Social ties and farmers’ market access in Ghana: Structural Characteristics, Sociocultural Motives and Consequences of Social Capital-Facilitated Exchanges in a Subsistence Marketplace
This study explores how social ties influence farmers’ market access in the subsistence marketplace within the Sub-Saharan African regions. With the compelling evidence that smallholder farmers operate under dismal market access and the ongoing global action plan from the United Nations Decade of Family Farming 2019-2028 campaign to create a supportive policy environment to strengthen the viability of small-scale farmers, exploring the mechanisms underlying support networks in the agri-market is more important than ever. While value chain theories are frequently consulted to gain insights into the mechanisms underlying networks for farmers’ market access, their analytical focus fails to address the micro-foundations of networks. Social capital research has established that donors’ motivation in market exchanges is complex, and thus, the underlying processes deserve analysis. Moreover, viewing support networks as a chain of actors fails to capture actors and entities outside the chain linkages. Hence, there is a need to shift the analytical thinking from viewing networks as a chain of actors to constellations where the farmer is recognised as a viable entity occupying a central position in a constellation of service exchanges. Using Portes’ (1998) dual-edged view of social capital, a qualitative-interpretivist research methodology (Verver and Koning, 2018) and the Gioia thematic analysis method, findings from actors in the Ghanaian agri-market suggest that the influence of social ties on farmers’ market access depends on the socio-cultural source that motivates actors in the agri-market to make resources available for farmers. The study further finds that the exchange culture could produce positive and negative consequences for farmers’ market access. The study contributes to three interconnected literature streams: the strength of ties argument, the sources of motivation for social capital and emerging scholarship on the subsistence marketplace. Firstly, the study bridges the gap between the narratives on the structure of network ties and the norms of marketplace exchanges. Secondly, the study demonstrates how the subsistence marketplace concept in marketing theory is more embracing to theorising at the middle-range level to overcome the limitations of complexity and the level of abstractions associated with understanding market exchanges in an informal economy by systems thinking. This study refines the scope of social capital-facilitated exchanges through contextual elaborations in the subsistence agri-marketplace. The study proposes a framework to explore marketplace exchanges where both consummatory and instrumental sources of social capital engender the motives of social actors. In a subsistence marketplace context where farmers actively collaborate with a constellation of actors to co-create their market access, the findings suggest that a key policy priority should be to create an enabling decentralised marketplace environment that empowers the agency and autonomy of individual farmers while stimulating collaboration.
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