Brokerage in Markets: The Role of Ambiguity in Distributing Value

Abstract

Understanding what brokers do and what happens to them in the doing is a way of understanding highly uneven processes of market-making and value distribution. This article explores the production and functioning of brokers’ moral ambiguity as a necessary and enabling feature of market exchange in a liberalized agricultural market. It focuses on tensions that have their origins in contradictory ideologies and the intertwining of instrumentality and affection. Through a close look at two different types of brokers — one closely linked to his client base through horizontal ties of mutual interdependence and one more socially distant — the article argues that how brokers respond to these tensions is constitutive of social power, the distribution of value between market actors, and the transformational processes at the heart of political economy.