African Businessmen in a Dual Economy
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9336379 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Peter Marris (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1971 |
| Volume | 19 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 231-231 |
| Publication date | 1971-07-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Industrial Economics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0022-1821 • E-ISSN: 1467-6451 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2097428 |
| OpenAlex | W2047654492 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
IN a society with marked cultural divisions, these divisions tend to intrude into economic life A racial or religious group dominates in one field of economic activity, while it is virtually excluded elsewhere. This is no accident, for the cultural bond can help to secure the social networks which carry business forward. But these cultural divisions also act as formidable barriers to change, cramping and distorting the evolution of new patterns of relationship. Economic innovation may then be stultified less by lack of resources than by lack of a social network, of conventions of mutual trust and understanding, through which to organize its affairs. This is a characteristic problem of a dual economy-meaning here simply any economy where such cultural divisions have become a dominant organizing principle of economic management. In this paper, I want to discuss the dual economy from the standpoint of a local businessman-not the manager, of an international company, nor the influential politician who sits on boards of directors, but the man who has built up his own concern, and is trying to be more than just a petty shopkeeper or a self-employed craftsman. Such a man stands in the middle of the systems of relationship in which the economy is divided. He is ambitious, progressive, yet still partly held by the values and obligations of the small-scale rural community in which he grew up. He has to think out afresh how to handle his suppliers, his bank, his workers and customers, because he is a newcomer to the commercial or industrial activity he undertakes and there are no precedents to guide him. Men of other races may have run similar businesses before, even in the same place, but they worked within the conventions of different cultures. He has to pioneer his own solution to the problems of management which confront him, mediating between the demands of economy institutions at large and the expectations of his own people. For him, the disjointedness of a dual economy presents a set of practical difficulties which he must overcome if his business is to survive. I will try to describe how African businessmen in Kenya characteristically handle this situation. My information comes mostly from
Art · Business · Dual (grammatical number · Dual economy · Economic system · Economics · Economy · African history and culture studies
| Citations per year | 0.19 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2000 - 2021 (22) |
| Highly cited | No |