SINCRONIZACION POR CONDICION GENERAL

“Too much of the knowledge produced has become more or less irrelevant to the ‘nitty gritty’ of how social actors experience and attempt to penetrate and shape their conditions of existence. The social sciences and humanities have a tendency to become self-referencing discourses with theories related only to other theories in everlasting chains of the history of ideas rather than of the world” From the “Manifesto for Ethnography” (Willis and Trondman, 2000: 14).

“However, the nitty gritty of everyday life cannot be presented as raw, unmediated data – the empiricist fallacy, data speaking for itself” (ibid: 12).

My approach to this thesis has tried to find a middle ground between the two extremes critiqued in the quotes above. I did not start from a specific hypothesis. The research starts with a real-world problem: How to sustainably feed the large and fast growing cities, where an increasingly large majority of the world’s population is, in a way that is beneficial to producers, most of whom still live in the areas where there is most poverty. A good starting point for addressing this problem, or challenge, is to find out how such cities are being fed now. The main research question arising from this was: what are the patterns of provisioning for the main foods of Dar es Salaam residents; how and by whom are these patterns shaped and how effective are they in meeting the needs of all people within the pattern of provisioning? The more specific research questions focussed on whether the system responds to the needs of the eaters? Does it get food to where it is needed? Do people earn reasonable incomes from their work in the system? Is it competitive in pricing and quality? Does it appear sustainable? Important for answering whether the system works or not was asking if it meets the needs and aspirations of the human actors in the food system as they express them through their words and actions. The main research question shifted to some extent during the research as I moved from looking at patterns and processes to looking at the food system and how it is created and sustained. I have also had to make choices, given limitations of time and resources, about what issues, empirical and theoretical, to focus on.

I applied actor orientated ethnography for the gathering of data that brings out the heterogeneous everyday practices and perspectives of the actors involved and reveals how they shape their livelihoods, including how they respond to and reshape systemic and external pressures (Long, 2001; Arce and Long, 2000). The grounded theory approach, elaborated more below, was used to take and use the data gathered as the starting point for finding, or developing, concepts and theories that could explain what had been found empirically (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007; Heath and Cowley, 2004; Strauss and Corbin, 1994; Charmaz, 2012).

Willis and Trondman call for a theoretically informed humanistic ethnography that has a level of generalizability of relevance to contemporary society (Willis and Trondman, 2000). To achieve this they put forward the notion of a “theoretically informed methodology for ethnography”, they are seeking ‘Ah ha’ effects and ‘surprise’ “in the space between experience and discourse” (ibid: 12). They advocate avoiding both the “empiricist fallacy” and the irrelevance of much knowledge produced, by applying a “two-way stretch, continuous process of shifting back and forth, if you like, between ‘induction’ and ‘deduction’” (ibid: 12). Ostrom shared a similar sentiment, proposing that “[u]nderstanding how individuals solve particular problems in field settings requires a strategy of moving back and forth from the world of theory to the world of action (Ostrom, 1990: 45).

This takes the ethnographic research beyond qualitative description, which has a lot of value (Sandelowski, 2000), but is not satisfactory, despite Sandelowski’s arguments, for explaining

how and why things work the way they do. It lacks the development of theory that makes findings interesting and potentially applicable in other contexts.

The actor orientated approach arose to a large extent in response to the modernisation mind- set that shaped much of development thinking and practice in the last century with its assumption of a linear process of ‘development’ based on ‘Western’ experience and involving a particular package of discourse, technology and institutions (Long, 2001; Arce and Long, 2000). As Arce and Long put it, “[f]rom this perspective, the prerequisites of social development could only be achieved through the replication of successful European and American experiences and models” (Arce and Long, 2000: 5). In relation to the study of markets in Africa, Hill stated that “scarcely any economists in Africa are yet showing any awareness of the need to study the structure of the indigenous economy”. She goes on to question, rhetorically, why they would show any interest given that this is something “which they have always been obliged to regard as primitive” (Hill, 1963: 441). While Hill was writing some time ago, her words remain valid today. Despite the modernisation approach giving little or no space for the recognition and valuing of local people’s practices and own paths of progress (their own diverse range of modernities), the targets of development interventions have in practice consistently reinterpreted interventions and ideas of modernity and appropriated aspects they wanted to into their own views of the world and practices (Arce and Long, 2000). People have consistently refused to be passive victims of the modernisation project.

The actor orientated approach set out to explore the diversity of responses by human actors to projects of modernisation and wider systemic influences. The actor orientated perspective is not satisfied with allowing a-priori assumptions, mostly taken from one or other form of a structuralist perspective, to shape the exploration of how society, or in this case the food system, works (Long, 2001). Long and van der Ploeg (1994), for example, accept the importance of social relations of production and wider structural settings, but reject these as adequate explanans of the levels of heterogeneity found. They state, therefore, that “our emphasis is on the question of how these specific social relations are constructed, reproduced and transformed” (Long and Ploeg, 1994: 81). My research deliberately avoided starting with any specific state or NGO intervention, starting rather with the everyday practices of eaters in Dar es Salaam. The paucity and limited influence of external interventions in the shaping of the food system I found in my research and the way aspects of modernity that were found, mostly in the form of technology, were incorporated on people’s own terms, is revealing. Development interventions just aren’t shaping society as much as we might think given the amount of research on such interventions.

In contrast to starting a-priori with common linear views of development, this research and analysis takes on the task of looking at what exists and trying to understand its logic. In doing so it is necessary to explore the diverse sets of social and cultural norms and relations along with the economic relations involved in shaping the food system and the nature of transactions taking place when food is procured, sold and eaten. In doing so I move beyond

the so-called formalist-substantivist debate of the 1980s (Lie, 1997; Polanyi, 1957; Granovetter, 1985). I don’t see the food system I am studying as ‘primitive’ and ‘pre- modern, but at the same time I do not assume it is governed solely by the rules of utility maximisation. Following an actor orientated approach I understand markets, which are a central part of the food system, as dynamic and emerging and changing over time, as made of the associations of human actors (e.g. traders, transporters, eaters, and farmers) and non- human actors (e.g. food products, market stalls, trucks, roads, motels, polices, regulations)(Latour, 2005). Markets are treated as being enacted by human and non-human actors that operate within parameters of economic utility as well as within the boundaries of social norms. Markets emerge out of social struggles and stand for both place and processes of interaction and exchange between actors in the food system (Watson and Studdert, 2006; Hebinck et al., 2015; Dilley, 1992). Understanding the particular assemblages and processes in the food system feeding Dar es Salaam and how and why they exist and work has been the main task in analysis of the data (DeLanda, 2006).

What the concept of grounded theory assists with is the development of theory without starting from set and pre-existing theoretical positions that can narrow ones exploration of the as yet undiscovered (Charmaz and Mitchell, 2001; Heath and Cowley, 2004; Strauss and Corbin, 1994). This is a good fit for my actor orientated ethnography that is dedicated to starting with the real and varied lives of actors, but does seek theoretical explanation of phenomena found. In grounded theory the “[t]heory evolves during actual research, and it does this through continuous interplay between analysis and data collection” (Strauss and Corbin, 1994: 273).

When I started, I had a sense of some of the theoretical debates and concepts that could be applicable to the research and that to some extent shaped the methodological approach, but it was a fairly ‘thin’ sense of these debates. I had no hypothesis or fixed theoretical problem to resolve and remained open to questioning which theories helped to explain the phenomena found empirically (Heath and Cowley, 2004). As I gathered empirical data that raised new research questions which I looked to theories to help answer and which also led to adjustments in the approach to the field work. The core of the theoretical inquiry came down to trying to understand how the system worked in the way it did and why it worked in the way it did. It became an iterative process of gathering empirical data and out of that identifying phenomena which were tested against theory and likewise various theories were tested against the empirical situation. This drove a three-part process of: 1) ‘thickening’ the understanding of the empirical situation; 2) narrowing the focus of the research and the research questions; and 3) thickening the theoretical understanding of how and why the system works in the way it does (Figure 1)(Heath and Cowley, 2004). The results of the research process are, a rich understanding of the empirical situation and theories engaged with and developed to come to the point where I have arrived at an understanding and theoretical explanation of the main food system that feeds Dar es Salaam.

The grounded theory approach has been much debated, including between the two academics, Glaser and Strauss, who are credited with first developing the methodology (Walker and Myrick, 2006; Heath and Cowley, 2004). It has also been widely adapted and used in different disciplines of study, I continue with that adaptation not least because I am applying it to the study of a food system, whereas a lot of the grounded theory work, including the original Glaser and Strauss studies, has been carried out in the field of health care. I feel confident to say I have applied grounded theory as I have to some extent applied all the key elements of the methodology, described by Strauss and Corbin as: 1) “grounding of theory upon data through data-theory interplay”; 2) “making of constant comparisons”; 3) “the asking of theoretically orientated questions”; 4) “theoretical coding”; and 5) “the development of theory” (Strauss and Corbin, 1994: 283). I have also used ‘theoretical sampling’ that Charmaz and others have argued is another strategy of grounded theory (Charmaz, 2012; Walker and Myrick, 2006) as I have gathered further data to test and fill out more detail of emerging theories, such as about where food comes from and how it is traded.

I did not follow a strict form of coding, in part due to my reluctance to establish typologies, especially early in the study, that run the risk of excluding an understanding of the complex and highly heterogeneous nature of the actors, process and relations involved. Instead I preferred to follow an ethnographic approach to gathering and representing people’s lives and experiences that respects and records “the irreducibility of human experience” (Willis and Trondman, 2000: 5). This provides a “practical comprehension of the world quite different from the act of conscious decoding that is normally designated by the idea of comprehension” (Bourdieu, 1999: 135, cited in Willis and Trondman, 2000: 5). A form of coding was, however, still necessary and involved organising my analysis of field data, first of all around quite practical questions such as what food people where eating and where they got it from? Such practical questions, necessary for description of the food system, then led to more conceptual questions, such as why eaters got the food where they did. Leading, amongst other things, to an understanding of what is important for eaters in terms of access to food. With food traders and producers, the conceptual questions involved asking how

Figure 1 - Iterative grounded theory approach as applied to this research, which drew on Heath and Cowley, 2004

people started. How they gained the skills needed? How and from there did they access the capital required? All of this involved a level of more and less structured coding and comparison across actors and nodes in the food system to lead to findings at the level of substantive theory applicable at least to the food system of Dar es Salaam.

A next level of abstraction was to seek what Strauss and Corbin refer to as “[h]igher order grounded-theory”, also referred to as ‘formal theory’, that moves us from substantive theory applicable in a particular context to social theories that can have relevance elsewhere and in other fields of study (Strauss and Corbin, 1994: 281). This involved exploring what the core ordering principles of the food system are. What holds together the processes and relations found to create and reproduce the system and could these ordering principles be applicable elsewhere? Comparison was required across the different parts of the food system, the different foods and different nodes from retailing, indeed even eating, to the production. It also involved reading about experiences from other countries and times and engagement with existing theory that could help to both explain the phenomena and indicate that indeed these phenomena are found elsewhere. Out of this I have developed theory and “can claim predictability for it, in the limited sense that if elsewhere approximately similar conditions obtain, then approximately similar consequences should occur” (ibid: 278).