Bittersweet Company: Relational Frames and Entrepreneurial Pursuit in a Deregulated Cocoa Industry

Résumé fourni par la source

Why do some microentrepreneurs in emerging economies pursue new entrepreneurial opportunities after reforms lift constraints, while others do not? This study shows that the answer lies not only in material resources or motivation, but in how actors navigate the risks associated with becoming more visible to others. Drawing on an inductive, longitudinal study of smallholder cocoa farmers in Trinidad and Tobago after industry deregulation, I develop a model of how relational frames—cultural tools that guide whom to engage with in economic activities and how—shape entrepreneurial pursuit. Before deregulation, farmers relied on a hierarchical relational frame that supported predictable exchanges with economic alters and buffered them from resource-extracting stakeholders, such as criminals and corrupt authorities. Deregulation dismantled the institutional structure that supported this frame and introduced new economic alters, forcing farmers to renegotiate the social rules of exchange. Most retained the hierarchical frame, did not learn how to engage with new economic alters, and thus ultimately exited cocoa. In contrast, a small subset built relational spaces with new economic alters. Within these spaces, they revised their frame toward co creation and thus pursued and sustained new cocoa based entrepreneurial activities. This study contributes to organizational theories of entrepreneurship in the Global South by highlighting the interpretive work through which entrepreneurs (re)construct relational certainty in changing markets.

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