Changing Social Structure in Ghana

Essays in the Comparative Sociology of a new State and an old Tradition

Jack Goody

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429950773
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

Originally published in 1975, this book presents the results of research into social change in Ghana. The book looks in detail at the problems of particular sub-groups and sectors in one single nation and they show that the field-worker with a wide comparative background in the range of pre-industrial societies has a positive role to play in contemporary social science.

SWINDLER OR PUBLIC BENEFACTOR? – THE ENTREPRENEUR IN HIS COMMUNITY

KEITH HART

In all relatively open economic systems it is possible for a few individuals to enrich themselves largely through their own efforts. The relationship betwen individual enrichment and social welfare is, however, a matter of dispute.

One set of ideologies is associated with the new rich themselves and those who proprogate their virtues. Success is attributed to hard work, abstinence, ambition, perseverance, skill and initiative, a quick eye for opportunities, luck and perhaps ‘a good woman behind me’. According to this view, success is due to the positive personal qualities of the individual concerned; no-one else really suffers when success comes this way. If the envious point out that some people are liable to get hurt by the individual’s single-minded pursuit of profit, it is usually claimed in mitigation that the public good is enhanced by his success in the long run: his enterprise generates additional social welfare either through a net increase of the total social product (provision of more goods, services and jobs) or through eventual redistribution of wealth gained at no-one else’s expense (the charitable benefits of industry). In this way individual enrichment may be idealised as a public benefaction, the mainspring of social progress.

Another set of ideologies is associated with those who oppose the new rich: individual enrichment is here attributed to lack of moral principle, isolationism, selfish greed, exploitation of others, theft (both direct and indirect) and numerous other anti-social vices. In every sense the community suffers from having such a person in its midst and public welfare is inevitably harmed. Individual wealth is seen largely as a product of transfers of value grabbed by force or sneaked by deception; wealth, created by others, is unjustly concentrated into the hands of a few persons selected by their lack of an ordinary social conscience. According to this view any long-term economic growth resulting from such a process is small compensation to those unfortunate enough to have been expropriated by the new rich on their way to the top. The essential feature of accumulation is thus the transfer of part of the social product to the benefit of one section of the community at the expense of the rest. In this way the successful individual is epitomised as a swindler and a public nuisance, the negation of social harmony.

These two contrasting images of the new rich may be encountered in real life situations, where social conflict arising from individual enrichment often take the form of ideological disputes about the morality of both particular persons and the process in general. The very existence of wide discrepancies in personal wealth poses a problem of justification and explanation which each of us depending on his own experience, tends to resolve by consistent adherence to one ideological pole or the other, whether positive or negative.

But must we leave it at that, simply as an example of the relativity of social constructions of reality? Is it not possible to settle the dispute at some other level, by having recourse to theory or ‘the facts’? When we turn to western economic theory for an assessment of the social consequences of individual enrichment, we only find two broad political camps corresponding roughly to the opposed ideologies set out above: each has prejudged the issue according to its commitment to a social world view. ‘Functional’ theory (the Weberian tradition) sees in the ‘entrepreneur’ a symbol of rationality and progress; ‘conflict’ theory (the Marxist tradition) identifies the ‘capitalist’ as a socially divisive expropriator of wealth produced by others.¹ It is unlikely then that the argument would be capable of resolution at the level of abstract generalisation, since all social theories, as ideologies, legitimate their findings by selective reference to some of the facts, while ignoring other, perhaps equally or more important dimensions to the problem. The tendency towards polarised judgements in real life is accentuated when the validity of entire social systems is called into question.

The position adopted in this paper is that social life, unlike the simplified reductions found in ideology and theory, is a dialectical process, in which individuals and groups seek to resolve fundamental contradictions operating as opposed pressures on their behaviour and thought. The process of personal enrichment highlights the contradiction between self and other, individual and society, private and public interests. At the bottom lies the contradiction, at least in the short-term, between accumulation and consumption. Conflict, both within the individual himself and in his exchanges with those around him, is the inevitable product of this clash of interests: but this may be offset by compensating measures which allow the individual to maintain viable, solidary relationships with his fellows and which reduce the antipathies and social conflict generated by his personal success. Given that social behaviour is never as consistent as ideology and sociological typification make it out to be, the basis of any theoretical account of the relationship between individual enrichment and social welfare must lie in the variety of possible resolutions to the dialectic as encountered in real life.

It is this paper’s aim to examine the social correlates of individual accumulation in a particular time and place, to see whether variations in the degree of ideological and practical opposition to the new rich may be grounded in (a) an unprejudiced analysis of the mechanisms of accumulation adopted by particular categories of individual and (b) an empirical account of their strategies for conducting exchanges with their social environment. The problem is a general one in history: as a recent commentator has remarked when discussing the issue in relation to African development, ‘.….emphasis on accumulating money as against meeting social obligations worried many people in the United States and Europe in the early years of industrialisation. John D. Rockefeller was highly unpopular most of his life; English literature is filled with hostile references to the ‘new men’, such as in Dickens’ ‘Hard Times’ ‘(Kamarck 1967:51). The interesting question is not to wonder whether accumulation of money and social obligations are in conflict – they clearly are; it is to ask why certain kinds of accumulation give rise to serious conflict in practice, while others do not. The wider issues of political choice and sociological prediction also depend on the question being framed in this way: in short, which strategies of accumulation are compatible with an enduring, cooperative social fabric and which lead to its potentially violent disruption? A major aim of the paper is thus to generate analytical categories which can be applied to the empirical problems in a wide-ranging number of social contexts. The particular case study chosen is appended to this discussion as a concrete illustration of what is thought to be a general dialectical process.

II

Very few analytical propositions are arrived at in a vacuum; and, before proceeding to elaborate the theoretical framework used in this study, it would probably be helpful if I were to outline the history of ideas and experience which lies behind the present analysis.

There are many cases for which my approach may be relevant (and I am aware of several), but the central case which this generalising model has been designed to fit was the product of an anthropological field study conducted in Ghana during 1965–68.² The study focussed on a number of self-made men and women who originated in one district of. N.E. Ghana and, at least potentially, shared an ethnic label referring to that district, ‘Frafra’. Some of them lived in their home village at the time of the study, others had moved to an urban centre within the Frafra district and others were migrants resident in Southern Ghana’s major cities. These accumulators (let us call them, without prejudice, ‘entrepreneurs’) were selected for study on one of two grounds – either (i) they were the commercial stars of this ethnic group, so widely known to most Frafras in Ghana that I could hardly miss them or (ii) they were small entrepreneurs at various stages of the accumulation process, less widely known but identified by me as prominent in a more restricted milieu, such as a village or a slum quarter.

All of these individuals presented accounts of their lives and social relations which I interpreted as providing (through their selection and emphasis of apparently verifiable events) ideological justification for their chosen path of material accumulation. All of them were described to me by others around them, and the two sets of accounts were often in conflict. In addition to these verbal statements, I was able to observe certain events and interactions over a prolonged period and sought, by means of various checks, to establish ‘objectively true’ pictures of each individual’s career built up from fragments of information gained in many ways. These personal histories, combining material transactions, social relations and ideological statements, were of highly varied quality, depending on the time devoted to each.

An underlying theme to emerge from these researches was that tensions between the claims of individual enrichment and those of social obligation were resolved in a number of practical ways and these various resolutions were often reflected in the somewhat idealised statements put out by actors of different kinds. The questions that I addressed to this problem were all concerned with the developing relationship between the entrepreneur and members of his community, whether it be home village or urban ethnic group. Could the demands of individual accumulation and membership in a ‘traditional’ community be reconciled? If they could not, what strategies were appropriate for emancipation from these ties? Conversely, why did village and ethnic solidarities apparently carry so much weight, when they inhibited the possibility of realising a successful strategy for personal enrichment? In taking this line, I was strongly influenced by the views of individual entrepreneurs, several of whom were by far my most intimate informants. A frequent topic in their conversation was the drag on their ambitions of continued ties with members of their natal community:

‘When they see this man is better, they want him to be worse, and they will always keep on coming, coming and you are giving, giving, giving. And then you will stand in the same shoes as they are – you will have nothing to give and they cannot give you anything. So you are poor and that is the level they really want to bring you to.’ (Politician and businessman in Accra).

In like vein, the converse opinion of many members of their networks was that these entrepreneurs were prone to neglect solidary relations of a morally binding nature. My initial analysis was based on an assimilation of this cognitive perspective and a reading of comparative entrepreneurial history and sociology.³ The overriding concern of this literature was to demonstrate the ‘economic rationality’ of the entrepreneur as he fought to secure extra profits (and social progress) in the face of obstacles put up by the forces of reaction. Unsurprisingly, I adopted a ‘modernisation’ approach to the problem of entrepreneurial development. The epitome of ‘modern men’, these accumulators of privately owned assets escaped, with a few exceptions, from the pressing obligations of kinship, neighbourhood and ethnicity through conversion to Islam or Christianity and by moving into new social milieus, where individualism was more positively sanctioned. They were ascetic, hardworking savers and investors whose economic rationality was in conflict with the norms of traditional values emphasising generosity and equality. As innovative types par excellence their unconventional choices set important precedents for their fellows. Although the mass of Frafras remained in stagnant poverty and were hidebound by tribal morality, the success of these few entrepreneurs was a source of great emulation for many and this small group constituted as such a major force for change, principal actors in the historical process leading to the erosion of existing social solidarities.⁴ Imbued with the spirit of this analysis I wrote a paper in 1969 which stressed the positive contribution made by small entrepreneurs of this type to Ghana’s development in the fields of long-distance trade, transport, housing, contracting and urban services. (Hart 1970)

The overall picture was consistent and therefore credible, were it not for the omission or glossing over of a number of impressions, facts and partial analyses which did not quite square with the general argument. Later I tackled the problem from an entirely different source and with another literature in mind. I became interested in the vast range of non-wage activities through which large numbers of ordinary poor Ghanaians made a sometimes precarious living in the towns. Preoccupation with this mass of petty transactions in what I chose to call the ‘informal economy’ brought to light the ‘rationality’ of various mechanisms of income sharing and social security provision which extended kinship and urban ethnicity made possible. Private accumulators looked rather different from this point of view and I came to realise that not all the self-employed, turning over a steady income, were would-be entrepreneurs who had failed to accumulate.⁵

A growing acquaintance with the literature of political economy and development economics led me to investigate the macro-structural relations between urban capitalism, rural production and the great amorphous rural-urban labour market of the self-employed. At this stage my attention was drawn to previously neglected features of Frafra entrepreneurship which together conform closely to the negative stereotype of the ‘petty capitalist’.⁶ Many accumulators were crooks, spivs, money lenders, extortionists, slum landlords, food hoarders and speculators who even sold water for profit, whose initial capital had been acquired shadily more often than not and whose unbridled individualism threatened the emergent adaptations with which the majority of Frafras sought to protect themselves against poverty, insecurity and exploitation. Moreover, the efforts of these small-time accumulators were of negligible social value in the face of massive income drain from Ghana facilitated by continuing relations of neo-colonial domination in sectors completely outside their control.

But this picture too, equally convincing because internally consistent, disturbed me because it precluded the possibility that small entrepreneurs, taken as a group, might be making a substantial contribution to real income growth in Ghana. Swindler or public benefactor? The polarised contrasts of popular sentiment and economic sociology succeed only in establishing that opposed points of view are possible, even likely, both in social life itself and in its academic analysis. This paper was conceived first as an attempt to set up an analytical framework capable of transcending the banal level of circular reasoning and self-fulfilling ideology, and second as a brief and partial application of the framework to a particular set of empirical circumstances, even though the details of the case were not collected with the testing of this framework in mind.

To relate the problem: what are the various ways in which individual entrepreneurs accumulate wealth? How do they manage their relationships (material, social and ideological) with other members of their community while raising their own income level? What are the consequences of individual enrichment for social welfare, conceived of either in terms of the total social product or of its distribution? These questions present a number of analytical difficulties which it would be advisable to confront before becoming involved in the case study itself. The following sections III and IV may be glossed over by readers who have little interest in theoretical problems.

III

The most obvious analytical problems are the following: (1) to identify the ‘entrepreneur’ as an actor (emic) or observer (etic) category, or as both; (2) to put a boundary around the term ‘community’ without objectifying either it or the individual’s orientation to it; and (3) to specify the terms under which social relationships will be analysed. It may then be possible to produce an abstract account of the accumulation process and its social consequences, by means of which particular cases may be investigated.

First, the term ‘entrepreneur’ is used ubiquitously in social science and history to denotea bewildering variety of persons.. In the third world, anyone who is not either a peasant farmer or a wage earner is liable to be classified as an entrepreneur; in anthropology, anyone who does something novel or manipulative, maximises profit or even acts persistently to further his own interest is likely to be called an entrepreneur; even in economics, ‘some writers have identified entrepreneurship with the function of uncertainty-bearing, others with the co-ordination of pro...