Moral Technologies of Market Construction: How Wal-Mart is Displacing the Indian Bazaar

• In Event: 355 - Section on Economic Sociology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 08. Ideas, Morality, and Social Organization

Abstract

This paper analyzes contemporary debates over legal rules and regulatory policies governing foreign direct investment (FDI) in retail food supply chains in India. It argues that political and economic elites deploy competing conceptions of ‘technology’ in order to rationalize and justify new regulations allowing greater participation of multinational firms such as Wal-Mart in Indian food markets. Proponents argue that foreign firms will bring sophisticated supply chain management technologies that will rationalize and modernize the retail food sector thus generating broad based consumer welfare benefits by delivering higher quality foods at lower prices as well as improved conditions for poor farmers. However, the paper suggests that this deployment of technology is less about improving the technical efficiency of Indian supply chains and more about radically reorganizing the sector by deploying moral categories of market actors. Indian technocrats seek to replace delegitimized ‘traditional’ small-scale Indian traders and middle-men with ‘modern’ large scale foreign and domestic capital in an increasingly liberal Indian political economy. Thus we argue that the stakes are less about new sets of supply chain management techniques but rather the reorganization of commodity markets and relations of exchange through the imposition of reformed moral hierarchies of market actors.

Author

• Jason Jackson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology