Assembling Export Markets (eBook)

Stefan Ouma is Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Geography at the Goethe University of Frankfurt. Being an economic geographer by training, he has worked extensively on global commodity chains, agrifood standards, smallholder agriculture, and contract farming in East and West Africa.

USA:
Annals of the American Association of Geographers
Economic Geography
Review of International Political Economy
Socio-Economic Review

ROW:
African Affairs
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
Cambridge Journal for Regions, Economy and Society
Development and Change
Environment and Planning A
Economy and Society
Global Networks
Globalizations
Progress in Human Geography
Journal of Agrarian Change
Journal of Modern African Studies
Science and Technology Studies

'In transparently clear prose, Stefan Ouma has written a wonderfully rich empirical account of how global markets for tropical fruit are made both materially and institutionally at the intersection of very particular local sites. The book is another terrific example of the usefulness of the theory of economic performativity that German economic geographers have increasingly honed and made their own.'
Trevor Barnes, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia

'In this provocative book, Ouma challenges the conventional wisdom of both market enthusiasts and critics. Through insights from across the social sciences, he shows how both market institutions and the persons who perform them always emerge from particular messy historical circumstances, creating different formats and distributions of power in different locations. Ouma's 'on the ground' study offers a new and important approach to understanding markets.'
Lawrence Busch, Department of Sociology, Michigan State University

'A rich exploration of the sociomaterial processes of marketization of two case studies of agriculture projects linked to the European market. Ouma's theoretical approach is eclectic, diverse, and interdisciplinary, edging on the line of exploration. The focused presentation of the various actor processes compels the reader to stay attentive to the details. This is a book that makes an extraordinary contribution both theoretically and empirically to the understanding of the ways in which global agro-export markets, which connect goods and products from the Global South to retailers in the Global North, are created through local projects.'
Gale Raj-Reichert, Queen Mary University of London, UK (The AAG Review of Books, Volume 7, 2019: Issue 2)

'I learned a lot reading this monograph, and find it to be a valuable addition to the commodity chain literature, providing sharp insights for thinking about critical ethnographies of markets and market making.'
Edward F. Fischer, Vanderbilt University (Economic Sociology: The European Electronic Newsletter, Volume 18, Number 2)

'Focusing on development through export-oriented integration into global markets, [Assembling Export Markets is] grounded in a wealth of ethnographic material, gathered with an amount of fieldwork that few scholars are prepared or are able to invest in the current academic environment... This impressive study of attempts to make agricultural markets in Ghana is cutting-edge scholarly work of the highest quality that I greatly enjoyed reading.'
Christian Berndt (Economic Geography, Vol. 93 No. 2)