Brokerage from within: A conceptual framework

Introduction

Brokers are fascinating but elusive figures, active in many different fields and taking on many different forms. Situated between various social worlds, brokers are highly mobile figures, in a physical and an ideational sense; they channel scarce information, translate different languages and jargons, and mediate and facilitate between individuals and/or organisations, the local and the global, in a wide range of settings. Some decades ago, Roger Southall (1978: 186) suggested that the lack of ethnographic studies on brokerage might result from an antipathy against middlemen as social parasites and thus, in his case, were paid less attention than peasants and traders. Although brokerage has attracted a lot of attention in recent years, comparative work on brokerage is still lacking (Lindquist, 2015: 870) and only little is known about the actual work and life worlds of brokers. Katherine Stovel and Lynette Shaw (2012: 139), for example, acknowledge that brokerage has been studied in different subfields of sociology, but is ‘hardly considered a central concept in the discipline’s theoretical or analytical arsenal’. In a similar vein, Thomas Faist (2014: 38) argued that brokerage is ‘an essential yet understudied function in social life’. This lack of a thorough engagement with the brokerage phenomenon is surprising, as the role of brokers as agents of social change has been noted early on, for instance in the context of the consolidation of nation states (Bailey, 1959: 101; Barth, 1966). Brokers are not simply facilitating the relationship between two groups but actually constitute, mould and redefine this relationship (Paine, 1971: 21) and, in this process, redefine themselves. Hence, Marie Perinbam (1973: 428–432) noted in the context of trade that ‘[i]f any group had the power to innovate, it would have been brokers and their associates’. Thus, the broker is an intriguing and significant figure to study.

Taking common themes from the brokerage literature, this special issue illustrates the complexity of the work of brokers and how their brokerage is embedded in their daily lives. By taking an in-depth ethnographic look at the actual work of brokers and their particular life stories in diverse settings in African, Asian and European countries, our contributions examine brokers’ socio-cultural practices of negotiation. They explore brokers’ life stories, their successes and failures, their vulnerabilities, (changing) interests and motivations within the cultural contexts that these brokers are part of. By adopting a comparative perspective in a thematic and a geographic sense, the articles in this special issue discuss the role of brokerage in diverse settings such as the transnational world of trade (Röschenthaler) and development (Knodel), peacebuilding and activism (Bräuchler), refugee care (Walther), health care (Arambewela-Colley), government services (Epple), and colonialism (Márquez García).

In this introductory article, we develop the conceptual framework for the special issue and prepare the ground for our individual contributions. The idea is not to impose preconceived notions of the broker onto local realities and thus simplify the lived experiences of brokers and parties they are mediating between. The contributions rather develop the specificities of the concept from their ethnographic material. We thus aim to broaden, but at the same time further specify the concept of the broker. Taking into account a broker’s personhood, routines and relationships, we want to analyse brokerage from within through five main themes: the emergence of new actors, technologies and spaces; brokers’ biographies, agency and self-description; moral ambiguity and vulnerabilities of brokerage; broker chains and hierarchies; and brokerage as part-time or in/formal activity and as part of changing sets of overlapping tasks. This introductory article first discusses some of the meanings of the term broker and then provides an overview of the anthropological and sociological literature on brokerage and some common themes. It then identifies gaps in existing research and integrates the contributions to this special issue into an innovative wider argument on brokerage.

The ‘broker’ – some brief etymological reflections

We start by briefly looking at the etymology and semantic fields of some selected terms related to brokerage.

The English ‘broker’, the German Makler and the French courtier all have roughly the same meanings in the present but they are derived from different aspects of mediation in trade. Etymologically, the term ‘broker’ goes back to Anglo-Norman brokour or abrokour. Brokour is often said to be an old form of ‘broach’, that is, the one piercing a small wine barrel to tap and sell the wine for profit, but it also refers to any small trader or retailer, even someone dealing with the money of people. The association of the term brokour with wine seems to come from Latin; in Latin it relates to brocator or abrocarius, a wine dealer selling wine from the tap. However, the Spanish albaroque has the same root but refers to a tip or small feast that was given by traders to a middleperson who had helped in a deal. Interestingly, the term albaroque, and hence also ‘broker’, have the same root as the Arabic buruk or baraka, meaning a ‘blessing’, ‘gift’ or ‘gratuity’ and might refer to what has later on been called the broker’s commission (see, for example, Merriam Webster, 2020; Online Etymology Dictionary, 2017).

The French courtier and the German Makler have slightly different connotations. The French courtier goes back to Occitan (a southern French dialect) for corratier or courretier, meaning coureur, the person who runs commercial errands for another person (Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 1992), which points to the, often, tedious work of brokers and their lower status. The German Makler comes from Dutch maken that was introduced to High German in the seventeenth century with the meanings ‘to make’, ‘to mediate (vermitteln) as a retailer and also to find faults in something (mäkeln) (Duden, 1963). In short, Makler refers to an ambiguous individual that mediates and can make things happen, but who is also often viewed critically, which are attributes strongly connoted with the idea of brokers, as the case studies in this issue illustrate.

Scholarly engagement with the broker: an overview

This section provides a brief overview of scholarship on brokerage in anthropology and related disciplines. Classically, brokerage has been discussed in several subfields of anthropology and sociology, among them social network theories, economic anthropology in the context of long-distance trade and political anthropology in the context of development and social change. We also provide examples of studies that go beyond those thematic fields.

Common themes in brokerage studies

Within the existing brokerage literature, we have identified some common themes – which we do not claim to be an exhaustive list – that we take up, challenge and develop further in this special issue. These include questions about the necessity of brokers for bridging knowledge gaps between two parties, about the specialised knowledge and skills their work requires, the social outcomes of their work, and the paradoxes and moral ambiguities involved in brokerage. We want to start with a classic in the brokerage literature, Jeremy Boissevain.

Defining brokerage: Boissevain’s work (1974) is one of the classics that most of the anthropological literature on brokerage refers to. He set out to define brokerage through four criteria – criteria that we aim to challenge in our special issue. According to Boissevain, brokers firstly work on their own account and as an independent ‘third party’. Different from, for example, trade agents, they are not liable to or employed by one of the parties for whom they mediate. Secondly, the mediation of brokers between different parties always implies a two-way process, in which information and/or resources need to be channelled through the broker as a gatekeeper, for instance, between local and global stakeholders in both directions. Thirdly, brokers have an interest to make some profit or commission, from their work of mediation. And fourthly, brokers have access to what Boissevain calls primary resources that they channel but do not directly control or own, which distinguishes them from ‘patrons’ who control material assets such as land and property. It could be added that in contrast to traders, who move material goods, brokers mainly control immaterial assets such as knowledge, social networks and language skills. To be successful in their mediation, brokers also need to impress, persuade and manipulate people (Boissevain, 1974: 154–159; Murphy, 1981: 667–668). As this special issue clearly shows, their work is, however, more complex and often overlaps with other tasks that they combine with their brokerage activity. Some of these criteria will be taken up again in the following themes.

The necessity of and requirements for brokerage: An important issue in brokerage studies has been the question whether brokerage is actually needed for the functioning of certain sectors. As brokers bridge different contexts, translate between languages and mediate between parties who would otherwise not meet or had no common language to communicate (Stovel and Shaw, 2012), this seems to suggest the necessity of brokers. Some scholars argue however that brokers are not indispensable but rather step in and create their own jobs where they see windows of opportunity to make a living for themselves (Murphy, 1981). Such windows of opportunity also open up, for instance, in situations where the parties prefer not to work too closely together, although they could (Röschenthaler, this issue). This bridging activity implies the capacity of the broker for innovation, as many scholars mention, due to the cultural or knowledge difference between the groups involved (Perinbam, 1973). Brokers profit from an existing knowledge differential in markets or other social settings, from the lack of information, transparency and networks on both sides.

The opportunity for brokers to step in arises in cases where they have necessary knowledge, skills and networks (Bierschenk et al., 2002: 21–23). Importantly, brokers need to have experiences in contexts beyond the specific locality in focus. It is such experience that allows them to learn registers of competence needed for brokerage and the changing of roles, for example as a political activist, an artist or a journalist (Bräuchler, this issue), or for turning from a villager into a government official implementing programmes in a rural region (Epple, this issue). The registers include the jargon and the behaviour of other spheres and spaces, for example, mastering the linguistic and cultural codes of local contexts and colonial regimes (Márquez García, this issue); organisational competence and how to become a federator who is capable of bringing together a critical mass of people, groups or associations; ‘scenographic competence’ (Bierschenk et al., 2002: 20); and social or relational skills that allow the broker to participate in and establish links between all spaces and contexts involved.

Social outcome and moral ambiguity of brokerage: Another point that the brokerage literature and the contributions to this special issue are concerned about is the actual outcome of brokerage and the often proclaimed moral ambiguity of brokers. Brokers are often depicted as profiteers of the communicational and cultural misfit between two or more social and cultural systems. Boissevain described the broker as entrepreneur who innovates and takes risks (see also Röschenthaler and Schulz, 2016) and as ‘a professional manipulator of people and information who brings about communication for profit’ (Boissevain, 1974: 146, 148). According to Wolf (1956: 1076), it is in their interest to maintain tensions between the different spheres to make themselves indispensable. Successful mediation on the one hand and the assumed profit-oriented self-centredness on the other make brokers ‘double agents’ (van Leynseele, 2018: 3) and morally ambiguous figures (James, 2011: 319). The field of work and venture that brokers create is often characterised by issues of manipulation and control, including moral concerns such as opportunism or the struggle for a common good. The parties between which brokers mediate often pursue divergent interests and brokers dwell in intermediate settings where frictious relations evolve in predictable and unpredictable ways (Bräuchler, 2019; De Jong, 2018; Lindquist, 2015). Brokers work in what Bierschenk et al. (2002: 6) called ‘local political arenas’ and must face the conflicts raised by the collision of these interests (Gluckman et al., 1949; Wolf, 1956: 1076).

Stovel and Shaw (2012: 140) also noted a paradoxical effect of brokerage: on the one hand, it can ease interaction, enhance economic development and political action; and on the other, it can encourage exploitation, corruption, personal profit, the accumulation of power and thus enhance inequalities. Brokers bridge communication divides but at the same time, they might be interested in keeping the parties apart for whom they mediate in order to not put themselves out of business. The issue of moral ambiguity is also taken up by Faist (2014), explaining how brokers help the parties they work for and are out for profit at the same time, which is also the basis of mistrust towards brokers as it can question their moral integrity. In a similar way, Southall (1978) differentiated between the positive image of brokers as an emanation of civil society and the negative image as a parasite and source of mismanagement. To add to that ambiguity, Irwin Press (1969) has described brokers as both admired innovators and as marginalised individuals whose, sometimes unpredictable, activities are met with resistance.

Reaching beyond existing scholarship of brokerage

This special issue aims to develop further and go beyond existing typologies and idealised notions of brokers that often disembed them from their specific sociocultural and historical contexts, as Faist (2014: 40) pointed out for brokerage in international migration. We are thus not only interested in the mediating capacities of brokers but propose to look closer at their actual work in context, their negotiation and networking strategies, and their specific biographies, qualifications and skills. Our contributions also investigate the legitimations and narratives that are linked to their brokerage activities, the social processes their work triggers, the emergence of new brokers and the chains (and hierarchies) of brokers that evolve through continuing mediation, as well as the limits of brokerage. This special issue reaches beyond the findings of and propositions made by existing scholarship in five ways that we will briefly elaborate in the following.

New actors, refined technologies, larger spaces: Depending on who and where brokers are, they have access to different spaces and places that, in turn, can equip them with specific resources, forms of knowledge and networks – the ‘spatial dimension of brokerage’ (Dotti and Spithoven, 2017: 2216). The more places and networks a broker connects, the more powerful s/he is (compare Castells, 2010: 502): ‘a broker’s unique “agency” is a function of her network position’ (Goddard, 2012: 505) that allows them ‘to formulate multivocal legitimation’, which implies that ‘ideas and symbols can have different meanings depending on who is listening, or more accurately, depending upon the network position of the audience’ (Goddard, 2012: 506). They do not dissolve difference, but try to make it intelligible. Given changing transport infrastructure and communication technologies, the way brokerage works changes too. Our contributions look into brokerage not as a given status, but analyse the emergence of new kinds of brokers who qualify through specific skills and the use of a broad variety of new communication and transport technologies (see e.g. Bräuchler, Röschenthaler, this issue; see also Lindquist, 2017: 215). Such brokers not only act within and between specific localities, or between local communities and the state, but they can also effectively mediate between these localities and global dynamics and transnational paradigms.

Brokers’ biographies, agency and self-description: The term ‘broker’ has been developed in specific contexts in Western Europe, as mentioned above. In other parts of the world, other terms are in use with often divergent semantic fields to describe such mediating activities. Often, brokers and the parties involved avoid the term broker as an international construct, the connotations of which do not match their local understandings. In this context it is also important to differentiate between how brokers refer to themselves and how the people they work with perceive them, that is, whether they are considered important actors with agency (Murphy, 1981) or deviant figures (Simmel, 1950), or both, and whether their reputation varies according to the socioeconomic conditions in a society. This is important as brokers need to be recognised and respected by the larger national or global and the local communities whose members do have to let themselves being brokered, in order to achieve something (Michie, 2014: 86).

As indicated before and as elaborated in more detail in our contributions, being a broker is not a status or a position that one attains and keeps but it needs to grow from within, through a combination of specific skills, capabilities, motivations and networks. Some brokers need to create their own job, others are requested to slip into that position by certain parties; they need to adopt this social role and staying in business or continuing doing good requires ongoing efforts. Bierschenk et al. (2002: 13, 19) speak ‘of “procedural discovery” as opportunities that present themselves, and are being taken up, in the course of action’ in a certain context, at a certain moment in time. It is thus crucial to look closer at brokers’ life stories and their embeddedness in social, political, and historical contexts, including, in some cases, their religious and economic backgrounds (Knodel, Röschenthaler, this issue) as well as the career paths that brokers envision.

Moral ambiguity, vulnerability and limits of brokerage: In this special issue, we also aim to refine predominant notions of moral ambiguity and deconstruct prevailing narratives of brokers as either profiteers or as people who are doing good. Brokers are exposed to much more complex challenges. Going beyond black and white, bedevilling or praising brokerage, we put a stronger focus on the human side of brokerage, the brokers’ emotions, personal investments, vulnerabilities and sufferings (Bräuchler, Knodel, Walther, this issue). Moral ambiguity is not just a question of intention or actual outcomes, but also a result of the brokers’ structural position, for instance between government institutions and non-governmental refugee aid organisations (Walther, this issue), which can trigger mistrust towards brokers who have the difficult task to do good to both sides and cope with the burden of ‘multivocal legitimation’ (see above).

Brokers are agents of diffusion and change (Malets and Zajak, 2014: 251), which requires translation between different spheres and contexts. Translations can be acts of power and control, not only by, for instance, translating local grievances into the more powerful language of transnational human rights (Merry, 2006: 42), but also through the brokers’ power to fix cultural meaning in public space. Rebecca Givan et al. rightly argue that such diffusion processes can be influenced by the brokers’ preferences, beliefs and interests (Givan et al., 2010: 12), a good example being local NGOs as the profiteers of outside interventions for development (Knodel, this issue).

In the brokers’ translation efforts, transformations between symbolic, social and cultural capital take place that can, at times, also be transformed into more material, economic or political resources (Boissevain, 1974; Jacobs, 2014: 310) and often lead to upward mobility (Bierschenk et al., 2002: 24). Brokerage can also exploit social dynamics to perpetuate or create social, economic and/or political inequalities or undermine democratic accountability (e.g. Berenschot et al., 2018). Our findings do confirm this. With a dependency on brokers for access to services (Arambewela-Colley, Epple, Walther, this issue) and other resources such as a global international human rights rhetoric (Bräuchler, this issue), knowledge of the rules of international trade (Röschenthaler, this issue), knowledge of national laws and bureaucracies (Epple, this issue) or the skills to tap into international donor funding (Knodel, this issue), the preferences and actions of individuals and communities who rely on such brokerage can be manipulated (Stokes et al., 2013).

However, reducing brokers to mere manipulators for their own benefits would simplify the motivational landscape of brokers. Setting personal interests and gains aside, the brokers we are looking at in our empirical work, for instance, defend the interests of local communities in national political spaces and international businesses (Bräuchler, this issue; see also Bierschenk et al., 2002: 37), they struggle for the implementation of national law and the needs of local communities (Epple, this issue) or refugees (Walther, this issue), or they take efforts to make a Western health system accessible and intelligible to local cultural communities (Arambewela-Colley, this issue). There are clear indications that brokers can empower the parties they are mediating between, in particular when partisan brokers (Faist, 2014: 45–46) struggle, for instance, for indigenous and human rights against state intrusion or exploitation by global players (e.g. Bräuchler, this issue) or provide their communities access to international donor funding for development projects (e.g. Knodel, this issue). This does not imply that they cannot, at the same time, perpetuate inequalities and benefit from their brokerage (Faist, 2014: 40, see also Márquez García, this issue). In most cases, it is not a matter of either or but the result of complex negotiation processes and dynamics that the broker is not always in control of. Hence, it is not a matter of taking sides only but of brokering for a better future as such.

What has also been ignored in the literature so far is that engaging in brokerage often comes with high costs, be it partisan brokers in Indonesia who fight for indigenous peoples’ rights against resource exploitation and face serious threats by formal and informal security forces (Bräuchler, this issue); government employees in Ethiopia who broker between the state government and their own cultural communities, struggling with pressure and harassment to implement national law and meet cultural expectations of their communities at the same time (Epple, this issue); NGOs with a mission to integrate refugees that need to address the widely diverging needs of government and refugees (Walther, this issue); local development brokers who need to invest and pay out of their own pocket for their first projects in order to build up their networks and engage in promotional work for upcoming project proposals (Knodel, this issue); or self-proclaimed brokers in trade who face the constant threat of a failing market (Röschenthaler, this issue). How do brokers themselves cope with their own intersectionality, their being within and outside of society or a specific community at the same time? How do they cope with their highly insecure positions, constantly having to work towards the feasibility, visibility and sustainability of their brokerage mechanisms?

Brokerage chains, hierarchies and networks: Next to brokers’ particular life stories, our focus is on chains of brokers that is the stringing together of multiple brokers. William Murphy (1981: 677) is probably first to mention that different brokers are interdependent: ‘In his subsequent role as the main broker between the chiefdom and the national system, Kama [the former leader of a chiefdom and son of a powerful Kpelle warrior in Liberia] helped to create a nested system of local patronage and brokerage in which brokers at each level relied on influential brokers at higher levels for access to the national system’ (1981: 677). Drawing on a case study by Honoret Edja (2000) in Benin, and following Neubert (1996), Bierschenk and colleagues (2002: 25) called such networking of brokers on different levels a ‘brokerage chain’. In the Liberia case, the knowledge broker was dependent on other brokers who work in higher political levels but he also worked with both villagers’ fears and admiration through the accumulation of power, of symbols of modernity and the cultivation of ‘impression management’ (Murphy, 1981: 669, 677).

Broker chains allow for the bridging of larger geographical and ideational divides than could be managed by only one broker. With few exceptions, the brokerage literature has not paid enough attention yet to that phenomenon. Also, there is a clear gap when it comes to hierarchies within such brokerage chains and the collaboration of brokers in a place or a region (see also Southall, 1978), and how brokers involved collaborate or compete with each other and forward information and resources to new levels. In our special issue, we analyse, for example, how broker chains allow for the translation and the conceptual transfer of local notions of mental health into international clinical jargon (Arambewela-Colley, this issue) or from local ecologies and cosmologies to transnational environmental activism (Bräuchler, this issue), and the other way around. The networks of brokers also include the transversal connections into various social, economic or cultural sectors through which they create their superior knowledge activity (Röschenthaler, this issue).

Part-time brokers and in/formal brokerage: With this special issue we also want to challenge the idea of brokers as independent and working on their own accounts by shedding light on the interdependencies implied by and the broad spectrum of brokerage, from institutionalised forms of brokerage to informal brokerage, from state-employed actors to NGOs and individuals who work autonomously. Also, the degree of institutionalisation or independence can change throughout the brokerage process. Additionally, brokerage is part of changing sets of overlapping tasks and the brokers’ roles intersect with other activities such as with being landlords and merchants (Röschenthaler, this issue) or with being local political rulers and cash crop farmers (Márquez García, this issue). In other case studies, we only find some of the more prominent components of brokerage, and the overlap with other roles steps into the foreground such as in the case of activism in Indonesia (Bräuchler, this issue) and political brokerage in Ethiopia through government employees (Epple, this issue).

In the course of their careers, most brokers go through several stages, acquiring necessary skills, emerging as brokers, becoming part- or full-time brokers, and also assuming additional roles that consolidate (or challenge) their professionalism and potentially render their status less vulnerable. Brokers might also formalise their business or become part of an institution or organisation that has specialised in brokerage. Our case studies illustrate the broad spectrum of brokerage that occurs not only in the classical sense where brokers work on their own account, for their own benefit, but where their fields of activity extend from independent informal brokerage to institutionalised forms of the activity, from individual to collective brokerage, and from individuals who work autonomously to actors employed by NGOs and the government.

Concluding reflections

Building on the aforementioned studies, our contributors set out to develop new perspectives on brokerage through the innovative analysis and the close conjunction of brokerage with concepts such as belonging and ethnicity, entrepreneurship and technology, health care and law enforcement, resonance and indigeneity – concepts that have not previously been discussed by brokerage scholars. Through its unique comparative set-up and the innovative engagement with such concepts, this special issue sheds new light on the intricate dynamics and social relationships that the figure of the broker is embedded in. This special issue thus sets out to both refine the concept of brokerage by uncovering new aspects of the mediation processes and broaden it far beyond the four criteria that we took as a starting point by shedding light on the diverging nuances of brokerage.

We use brokerage as an analytical framework and our contributions illustrate the added value of this analytical tool and what it reveals that would otherwise remain hidden or unseen. At the same time, we are aware of possible pitfalls when essentialising and overstretching the concept. None of the actors that are in the centre of our considerations are solely brokers. It is a role that they take on but it should not be mistaken for the actors themselves. With a focus on a refined and broadened notion of brokerage there is always the risk to mistake any supposed mediator as broker and read the concept into any context, which is not helpful and would rather weaken the concept. Therefore, it is important to analyse brokers in their specific cultural, social and political contexts and be clear about parallel roles such as traders, spokesmen, gatekeepers, government officials, kins(wo)men or artists and overlapping activities such as translating, networking and spinning. Whereas brokers in some cases combine all these roles and activities, not all of these roles or activities taken on their own imply brokerage. Importantly, we also keep an eye on the limits of brokerage as a concept (see above) and as an act of intermediation because of, for instance, structural restrictions as well as vulnerabilities and harassment that often accompany the broker’s position.

Our contributions focus on both: how brokers themselves see their activities and how they are perceived by others in their specific contexts – by those who profit from their brokerage, those who might encounter disadvantages as well as those who are only indirectly involved. It is obvious that brokers shape and influence the notion of the fields that they handle as either, for example, desirable or unappealing, highly competitive or readily accessible. In either case, it is evident that all parties are gaining something in the process of brokering: the broker, even when in the role of a classical do-gooder (e.g. gaining prestige), marginalised indigenous people or villagers (e.g. gaining access to resources), as well as powerful national and international actors or donors (e.g. getting access to the targets of their activities and policies). By adopting such a perspective, we place all parties on the same epistemological level, which is a less hierarchical way to see the world, however, without ignoring the potential inequalities brokerage creates, reinforces or brokers themselves undergo in the relevant contexts.