Dynamic brokerage across socio-cognitive boundaries : external boundary spanners in South African agribusiness

Abstract

Extant brokerage literature is teeming with explanations of brokerage across structural holes (open networks), but lean on the accounting for brokerage opportunities in closed networks. Predominantly, brokerage is presented as a structural construct and brokerage opportunities that exhibit temporal dependencies are not easy to explain using extant literature. The explanation of the dynamic properties of brokerage, such as the ability of brokers to adjust their roles as the network context changes, is eschewed. This study introduces the concept of boundary spanner brokerage and defines a dynamic construct, that is able explicate temporal adjustments to brokerage roles as a consequence of cognition in the social environment. The South African agribusiness sector presents an ideal opportunity for the exploration of this phenomenon. The network environment is characterised by small-world networks that impose cognitive boundaries between established white agribusiness and emerging black farmers. Building relationships across these socio-cognitive boundaries is a challenge for emerging agribusiness. Traditional brokerage methods have failed, but cases of successful boundary spanner brokerage have been reported. The expectation that such brokerage could be a silver bullet, for the sustainable connection of emerging agribusiness to industry value networks is, a motivation for this study. Applying a contextualist perspective, the research design considers change dynamics at network, process and actor levels. Social network scholarship posits that any study of network change should consider the interconnectedness of context, action and change, hence the study of microfoundations of network change and in particular, how agency secures on-going brokerage returns. The longitudinal study combines historical and real-time data, spanning the period 2008 to 2018. It relies on 18 semi-structured interviews with business managers, board members and senior members of partner organisations, as well as news media reports and previous academic studies. A necessary complement to the research design is that of ethnographic observation. It allows the phenomenon of boundary spanner brokerage to be studied in its environmental context