Market-Driven Change and Social Development in Peripheral Rural Context

This dissertation studies how businesses implement well-intended development ideas in a peripheral rural context. New business models have emerged that attempt to shift the focus away from profits for shareholders to the interests of peripheral communities where a business operates and claims to bring development. Literature nevertheless shows that development initiatives especially driven by the market, tend to work in service of the ‘developed’ capital while creating a seeming benefit of the ‘under-developed’ periphery (Spivak, 2018). Such critique often addresses cases of more extreme exploitation of peripheral regions by capital from the core. In this work, I look at how even in cases where a business is not generating major harm to the peripheral community it is operating in, but still exports the market logic and facilitates precarious channels of escape from poverty. The research question is formulated as follows: How can market-based ideas for development expand the market logic into a rural community and reproduce unequal relations between “developers” and “under-developed”? To answer this question, I suggest a framework rooted in a world systems perspective where ideas from the core that are framed in economic and market logic are expanding to development arenas and exclude the community from making decisions within this arena. It is infused with some principles of Tilly’s concept of durable inequality, specifically the idea that exclusionary patterns do not require belief in other persons' inferiority or intention to exploit for their benefit. As this work suggests, exclusion can be done even with the intention of creating benefits for the marginalised. Approaching from the interpretivist view, this research taps into how business fuses ideas of social development and exclusive market logic in a balancing act while justifying the inevitability of being exclusive towards members of the peripheral community it brings “development” to. To do so, I study two cases where business shows a willingness to take extra steps in improving the conditions of people within a rural peripheral community it operates in. One case concerns Illovo, a for-profit company utilising corporate social responsibility principles in its sugarcane supply relations with smallholder farmers in Kilombero, Tanzania. The other is centred around Libera Terra, a non-profit cooperative providing job opportunities to marginalised people facing threats from the mafia in Sicily, Palermo. Both businesses have a strong belief that they can and should be helping the peripheral community they take labour and resources. This is done through the creation of channels of escape from poverty. At the same time, due to the market custom of prioritising consumers over small suppliers and labour, due to the former being the source of income and the latter being replaceable, business is unable to exit the exclusive market logic. It prioritises its market position and the sustainability of the business model. As a result, business is putting the risks onto the members of the peripheral community by facilitating only precarious channels of exiting poverty. To answer the research question, I argue that the combination of market logic and intentions for a positive social shift solidifies the position of the business as the decisionmaker in a development arena while the impacted members of the community entering or not entering the provided channels of poverty escape are excluded from participating in controlling how the development arena is shaped. Following the contrast-oriented comparative logic, besides the exclusive tendency observed coming from the market, I highlight an important aspect that separates the two cases that can be the basis for further theory development. While the market pushes the business to take at least a partially exclusive position regarding the peripheral community, in forming a more focused approach to socio-political roots of poverty, such as the mafia, a business can create a framework of reality checks that help elevate the social aspects of development projects in contrast to wealth generation as the main objective of development.