From development state to corporate leviathan: historicizing the infrastructural performativity of digital platforms within Kenyan agriculture

Laura Mann and Gianluca Iazzolino

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: While there is growing literature on the role of platforms in concentrating market power, this article centres on their role in ‘performing’ economic theory. As infrastructures that measure, monitor and ultimately compel human behaviour, the authors argue that digital platforms should be understood as ‘performative infrastructures’ that seek to incorporate informal populations by compelling behaviour in line with certain theoretical and commercial models. The article draws on secondary historical literature and primary research with Kenyan and international agritech developers, farmers, and representatives from international organizations, regulators and farmer organizations, to historicize contemporary ‘platformization’ within a longer history of infrastructural performativity in rural Kenya, in order to tease out both continuities and departures from the past. While contemporary technologists evoke similar justifications for top-down control over markets as did their analogue predecessors, they nonetheless seek to vest such power within the private sector and to use it to perform neoclassical theory. The authors argue that this particular orientation is not an intrinsic feature of the technology itself but is rather shaped by a longer history of shifting policy paradigms.

JEL-codes: J01 J1 N0 R14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2021-07-21
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-isf and nep-pay
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published in Development and Change, 21, July, 2021, 52(4), pp. 829-854. ISSN: 0012-155X

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/110725/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:110725

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().