrepreneurship.

The Case Study Approach in Relation to Other Approaches: Social Symphony As follows from the previous exposition, the ethnographic case study makes an essential contribution to the social study of entrepreneurship, yet I consider it neither sacrosanct nor an isolated research strategy that stands on its own. Instead, it can benefit from liaising with other methodologies that have their origin in a different disciplinary tradition. The term ‘social symphony’, a music metaphor coined by British sociologists Susan Halford and Mike Savage, suggests itself as an inspiring entry point for considering multidisciplinary collaboration that includes case study research (Halford and Savage 2017). Consider for a moment social anthropology and its

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associated disciplines as a symphony orchestra, with each of the disciplines representing a particular instrument group: brass instruments, orchestral percussion, string instruments and so on. As anyone with practical experience of playing in such an orchestra will readily attest to, advanced technical skills in playing one’s own instrument are not particularly helpful if one is unable to attune one’s musical performance to that of others. Playing a symphony is very much a collective effort that revolves around listening as much as around playing; and whereas in social anthropology, and more broadly in the social sciences, the forces of competition for public funds accentuate individual musical prowess (playing rather than listening), they work against musicians playing together harmoniously. The image is often one of a collection of soloists, and one may wonder whether this produces the best version of the musical score. The metaphor conjures up interesting questions about the various roles in the orchestra peopled by the musical groups/social science disciplines. To be sure, talking about roles is not the same as saying that the various musical groups are equal to one another in the sense that each can lay claim to the same musical space. In nineteenth-­century Romantic musical scores, for which the symphony orchestra was essentially invented, the various string instruments usually feature centre stage, with the humble triangle having a minimal role. That said, whereas few in the audience will note when one second violin plays a C where it should have been a D, the triangle must be played with great precision or else it will ruin everything. The triangle must be played with greater precision, therefore, than a second violin, though both are needed to make the music work. Likewise, instruments playing in the lower register of the human ear, such as the double bass or the bassoon, may not be heard as prominently as, say, the melody played by the lead violin, yet without them the orchestra does not produce the low hum needed for the violin to stand out. In other words, the various instrument groups depend on one another; the sounds that they are intended to produce can be achieved only when the instruments are played in harmony. Applying this music metaphor to the ethnographic case study and/or social anthropology elicits two important ideas. First, a social symphony revolves around the mixing of ­ various – q ­ualitative and quantitative, nomothetic and ideographic, obtrusive and u ­ nobtrusive – s­ trategies for the collection and interpretation of information. This is unlikely to succeed, however, unless a common understanding of what constitutes the research problem underpins it: the musical score to which all the orchestral groups must be attuned. This points towards the second idea: this attuning is of a temporary character. Lacking a central point of coordination in the sense that the symphony orchestra has a conductor, in practice the various social

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sciences resemble what organization theorists see as a shifting organizational coalition of competing individual or collective interests for status, position or funding (Cyert and March [1963] 2013). To make the best of the music score, anthropology must strategize, i.e. to get the best out of the collaboration by temporarily uniting over shared interests. At the same time, it must be prepared to go its own way once organizational configurations shift again and the collaboration becomes exhausted. Facing today’s realities of the neoliberal university (Bal et al. 2014), the first part of the ­process – u ­ niting over shared ­interests – ­is what constitutes the road ahead in the social study of entrepreneurship, with a special place therein for the case study method.7 Two specialist fields of inquiry suggest themselves in a social symphonic study of entrepreneurship that can enrich case study research: the study of numbers and the study of social media. I continue the Epilogue with a brief reflection on both.

Study of Numbers: The Balance Sheet In their daily practice, entrepreneurs use n ­ umbers – f­ or calculating profits or when comparing factor prices, but, more importantly, for making ­prognoses – a­ nd understanding what the numbers mean to them can yield important insights into their future-­work. The study of numbers is central to applied economics, in particular the subdiscipline of accountancy. Accountancy emerged as a numerical practice parallel to the rise of modern capitalism with a strong ‘how to’ orientation, but over the past few decades it has taken a sociological turn, resulting in the new and exciting field of interpretive accountancy. Its central claim is that financial statements are a system of representation that is socially constructed (Lehman 2010). This social constructivist understanding of numbers and their associated practices holds promise from an ethnographic case study perspective. Let me elaborate on this claim by focusing on balance sheets. An outsider who looks at a balance sheet may see nothing but an assembly of numbers summarizing an economic unit such as a company’s or a firm’s assets (things in the company), equity (financial property such as shares and stocks) and liabilities (a sum of money that the company owes to someone else) at a specific point in time. However, it becomes more interesting when the balance sheet is viewed as a story that a company or a firm wants to tell itself or the outside world. Seen in this light, a balance sheet is part of an entrepreneurial presentation of the self (Jack 2017). Once we accept that balance sheets are a form of financial storytelling, an immediate question that comes to mind is: who is the intended

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audience and what is the central message of the story? Balance sheets may have various audiences. For instance, investors wanting to invest in, or pull their money out of, a firm scrutinize the sheet in search of an opportunity, and perhaps they need to be placated. We have seen this in connection with the two Greek companies, Galaxidi and Selonda, when they prepared for ASE listing. Once there, they ran into the reality of national accountancy regulators and audit firms. Regulators and auditors present quite another audience, as they may look for infractions such as entering partly owned equity on the balance sheet in order to present an inflated version of the company. Moreover, their legal mandate exceeds that of outsider investors, requiring a different level of preparedness. Ultimately, the exigencies of fulfilling this higher level of preparedness led Galaxidi to delist itself. To senior management echelons, the balance sheet may help to justify unpleasant management decisions that are likely to trigger work-­ floor opposition, for instance, the downsizing of Selonda when bankruptcy became imminent and Stephanis addressed a crowd of angry employees with a bone-­dry presentation. These examples suggest that it would be a mistake to approach balance sheet numbers as an independent reality. The central tenet of interpretive accountancy is that numbers do not speak for themselves: they are social constructions. Numbers can therefore be understood only when placed in the context of social practice to avoid imputing a logic that may not be there. We have seen this social function of numbers, for instance in Chapter 4 debating the fate of Bill Broeksmit. Broeksmit argued forcefully that it was likely that the value of derivatives would plummet when dire circumstances forced Deutsche to sell them before their maturity; nevertheless, it appears that Deutsche senior circles decided to wilfully ignore this unwelcome message as it contradicted the self-­image of a successful, global business. Broeksmit’s muffled warnings must be seen in the context of a loss of position, exacerbated after the demise of his patron, Edson Mitchell. Numerical realities also play a role in the informal world of second-­hand car trading presented in Chapter 3. By studying the receipt books that the traders kept, including the profits and losses recorded in them, often scribbled on the back of the receipts, I began to realize that there was a major disjunct between the financial realities of second-­hand car trading and the routinely circulated remark that ‘car business is good business’. The numbers thus corrected the too-­optimistic image that I had built up during earlier stages of the fieldwork, leading me to new ideas about the strength of the performance of traders as successful businessmen. Thirdly, I benefitted from a study of numbers when looking at the balance sheets of the aquaculture companies, Galaxidi and Selonda. Rather than the numbers

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themselves, their form attracted attention. Whereas Galaxidi presents its balance sheet in an austere way, a mere list of numbers, in Selonda’s case we see a glamorous presentation in a full-­colour glossy that functions in a larger entrepreneurial spectacle revolving around the projection of business success. Contrasting numbers with social practice can thus add to the depth of the case study method.

Study of the Internet: Reconsidering Frontstage/Backstage In any consideration of entrepreneurs’ presentation of the self as goal-­ rational actants, the role of the internet, in particular the particular group of internet platforms known as social media, cannot be ignored. It has been observed how social media contribute to shifting relations between backstage and frontstage (Turkle 2011). This can take the form of displaying in public the backstage of the private sphere. Aspiring vloggers, for instance, make use of this by showing their followers their homes and the goods that they use, meanwhile pocketing a handsome sum from companies through an advertisement strategy called product placement. Vloggers thus transform the backstage of their private lives into a valuable economic resource. Analyses of social media footage are commonplace in culture, communication and media studies, and they are now slowly seeping into social anthropology too. Following from the example of the vlogger, including social media in my case study approach made me sensitive to the sociological problem of theatrical rearrangement: frontstage and backstage, through social media, realign in a different way, and an important question for the study of entrepreneurial behaviour is how this leads to new forms of future-­work. One example that comes to mind is how the rapid rise of mobile phones on the African continent has enabled young, enterprising Africans to achieve a greater degree of autonomy. As I argued in another publication (Beuving 2019b), the mobile phone increased opportunities to pretend: to act ‘as if’. For instance, mobile phones are energy-­hungry devices and, with batteries losing electrical charge capacity with advancing age, frequent recharging is inevitable. Power cuts, however, are frequent and unpredictable. Likewise, as a consequence of Sub-­Saharan Africa’s harsh environment (heat, solar radiation), malfunction is frequent. The world of phone use in Africa is hence littered with perfectly acceptable excuses for not having a working phone. Obviously, this may be conveniently used for personal benefit, for instance to keep undesired creditors or importunate relatives at a safe distance. This contributes to a vision of the future as one of greater personal autonomy, even though in reality such social distancing

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strategies may come at the price of being seen as a dubious member of society, hence actually impeding future opportunity. Nonetheless, the small example shows how mobile phone use occupies a particular place in a presentation of the self and is therefore a vital object for studying social behaviour. Websites are also fascinating internet environments with distinctive performative qualities. In Chapter 5, I contrasted the flashy self-­presentation of Selonda, which I analysed as an attempt at self-­aggrandizement, with the more austere setting of the Galaxidi website. Their respective websites also indicated important differences in future-­narratives. Studying the websites added depth to an unfolding insight that I was acquiring through interviews and by making direct observations. Without them, I might have run into the tricky business of overinterpretation. Reading texts from websites and looking at the images that they contain is not information in itself; they are visual data that become meaningful only when they are placed in the context of social practice as observed by the research and as narrated by research participants. There is a wider lesson implied here. As with the study of numbers above, internet phenomena are not independent realities in and of themselves.

Conclusion The case study method, also sometimes referred to as the extended case or analysis of a social situation, is essential in coming to grips with the problem of social structure in entrepreneurship. It considers the structure of the economic system, the policy environment and the prevailing culture as a double-­edged sword. Entrepreneurial behaviour results from it, but in the process the behaviour also contributes to the structure. Social structure enters the symbolic universe of entrepreneurs and they give meaning to it through social behaviour. Observing behaviour is thus seeing social structure in action; and this is what the case study method seeks to make visible. Consequently, the case study method generalizes through inference of logical principles that illuminate the working of the social structure, or some special part thereof. These logical principles show themselves in a special form of writing, called thick description, that combines detailed description of the behaviour with the interpretation of that behaviour by considering how entrepreneurs see their socially structured universe; the interpretation is subsequently explained by connecting it to a wider frame of reference. In this manner, thick description is ultimately guided towards building social theory: in the case of my study, a processual understanding of time in entrepreneurship.

190  •   Epilogue

Notes 1. The case study method is part of a broader wave of methodological reflection that transcends ethnographic discourse. For instance, historians make use of case studies, and some of their work shares the concerns that I wish to tackle in this Epilogue. The work of Italian scholar Carlo Ginzburg represents an important voice. In the mid-­1970s, he published his acclaimed The Cheese and the Worms (Ginzburg 1980). It brings sixteenth-­century Italy to life through a detailed life history of an ordinary Italian man, a miller called Menocchio, in northeast Italy. Menocchio had outspoken views that questioned the prevailing religious order, and he was declared a heretic. Yet, the ideas that he enunciated during the questioning at his trial provide a unique insight into the changing tide of views in local Italian society that helps to explain the rise of what we now identify as the Renaissance. As a more recent example, Dutch colonial scholar Alicia Schrikker published a book of stories situated in Indonesia that shed light on everyday life at the edge of the Dutch colonial empire, transcending the mainstream view of colonialism as a system ultimately defined by oppression (Schrikker 2021). Her work gives insight into how small stories can reveal bigger themes in a way that big stories in themselves cannot; this inspires my attempt to pinpoint the case study approach methodologically. 2. The full quotation is: ‘Uncertainty accepting societies are characterized by an important role for financial markets, a low level of employees’ protection, decentralized bargaining, a positive attitude towards innovation and foreign influences. In accordance with these findings, these countries appear to specialize in R&D intensive industries and to export relatively many R&D intensive products. All these characteristics are often considered to be pro-­growth’ (de Jong 2009: 103). 3. The methodological literature usually distinguishes between two types of case studies (Yin 2013; see also van Donge 2006). The first type, called a multiple case study method, revolves around the collection of several, sometimes even numerous, individual cases that are subsequently classified with a view to yielding a pattern. A classic example is Awareness of Dying by Chicago School sociologists Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss ([1965] 2005). Using research in six hospitals in the United States, they studied four different situations in which dying plays a dominant role: neonatology, ER, the oncology department and a geriatric department. To grasp the process of dying from the viewpoint of patients, the researchers integrated insights developed in the four different situations in a new theoretical concept: the awareness context. They defined this as what participants in a social situation think they know about it, including what they think that others know about it. This context impacts on the interactions between various groups of interactants, such as patients, those close to them (family and friends), medical staff, and this in turn finds expression in the experience of the dying process (Glaser and Strauss [1965] 2005). The theoretical term, awareness context, has since been successfully used in situations beyond the medical domain, for instance in studies of relations between management and employees in companies (Cirillo et al. 2018) and of the switching of gender roles, or ‘male-­femaling’ (Ekins 2008). This study, however, has resorted to

Epilogue  *  191

another type of case study, namely, one that revolves around the intensive study of one social situation or event: a single case study. 4. In ethnographic circles, it has become customary to debate the term reconstruction, especially as a problem of reflexivity (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). The reflexivity thesis can be summarized as follows: how does the image that I as a researcher build up in the course of fieldwork reflect something that is independent of my presence in the field? Is what I observe society itself, or a version of it dished out specifically for me as part of a performative strategy, or is it the result of personal projection? What is the influence of my particular background as a Westerner and my gender identity as a man? These are important questions for all of the ethnographic cases reported in this study. In all of them, I remained a relative outsider (I never traded cars, or fish, or derivatives) and I had to carefully insinuate my way into a community and network of relative strangers. The first two cases, Benin and Uganda, added difficult questions about economic class: I was more affluent, could more easily secure documents for international travel and so on. In the third case however, the Greek aquaculture entrepreneurs, a reverse pattern emerged: I had to deal with research participants who were more affluent and also more widely travelled than I am. Without claiming that I fully succeeded in resolving the reflexivity matter, I remained aware of it throughout, and at various key moments even shifted my initial interpretations of the material. 5. There appears to be an interesting correspondence with the work of historians. Harvard historian Louis Menand noted the following, for instance, in an influential essay in The New Yorker: ‘[Novelists] can describe what is going on in a character’ heads and what characters are feeling, which historians mostly cannot, or should not, do. But historians want to capture what it felt like, too. For what they are doing is not all that different from what novelists are doing: they are trying to bring a vanished world to life on the page. Novelists are allowed to invent, and historians have to work with verifiable facts. They can’t make stuff up; that’s the one rule of the game. But they want to give readers a sense of what it is like to be alive at a certain time and place. The sense is not a fact, but it is what gives the facts meaning’ (Menand 2022; my emphasis). 6. A related problem is that some of the cases revolve around biographical accounts that contain details that I could not observe directly, as they happened prior to the fieldwork: they were reconstructed from the stories that my informants told me. A thorny problem in biographical interview methods is whether they produce histories or stories (Fontana and Prokos 2007). They are often both of course (Beuving and de Vries 2015: 102–103), and, inspired by the Thomas theorem (see the Conclusion, note 1), I found it useful to focus on how entrepreneurs interpret and act towards their (hi)stories: in other words, how the biographical accounts contribute towards definitions of some future situation. 7. Financial anthropologist Annelise Riles, running into the same problem that I discuss here, sees the collaborative e­ conomy – ­sharing cars rather than owning them, exchanging services rather than selling them on the m ­ arket – a­ s a sphere around which anthropological and economic expertise could productively organize themselves. At the same time, she suspects that there may be ­epistemological

192  •   Epilogue

obstacles on the road ahead. An important one is that ethnographic research typically starts out with relatively undescribed ideas to begin with (Malinowski’s ‘Foreshadowed problem’; see also Beuving and de Vries 2015), whereas economists tend to approach the field armed with more or less developed hypotheses (Riles 2013).

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° Index of Subjects Abdul, 2, 3, 5–6, 13, 15, 16, 18, 40, 71, 82–95, 155 ABN–AMRO. See banks accountancy, 20, 165, 171, 186–7 financial storytelling, 19, 100–1, 114, 157–8 interpretive accounting, 186–7 Ackerman, Joseph, 111, 113, 117 actor–oriented approach, 6–7 Akim, 82, 83, 87–8 Alpha Bank. See banks Amazon, 163 Amerra Capital, 142 analysis of social situation. See case study method analytic philosophy (British), 35–6, 40, 146 Andromeda, 141, 148, 206 animal spirits. See entrepreneurial behaviour anthropological fieldwork. See case study method anthropology, 6, 10, 14, 23, 25, 44, 121, 148, 156, 184–6 Antwerp. See port Apple, 152n7, 163 apt illustration. See case study method aquaculture. See fishing Arab trader. See Darfur Athens. See Greece Athens Stock Exchange (ASE), 134, 158 atypical case. See case study methodology austerity. See economic policy–making awareness context, 190n3 Bakassi boys, 70–1 balance sheet, 105, 112, 134–5, 138, 149, 152, 165–6, 171, 186–8

banker suicide. See banking banking, xiii–iv, 10, 13, 18, 100–22, 175, 181–2 banker suicide, 101, 106, 111, 114, 188–9, 121 bonus system, 144–5, 117 caveat emptor, 109, 117 CDOs, 99–100, 159 derivatives, 13, 15, 18–9, 40–1, 97, 99–113, 117, 119–20, 122n4–7, 125, 158–8, 175, 191n4 LIBOR, 118, 121 mirror trade, 113 mortgage, 98–100, 104 predictive finance, 12, 104 quantitative modelling, 18, 105, 159 swaptions, 108 bankruptcy, 46, 57–8, 80, 126, 128, 141, 162, 187 banks, 19, 63, 89, 98, 100, 102–12, 117–20, 129, 140–44, 147–8, 157, 182 ABN-AMRO, 112, 122n8 Alpha Bank, 140 Continental Bank, 106–8 Deutsche bank, 13, 106, 110–122, 159, 187 Eurobank Ergasias, 140 Lehman Brothers, 112, 186 Merrill Lynch, 106–111, 115 Northern Rock, 112 Pireus Bank, 140 Svenska Handelsbanken, 117 Barazi, Lara, 139, 147 Belles, Aristides, 137–8, 141, 145–6, 149 Benin, 2, 68, 71–3, 77–8, 82, 85, 88, 91–2, 96, 180, 191n4 Big Man. See entrepreneur

208  •   Index of Subjects

big push. See economic policy-making Bittar, Christian, 118 boats (incl. canoe). See fishing boda-boda, 55–6 bonus system. See banking Bretton-Woods, 18, 102–3, 107 Broeksmit, Alla, 108, 116 Broeksmit, Bill, 13, 19, 102, 106–22, 181, 184, 187 Broeksmit, Jake, 106, 108 broker. See entrepreneur brokerage. See entrepreneurial behaviour Brussels, x, 136, 141 Buddenbrook, 160–1, 168 Buffet, Warren. See business tycoons Bukakate. See port Bulgaria, 136, 145 business tycoons, 1, 24, 41 Warren Buffet, 1 Steve Jobs, 1, 41, 152n7, 163 Jack Ma, 1 Elon Musk, 1 cages. See fishing calculation, 10, 12–3, 18, 101, 119, 135, 152, 154, 156–7, 171 cost, 10, 13, 18, 154, 156 cognitive limits, 175 Cameroon, 69 capitalism, 9, 14, 16, 32, 44–5, 101, 121n3, 140, 148, 153, 163–8, 171, 186 captain/skipper. See fishing career history. See case study method cargo cult. See entrepreneurial behaviour cars, ix–xiii, 2, 15, 18, 70–98, 144, 157–8, 191n4 Caruso. See entrepreneur case study method, 6, 16, 170–2, 179–190 analysis of social situation, 178 (anthropological) fieldwork, 2, 6–7, 51, 73, 79, 89, 94–6, 136, 170, 187, 191, 194 apt illustration, 170–4, 179 atypical case, 181 career history, 19, 56, 114, 118

causal explanation, 181–2 company history, 131, 137, 152 (ethnographic) observation, 4, 9, 42, 171, 184 everyday life, study of, 11, 36, 40, 46, 72, 146, 190n1 figurative logic, 14, 182 generalization, 16, 171, 174, 177, 180–1 grounded theory, 6, 182 interactional approach, 178–9 multiple case, 190–1n3 scientific explanation, 181–2 single case, 190–1n3 social drama, 170 social symphony, 172, 184–5 theoretical inference, 16 thick description, 179, 181–3, 189 thin description, 171, 175–9 typical case, 174 validity, 171, 174, 184 causal explanation. See case study method caveat emptor. See banking CDOs. See banking cell phone. See mobile phone change blindness. See time Chicago Board Options Exchange104 China, 136, 152n5 Clinton Administration. See economic policy-making Cockaigne, 19, 101, 119 cognitive limits. See calculation Coli, Antonio, 139, 141, 144, 147 collective effervescence (Durkheim), 8 company history. See case study method Continental Bank. See banks contingency fund, 47, 109 Corinthian Gulf. See Greece corporate entrepreneurship, 102 cost calculation. See calculation Cotonou. See port creative destruction. See entrepreneur culture, 28, 72, 90, 171, 173, 179–80, 188–9 currency derivatives. See banking cyclical model. See economy

Index of Subjects  *  209

Darfur, 25, 27–9, 33 Arab trader, 28–9, 33 Fur society, 37–8 derivatives. See banking Deutsche Bank. See banks Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas (DBTCA), 113, 118, 121 Diaz, 151n4 Dodd-Frank Act. See economic policy-making doppelgänger, 99 dramaturgical model (Goffman), 13–4 dream of fortune, 15, 18, 72, 86–95 drinking (alcohol), 57–9, 115, 158 Dubai, 54–5 economic growth. See economy economic meltdown, xiv, 9, 11, 106, 143 economic millennialism, 160–3 economic policy-making, 34, 123–6, 164 austerity, xii, 19, 126, 128, 158, 171 big push, 123–4 Clinton Administration, 105, 110 Dodd-Frank Act, 106 economic reform, xii, 72, 128, 154, 158, 167, 172 Glass-Steagall act, 105, 110 New Democracy, 128 PASOK, 128 (state) grants, 124, 133, 135, 151 (state) subsidies, 124, 158 structural adjustment programme (SAP), 18, 69, 92 structural funds (EEC/EU), 142 supply response, 19, 123, 125, 172 Troika, 19, 128, 141–2 economic reform. See economic policy-making economy, xiv, 8, 10, 14, 28, 30, 34–7, 44, 49, 67, 70, 72, 93, 95, 97, 100–3, 109, 111, 119, 124–8, 136, 139–40, 158–9, 163–4, 182, 191n7 cyclical model, 19, 35, 168 economic growth, 19, 29, 31, 34, 173, 181 equilibrium model, 8, 30–1, 35, 102, 174

Eigendynamik, 3 embeddedness. See entrepreneurial behaviour entrepreneur, 5, 13, 17, 24–5, 29, 31, 33–4, 39, 41, 107, 126, 132, 137, 151n2 as Big Man, 69, 96n2 as broker, 23, 25 as Caruso, 33, 107 creative destruction, 31, 42n1 entrepreneurial rent, 33 as gold prospector, 71, 92–95 idealization, 24, 42n1 innovation, 42–3n2, 175, 182 investment, 10, 12, 19, 29, 41, 45, 58, 68, 91, 95, 97, 142, 151, 153, 173, 182 as perceptive juror, 24, 34, 36–7 as social manipulator, 23, 25–7 spectacle, 33, 41, 149, 166 transactions, 25–7, 61, 80–1, 84–91, 111 uncertainty index, 173, 181–2 as visionary creator, 14, 23–4, 29, 32–3, 37, 39, 138, 163, 166 as voleur imprenable, 69 entrepreneurial behaviour, xii–xiv, 1, 5–7, 10, 12–24, 30–4, 37–8, 41–6, 67–8, 97, 121–4, 142, 146, 150–8, 159–189 animal spirits, 8–9, 37 brokering, 23, 103 cargo cult, 8, 142–3, 148 embeddedness, 12, 23, 38–9, 42n3, 46–7, 67, 124, 143 goal rational versus value rational, 1, 8, 10, 12–7, 19–22, 27, 29, 39–40, 43–4, 68, 91, 124, 161, 166, 177, 188 house economies, 14–5, 17, 156 individualism, 44–6, 65, 93, 156 investor (over)confidence, 1, 8, 181 kinship, 28, 44, 64, 66, 70, 87, 134, 145, 174 (economic) language, 3, 5, 15, 17, 20, 22, 35–8, 40–1, 71, 92, 94, 142, 146–8, 151, 156–7, 171, 176–8, 182

210  •   Index of Subjects

entrepreneurial behaviour (cont.) market economies, 8, 11, 14 opportunistic individual, 12–3, 15–8, 40, 44, 63–5, 90, 154–6 patronage, 69, 116, 184 presentation of self (Goffman), 10, 15, 17, 20, 22n5, 27, 29, 33, 39–40, 43, 65–8, 145, 156, 161, 164–5, 186–9 profit maximizing, 15, 17, 91 rational expectations, 35–7 risk, 13, 15, 19, 22, 42n2, 47, 53, 61, 63, 76, 84–5, 98–106, 109–14, 117, 157–1160, 175, 182 situated, 14, 16, 38, 176 social manipulation, 29, 37, 91 uncertainty, 29, 38, 41, 42n2, 47–8, 68, 87, 148, 156–7, 173, 179 entrepreneurial event, 16, 166 entrepreneurial rent. See entrepreneur entrepreneurship, xiv–ix, 1–3, 7, 9, 11, 15, 17–9, 25, 30–1, 38, 65, 82, 97, 124, 126, 129, 171–80, 184–6, 189 epistemic dilemma. See time equilibrium model. See economy Essen, 73 ethnographic observation. See case study method Eurobank Ergasias. See banks European Central Bank. See economic policy-making European Economic Community, 125, 127, 135, 137, 143, 151 European Union, 19, 125, 150 everyday life, study of. See case study method figurative logic. See case study method Financial America, 101–12, 116, 157, 163 financial crisis (2008), xiii, 1, 8, 9, 11, 19, 34, 101, 106, 112, 116–8, 122, 128, 131, 141, 158, 167, 182 financial storytelling. See accountancy fish exporting, xiii, xiv, 7, 17, 19, 47, 49, 58, 64, 125, 127–8, 143, 158 fish farming, xiii–iv, 125, 131–2, 138–47, 151, 194

fish species mukene, 48, 56, 58 Nile perch, 7, 12, 17–8, 45–53, 56–66 salmon, 131, 152 seabass, 125, 133, 136, 140, 143, 151 seabream, 125, 133, 136, 140, 143 tilapia, 48, 53 fishing, xii, 12, 17, 26–7, 39, 45–66, 125–7, 130–2, 143, 152, 156–7, 180 aquaculture, xii–iii, 123–144, 148–52, 158, 163, 172, 182, 187, 191n4 boats (incl. canoe), 26, 39, 47, 51, 66, 131 cages, 130–1, 134, 138–44, 152 fishing crews, 45, 50–2, 55–65, 112 fishing equipment, 47, 49, 51, 56–8, 62, 130 hatcheries, 133–4, 139–40, 143–4 herring industry, 26–7, 47, 131 processing factories, xi, 45, 49, 50, 51–3, 57 skipper/captain, 26–9, 33, 39, 41 fishing crews. See fishing fishing equipment. See fishing Frentzos, Thanassos, 154 Frontier, x, xii, 16–7, 45, 47–8, 58, 64–9, 71, 73, 101, 151, 153, 155, 159–62, 172 Fur society. See Darfur future creation. See time future knowledge. See time future-work. See time Galaxidi, 126, 129, 131–6, 140, 143–52, 182, 187–9 General theory (Keynes), 9, 34 generalization. See case study method Giannoulatos, Spiros, 134–6, 142, 145, 147–9 Glass-Steagall act. See economic policy-making goal rational. See entrepreneurial behaviour gold prospector. See entrepreneur Gollo. See landing sites Goodwin, Shaini, 162, 168n3

Index of Subjects  *  211

Google, 163 Great Depression, 8, 34, 37, 103, 105, 107 Greece, xii, 8, 19, 125–151, 158, 182 Athens, 129, 131–8, 141, 144, 158–9 Corinthian Gulf, 129–30 Kefalonia, 130 Patras, 129, 133–4, 140 Pireus, 140 Saronic Gulf, 133 grounded theory. See case study method hatcheries. See fishing hazing. See ritual Hellenic Fish, 152n4 Henri, 83–8, 91 hermeneutics, 12, 37, 155–6, 159, 164–6, 178–9 herring industry. See fishing Holmes, Elizabeth. See Theranos homo economicus, 10, 12–3, 22, 36, 40, 44, 64, 100, 116, 148, 154–6, 171 house economies. See entrepreneurial behaviour Id (Freud), 8 idealization of entrepreneur. See entrepreneur importers, 75–82, 86, 92 individualism. See entrepreneurial behaviour innovation. See entrepreneur interactional approach. See case study method interpretive accounting. See accountancy investigative journalism, xiii, 42, 121 investment. See entrepreneur investment bank, xiii, 13, 15, 18, 97–106, 110, 114–21, 122n5, 181 investor (over) confidence. See entrepreneurial behaviour IS-LM model, 35, 102 Italy, 133, 190 Jain, Ainshu, 108, 111–3, 115, 118 Jobs, Steve. See business tycoons

Kalungi, Richard, 54, 55, 61 Kampala, 45, 53–5 Kasensero. See landing sites Kefalonia. See Greece Keynesianism, 35, 102 kinship. See entrepreneurial behaviour Kirimega, Herman, 12, 17, 45–8, 53–4, 65–6 Kirimega, Veronica, 54–5 Klondike, 71, 86, 90, 92–5 knowledge. See time known unknowns. See time Kuwait, 138–9, 147, 152n5 Lake Victoria, xii, 7, 17, 19, 44–9, 55, 57, 65–6, 67n2, 87, 125, 156 Lambu. See landing sites landing sites, 49–55, 58, 62 Ggolo, 45, 49, 53–5 Kasensero, 49, 53–5 Lambu, 49, 55–7, 60 (economic) language. See entrepreneurial behaviour Lehman Brothers. See banks LIBOR. See banking LinkedIn, 144–5 Ma, Jack. See business tycoons Maastricht treaty, 128 Magendo (smuggling), 53 market economies. See entrepreneurial behaviour market owners, 77–81, 92, 94 market runners, 77, 79–81, 83, 86 Masaka town, 51, 55–6 Merrill Lynch. See banks millenarian movement, 160–3 mirror trade. See banking Mitchell, Dara, 108, 116 Mitchell, Edson, 107–8, 115–6, 187 Mitchell, Estelle, 108–16 mobile phone, 84, 87, 188–9 Mohammed, 82–4, 86–7, 89–90 MOT-test, x–xii mugaga (rich man), 54–5, 58, 62 mukene. See fish species multiple case. See case study method

212  •   Index of Subjects

Musk, Elon. See business tycoons Myopia, 19, 101, 122, 143, 157–9 Myrseth, Björn, 132–4, 151 Nesara, 161–3, 168n3 New Democracy. See economic policy-making New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), 37, 111, 117 Nigeria, 70, 72, 75, 77–8, 82–5, 88, 96n3–5 Nile perch. See fish species Nireus, 137–45, 148, 152n4 Nkose island, 49, 55, 61 normal accident, 9, 167 Northern Rock. See banks Nudging, 15, 21n2, 124, 172–3 observation. See case study method okwegatta (collaboration), 60–1 old boys’ network, 116 ontogenetic interpretation. See time open future, 16, 160 open water fishing. See fishing Operation Wembley, 57 opportunistic individual. See entrepreneurial behaviour Orange County (scandal), 109, 111, 120 ordinary language analysis, 15, 35, 41 paillote, 79, 81 panic, 9, 103 Panteleimonitou, Nancy, 131, 133–4, 136, 141, 144–5, 147–8 PASOK. See economic policy-making Patras. See Greece patronage. See entrepreneurial behaviour perceptive juror. See entrepreneur performance, 13–4, 29, 41, 91, 149, 156, 185, 187 Piraeus. See Greece Piraeus Bank. See banks port, 2–3, 39, 57, 72–9, 83–4, 86, 91–2, 96n3 Antwerp, x, 73 Bukakate, 49, 56–7

Cotonou, 2–3, 5–18, 71–83, 86–96, 151, 159 port authority, 76 port authority. See port Porto Novo, 82–9 positional good, 114, 165 practice. See time predictive finance. See banking presentation of self (Goffman). See entrepreneurial behaviour pricing, 98–100, 104–5, 117, 158, 175 private equity, 142, 145, 147 probability/ies. See time processing factories. See fishing profit maximizing. See entrepreneurial behaviour quantitative modelling. See banking quantum computing, 155 rational expectations. See entrepreneurial behaviour real estate, 98–9 reality distortion field, 163 replication. See case study method resellers, 2, 77, 79–83, 89, 92 retirement, 62, 109–16 Ryle, Gilbert, 179 Riopesca, 152n4 risk. See entrepreneurial behaviour rituals. See time RoRo (roll-on-roll-off) ships, x, 73–5, 84, 86–7 salmon. See fish species Saronic Gulf. See Greece savage sentiment, 16, 101 scientific explanation. See case study method seabass. See fish species seabream. See fish species Seafarm Ionian, 139 sector studies. See case study method self-fulfilling prophecy, 15, 17–8, 37, 40, 48, 62, 64–6, 156 Selonda, 126, 129, 131–52, 187–9 social construction. See time

Index of Subjects  *  213

social manipulation. See entrepreneurial behaviour social manipulator. See entrepreneur social media, 143, 155, 162, 171, 186, 188 social structure, 6, 25–6, 38, 40, 171–81, 183, 189 social symphony. See case study method Ssekyewa, Bosco, 48, 55–61, 66 Ssentongo, 56–7, 60 Ssese islands, 55, 59 Simons, Jim, 12, 16 single case. See case study method social symphony. See case study method spectacle. See entrepreneur state grants. See economic policy-making state subsidies. See economic policy-making Stephanis, John, 132–3, 136–41, 144–9, 187 Stephanis, Visilios, 136–7, 145 Stock value optimism, 166 Stolt Sea Farm, 132–3 stories. See time storytelling. See time structural adjustment programme (SAP). See economic policy-making structural functionalism, 25, 30, 174 structural funds (EEC/EU). See economic policy-making structured finance. See banking subsidies. See economic policy-making supply response. See economic policy-making Svenska Handelsbanken. See banks swaptions. See banking theoretical inference. See case study method theorizing. See case study method Theranos, 9, 136 thick description. See case study method thin description. See case study method Thomas theorem, 159, 168n1, 191n6 tilapia. See fish species time, 1–2, 6–7, 11–3, 16, 20, 21–2n4, 24–5, 29, 34, 36, 48, 97, 103, 105,

154, 158–9, 160, 164, 166, 168, 172–3, 178, 180 change blindness, 11 epistemic dilemma, 4, 10, 21, 23 future creation, 4, 21n2–3, 120, 125 future-work, 3–6, 9–12, 15–20, 21n2–3, 23–4, 29, 36, 38–42, 45–6, 65–6, 72, 97–8, 100–2, 114, 125–6, 129, 142–3, 150, 153–5, 155, 157–60, 163–68, 180–182, 184, 186, 188 knowledge, 10–11, 16–7, 21, 29, 32, 36, 40, 42n2, 71, 93, 124, 132, 134, 170, 175–7 known unknowns, 4, 22n5, 175 ontogenetic interpretation, 5–12, 22n4, 24, 29, 34–8, 40, 103, 105, 124, 164, 168, 178 probability/ies, 11–2, 22n5, 35–7, 104, 154 rituals, 3–4, 10, 17–20, 21n3, 38, 40–1, 61–2, 101, 115, 142, 148, 151, 156–8, 178, 182 social construction, 5, 41, 45, 142, 152, 160, 163, 167, 174, 178, 187 stories, ix–xv, 1, 8, 10, 15–7, 20n1, 40, 42, 47–8, 61, 94, 97, 100–1, 106, 114, 139, 145, 157, 166, 179, 190n1, 190n6 storytelling, 16, 19–20, 100–1, 114, 156–8, 183 uncertainty, 20, 38, 41–2, 47–8, 68, 87, 148, 156–7, 173, 179, 181–2, 190n2 unknown unknowns, 3–4, 11, 16, 23, 35, 97, 154–5, 178 Togo, 77, 89 transactions. See entrepreneur Troika. See economic policy-making Tsipras election, 141–2 Turkey, 128, 139–40, 147 typical case. See case study methodology Uganda, xii, 12, 17, 44–5, 49–55, 57, 156, 180, 191n4 uncertainty. See time

214  •   Index of Subjects

uncertainty index. See entrepreneur unknown unknowns. See time Utrecht Veemarkt, x–xi value rational. See entrepreneurial behaviour

visionary creator. See entrepreneur voleur imprenable. See entrepreneur Wall Street, 102, 110, 115 zero-sum game, 68–9, 93, 146

° Index of Key Thinkers Abolafia, Mitch, 37, 38, 98, 193 Akerlof, George, 100–1, 114, 175, 193 Aliber, Robert, 8, 199 Appadurai, Arjun, 4, 21, 193

Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 14 Flyvbjerg, Bent, 42, 180, 197 Freud, Sigmund, 8, 197 Friedman, Milton, 102

Batko, Marc, 10, 193 Barnard, Francis Harvey, 161–2, 193 Beaney, Michael, 35, 194 Becker, Howard, 181, 194 Beuving, Joost, xvi, 4, 22, 51, 67, 96, 151, 175–6, 183, 188, 191–4 Blyth, Mark, 102, 126, 194 Bourdieu, Pierre, 191 n4, 195 Bryant, Rebecca, 17, 195

Galbraith, John Kenneth, 167, 197 Geertz, Clifford, 86, 166, 179, 197 Gell, Andrew, 10, 12, 23, 42, 197 Ginzburg, Carlo, 190, 197 Gladwell, Malcolm, 37, 197 Glaser, Anselm, 6, 182, 190, 197 Gluckman, Max, 174, 179, 198 Goffman, Ervin, 13, 15, 27, 39, 198 Granovetter, Mark, 39, 42–3, 198 Greenberg, Paul, 132–3, 151, 198 Gudeman, Stephen, 14–5, 40, 156, 198

Callon, Michel, 40, 114, 195 Carter, Zachary, 1, 3, 9, 35, 195 Casey, Michael, 100, 167, 206 Corbin, Juliette, 6, 182, 197 Cyert, Richard, 38, 186, 195 de Jong, Eelke, 173, 182, 190, 196 de Vries, Geert, 4, 176, 191–2, 194 de Waal, Frans, 29, 184, 196 Dein, Simon, 41, 196 Dequench, David, 35, 196 Douglas, Mary, 10, 12, 44, 196 Durkheim, Emile, 8, 196 Easterly, William, 124, 196 Elias, Norbert, 3, 196 Ellis, Stephen, 70, 196 Enrich, David, 111–2, 115–8, 122, 171, 186, 196 Ezeala-Harison, Fidelis, 124, 196 Ferguson, Adam, 4–5, 161, 196 Ferguson, James, 67, 197

Hageman, Harald, 30, 198 Hann, Chris, 14, 40, 59, 198 Halford, Susan, 184, 198 Hannerz, Ulf, 183, 198 Hart, Keith, 14, 198 Hayek, Friedrich, 102 Herzfeld, Michael, 151, 198 Hofstede, Geert, 173, 181–2, 199, 201, 206 Hylland-Eriksen, Thomas, 26, 199 Isaacson, Walter, 1, 24, 152, 163, 199 Jack, Lisa, 186, 199 Kahneman, Daniel, 176, 205 Kaplan, Abraham, 17, 199 Kay, John, 8, 11, 24, 36, 41–2, 105, 118, 199, 201 Keynes, John Maynard, 8–9, 11, 23–4, 34–8, 42 n2, 102–3, 164, 195, 199–201

216  •   Index of Key Thinkers

Kindleberger, Charles, 8, 199 King, Mervyn, 8, 11, 24, 36, 41–2, 105, 118, 199, 201 Knight, Daniel, 17, 195, 199 Knight, Frank, 42 n2, 199 Kopytoff, Igor, 16, 199 Kostas, Kostis, 151, 199 Kroner, Nils, 117, 200 Krugman, Paul, 124, 200 Kuper, Adam, 25, 174, 200, 204 Langlois, Richard, 30–1, 200 Lehman, Glen, 186, 200 Lepore, Jill, v, 200 Lewis, Michael, 177, 200 Litzenberger, Robert, 107, 200 Long, Norman, 4, 7, 25 Luyendijk, Joris, 105, 115, 200 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 25, 180, 192, 200 March, James, 38, 186, 195 Meck, Georg, 111–2, 201 Merton, Robert, 37, 62–3, 201 Mintzberg, Henry, 124, 201 Mitchell, Clyde, 182, 201 Munn, Nancy, 11, 201 Murphy, Kevin, 123, 201 Ney, Stephen, 10, 12, 44, 196 Nietzche, Friedrich, 8, 30 Oermann, Nils, 107, 110, 201 Parker, Martin, 107, 202 Partnoy, Frank, 120, 202 Perrow, Charles, 9, 167, 202 Pfeilstetter, Richard, 23, 202 Porsild, Charlotte, 93, 202 Pringle, Robert, 47–8, 202 Rajan, Raghuran, 100, 121, 200, 202 Ravenelle, Alexandra, 44, 202 Ridley, Hugh, 168, 202 Riles, Annelise, 191–2, 202

Rodrik, Danny, 124, 202 Roitman, Janet, 69–70, 202 Rubbers, Benjamin, 65, 203 Sahlins, Marshall, 96, 203 Savage, Mike, 184, 198 Schaffer, Fredrick, 40, 203 Scheffer, Marten, 37, 203 Schrikker, Alicia, 190, 203 Schumpeter, Joseph, 11, 23–5, 29–34, 37, 39, 41–2, 107, 163, 176, 182–3, 194, 198, 200, 203–4 Searle, John, 15, 203 Shackle, George, 4, 68, 82, 151, 203 Shiller, Robert, 15, 40, 100–1, 114, 193, 203 Sillitoe, Paul, 8, 148, 204 Simon, Herbert, 10, 204 Skidelsky, Robert, 8, 36–7, 204 Small, Mario Luis, 182, 204 Smith, Daniel, 70, 204 Stewart, Alex, 23, 69, 204 Steyaert, Chris, 23, 204 Stiglitz, Joseph, 10, 175, 204 Swedberg, Richard, 17, 23, 31, 42, 204 Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, 11, 205 Tang, Paul, 150, 205 Taussig, Michael, 70, 205 Tett, Gillian, 11, 15, 97, 105, 113, 122, 205 Thomas, William I., 159, 168, 205 Tsing, Anna, 16, 101, 205 Turkle, Sherry, 188, 205 Turner, Victor, 170, 205 Tversky, Amos, 176, 205 van Donge, Jan Kees, 68, 123, 190, 196, 205 van Velsen, Jaap, 170–1, 205 Vetsopoulos, Apostolos, 127, 206 Vigna, Paul, 100, 167, 206 Wacquant, Loic, 191, 195 Walsh, Andrew, 65, 206