Rationality and Decision-Making of Small Farmers: The Case of Ghana

Abstract

According to anthropologists and sociologists of non-western societies, small-scale farmers in the developing economies are not self-seeking profit maximizers—i.e., their activities are not oriented towards economic efficiency—compared to their counterparts in the developed economies. They are said to include cultural considerations in their decision-making process. As a result, sociology has been typically divided into western and non-western sociology. This gives the impression that societies are polarized into two extremes each of which requires a different method of analysis. The paper argues that in the less industrialised as in the industrialised societies, economic activities are subject to economic as well as socio-cultural considerations, although in the former, the cultural component may count more. A socio-economic model of rational behaviour has been developed to explain the activities of small cocoa farmers in Ghana. The relevance of a socio-economic model to explain the decision-making of the Ghanaian farmers broadens the notion of rational behaviour, and lends little support to the implications associated with the categorization of sociology into western and non-western sociology.