Abstract
Brokerage is an essential yet understudied function in social life. In one of the classics in the field of sociology, Georg Simmel differentiated three types of the “third” which help to analyse brokerage: the disinterested mediator or arbitrator, <em>tertius gaudens</em> and <em>divide et impera</em>. Studies that conceptualise traffickers and smugglers as brokers are extremely rare. Scholars lack a typology which can serve as a basis for comparative research. To advance scholarship on brokerage this article seeks to develop a conceptual-typological matrix by setting out to explore three questions: Why does brokerage exist? What kind of social mechanism is brokerage? What are the implications of brokerage for social inequalities and equalities? The analysis concludes with the consequences of different types of brokerage for the (re)production of social inequalities.
Highlights
Reference to ubiquitous migrant networks (Gold, 2005), social capital (Massey & Aysa, 2005), or migration systems is not sufficient to account for how some of the reciprocal relationships between migrants and others who offer intermediary or brokerage services function
This paper offers a conceptual sketch for a typology of brokerage in cross-border migration and outlines how to study the consequences brokerage has for socialequality
By employing brokerage as a social mechanism, we can see that it is a crucial part of the functioning of what are called migrant or migration networks, groups and associations
Summary
Reference to ubiquitous migrant networks (Gold, 2005), social capital (Massey & Aysa, 2005), or migration systems is not sufficient to account for how some of the reciprocal relationships between migrants and others who offer intermediary or brokerage services function. Since labour migration and other forms of cross-border mobility constitute an adaptive response to social risks and related inequalities of opportunity on the part of the movers, a conceptual approach to brokerage should be open to the idea that it can at the same time perpetuate old inequalities and create new ones. Brokerage needs to be disaggregated as a social mechanism into sub-mechanisms to be of use This crucial task is nicely illustrated in Pamela Oliver’s criticism of the seminal work by McAdams et al (2001) on collective action: The mechanism...that comes up most often [in the volume] is called “brokerage”, a term borrowed from network theory...to refer to people who connect previously unconnected groups, and the book stresses its importance in virtually every episode. This approach is appropriate because cross-border transactions may take place on different levels, such as the family, friendship cliques, business networks, local communities, or organizations, and it is through the very practice itself that agents constitute these scales in the first place
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