BENEDICTE BRØGGER

Economic anthropology,
trade and innovation

The problem addressed in the paper is that professional trade does not appear on the horizon of the national
innovation system in Norway. Everyday trade in everyday goods, retailing, appears as a white spot on an
otherwise fairly comprehensive map of the economic process. An ethnographic account would render a view
of it as a terrain teeming with life and activity and depending on innovations to play the role it does in the
national economy. In line with basic approaches in economic anthropology, I explore three sets of conditions
that contribute to generate this particular white spot – the rationality of economic theory, the priorities of
institutions in the political economy and a classificatory schema in which professional trade is categorically
‘matter out of place’. The innovation system is portrayed as reproducing a certain reality, ‘vicious cycle
of “reality”’, and the concluding discussion is about how the grounded and experimental anthropological
approach makes it possible to dismantle and explore such certainty.

Key words retailing, political economy, grand theory, Norway

Introduction

The problem addressed in the paper is that professional trade does not appear on the
horizon of the national innovation system in Norway. Everyday trade in everyday
goods, retailing, appears as a white spot on an otherwise fairly comprehensive map
of the economic process. I explore three sets of separate, but related conditions that
contribute to generate this particular pattern: basic assumptions in economic theory, the
self-confirming practices of the national innovation system, and the everyday ambiguity
of traders as ‘matter out of place’. By this, I test the fruitfulness of combining what
Wilk and Cligget (2007) have identified as the three main approaches in economic
anthropology – the rational, the social and the cultural. I conclude that each type
of explanation contributes to a more holistic account, but that it is the more basic
experiential approach common to all of anthropology that is crucial for understanding
the ‘vicious cycle of “reality”’ (Smith 2006) generated by the innovation establishment.

A white spot on the map

My practical experience with the somewhat ambiguous position of professional trade in

Norway was the result of three collaborative R&D projects in retail chains between 2000

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and 2007, and the failed efforts at establishing conditions for a fourth. The projects were
based on interaction and reflections with a large number of people in chain headquarters,
stores, unions and employers’ associations, as well as people in the institutions that make
up the national system in support of innovation.
The fact that trade does not appear on the horizon generated by the national
discourse of innovation was firmly established at a business meeting in 2003. At the
meeting were two researchers, a vice-president in one of the country’s largest chains
and a representative from a government agency in support of innovation. The chain had
gone through a radical overhaul in just a few years and the vice-president was among
those who had initiated and steered the organisation towards the new practices. At the
meeting he presented numerous examples to support his argument that there was indeed
innovation in retailing. The government representative was equally insistent that these
types of changes could not be classified as innovation. Finally he simply said, ‘there is no
innovation in selling goods, you know’. On hearing this, the vice-president’s face turned
red and his shoulders tensed, but he responded with woolly phrases that deflected the
potentially explosive situation. The meeting ended soon after. The vice-president later
explained that although he strongly disagreed with the government representative, he
had thought it unwise to push him any further at that point. The communication had
broken down, and against the representative’s surety about the nature of reality there
was nothing more that could be said or done.
The statement ‘there is no innovation in selling goods’ had left the rest of us in
some confusion. We knew very well that there was a lot of innovative activity going
on in retailing, even though the activities were conceptualised in terms of branding,
marketing, logistics and organisational formats rather than innovation. Such activities
had resulted in a sector that had had the highest productivity growth of all since the early
1990s (Norges Bank 2006), and was now the single largest part of the private sector, both
in terms of number of employees and number of enterprises (Norges Forskningsråd
2007b). Hence, there seemed to be a considerable discrepancy between our experiences
and what the government representative claimed to be the situation. It seemed to be
a white spot on the map, while the terrain was teeming with life and activity. This
paper is the result of the effort to explore conditions that generated this particular white
spot.

On professional trade

Of the three interrelated fields that make up an economy – production, distribution/

exchange and consumption – the distributive apparatus has received the least attention,
also in anthropology. When the distributive apparatus is integral to the subsistence
economy, it does not appear as a separate institutional structure. In such cases, there
are good reasons to analyse it as part of integrated patterns of production, exchange
and consumption. This is how trade and exchange has most often been analysed in
anthropology (Barth 1967, 1972; Bohannan 1959; Bohannan and Bohannan 1968; Firth
1967; Gudeman 2008; Malinowski 2002; Sahlins 1972). An integrated understanding
may also be warranted when the distributive apparatus is integrated with the polity,
as was the case with the Roman grain trade (McCormick 2002), the tribute trade in
China (Pomeranz and Topic 2005), trade from abbeys and monasteries in medieval

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Europe (Pirenne 1969), and the ‘supply on command’ of the Inca (LaLone in Earle
2002: 82). Professional trade’s position in the political economy is somewhat different
from that of subsistence or tribute trade, even though the difference may be more in
degree than in kind. Professional traders represent themselves. They bear the risk and
gain themselves, and can rarely depend on others for safety and support. In some cases,
the position apart may be further enhanced by ethnic differences, as has been the case
with the Hansa (Zimmern 2007), the overseas Chinese in South-east Asia (Menkhoff
and Gerke 2002), Jews in the USA (Weiner 2006) or the Hausa in Nigeria (Cohen
1969).
When the research interest is in subsistence systems or political economy, the inner
workings of the distributive apparatus are easy to lose sight of. However, a recent
surge of books and papers has brought it into view. This literature reveals the complex
dependencies between production, exchange and consumption without reducing the
distributive apparatus to a function of either. One of the first ethnographies of its inner
workings is an all too brief chapter of the ‘warfare’ between different distributors of
sweet drinks in Trinidad (Miller 1997: 104–35). A rich ethnography from an old style
outdoor market in France thematises social relations between real people who are much
more than calculating economic agents (Pradelle 2006), as in an account of the fluidity
in the paths taken by women traders who make a living in Nigeria (Cornwall 2007).
A volume on how individual bookstores become part of retail chains brings forth the
sellers’ experiences of confusion and loss in the transformation from a ‘books for books’
sake’ to a ‘books for profit’ approach (Miller 2007). In a collection of papers on markets
as gendered places, the emphasis is on how women traders use markets to shape their
identities in intensely personal ways (Seligman 2001). An account of how used clothes
are sent from the West for resale to Zambia documents the transformation of value that
occurs as garments shift hands from importers through wholesalers and distributors,
and the account moves effortlessly from personal ideas of beauty to realpolitik and
back (Hansen 2000, 2002). A somewhat incongruous comparison between the sale of
vodka in Russia and newspapers in Nigeria links regulative regimes and trade patterns
(Obukhova and Guyer 2002), as does a discussion of the ambivalence towards sales
assistants in recent years in the German Democratic Republic (Schröder 2006). These
rich and often ambivalent portraits of traders contrast markedly with how trade appears
when pressed into the more rigid models of economics.

‘Sellers of cabbages and shoes’ in economic theor y

The development of modern economic theory is a several centuries-long and convoluted

process (Schumpeter 1982; Magnusson 1994). The nuances and controversies of the
discourse are not a concern of this paper, which presents the results of a selective
reading in search of the genesis of the white spot.
The origin of modern economics is most often given as the late 1700s. The strong
interest in economics at the time must be seen in connection with the emergence of
nation states. Initially, there was a keen interest in trade. It was regarded as a means to
make ‘the nation-state . . . rich and powerful’ by securing favourable balances of trade
(Magnusson 1994: 147). From the interest in the balance of trade followed an interest
in flows of goods and payments, and the nature of wealth, and later of labour.

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Traces of the genesis of the white spot can be found in a footnote in Schumpeter’s
account of these times. He states that ‘this curious idea, according to which capitalist
employers are supposed to hold cabbages and shoes, which they sell to their workmen
must be viewed as a measure of simplification to bring out essentials and meaning
that underlie the treacherous mass of surface phenomena in a monetary economy’
(Schumpeter 1982: 567). Why he regards merchants and shopkeepers as surface
phenomena, he does not say.
The simplification came to be continued as a narrower and quantitative economics
developed a hundred years later (Elliot 2007). In this field, the experiences of real people
were even further removed from the models, so the fact that traders were absent hardly
mattered. The emergence of econometrics in the beginning of the 1900s resulted in an
array of advanced statistical tools to analyse the aggregate outcomes of the dispositions
of individuals, households and firms (Schumpeter 1982), and mainstream economics
got even further away from the untidy ground of economic practice.
In the development of the theories there seems to be several factors that contributed
to keeping the ‘sellers of cabbages and shoes’ out of the picture:

• When the schema for organising the subject matter of economic analyses into
production, distribution and consumption was developed, distribution came to refer
to income formation and not to how goods were distributed and by whom.
• At the same time, the general idea was that goods and services left the economic
process when they entered the household sphere and were consumed. Hence
a distinction between the public (productive) and the private (unproductive or
reproductive) became operative. Those who sold the goods to be consumed were
classified as part of the ‘unproductive’ sphere.
• Another general idea was that the interplay of the productive forces of land, labour
and capital was shaped by a given technological horizon. The distributive apparatus
was not technological and hence it could not appear on that horizon.

By the time innovation studies became established as a separate field, the basic
idea that the distributive apparatus did not contribute to the economy or technological
change had long been established.

Professional trade and innovation studies

Although it was not originally part of the economists’ land–labour–capital blueprint

of the economic world, innovation came to occupy an increasingly important position
in economics, especially in theories of economic development and growth (Baumol
et al. 2007; Elliot 2007). Innovation theory was developed to cope with the unpredictable
processes that consistently contradicted the axiomatic assumption of equilibrium on
which economic theory rests. Economies do change, and that fact is hard to reconcile
with the notion of equilibrium. Innovation theory provided a much needed means of
explanation, and made it possible to study change and growth as the result of ‘new
combinations of existing resources’ – innovation (Fagerberg 2005: 6).
In the 1990s a torrent of innovation research appeared. Innovation is studied in
connection with many factors: technological conditions; institutional factors: firms,

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regional systems, sectors, nations or industrial clusters; as part of processes of learning

and diffusion; or as an element in competition, profit and economic growth, as the
chapters in a comprehensive handbook on innovation attests to (Fagerberg et al. 2005).
The literature is vast, with one exception, the scarcity of literature on innovation in
‘selling of goods’. In the literature on sectoral innovation, which deals with how and
why innovation differs across sectors, emphasis is on technology, the size of firms and
the process industry (Malerba 2005). In the literature on services (a category in which
trade for some reason is included), the main theme is information technology, design
and customer relations, which to some extent address concerns of the traders, as do
questions of the recent ‘industrialisation’ of global trade and new organisational formats
(Miles 2005). A study of retailing in Japan addresses professional trade and innovation
directly, as the author discusses innovation as originating from changes in organisational
formats and not technologies (Meyer-Ohle 2003). There is also a literature that deals
explicitly with trade in Norway. There are many examples of what could be identified as
innovation in these publications, but none of them addresses the question of innovation
explicitly (see, for example, Dahlstrøm and Nygaard 1999; Hodne 1989; Nygaard 2000;
Nygaard and Myrtveit 2000; Rasmussen and Reidarson 2007; Reidarson and Rasmussen
1997; Reve and Jacobsen 2001). It is therefore possible to find a few examples of studies
that implicitly link innovation and professional trade, and those that link it explicitly
are even fewer.
The field of innovation studies was established as an influential cross-disciplinary
field and parted ways with economics in many respects. However, the old, basic schema
of income formation, productive sectors and technological change is clearly recognisable
as main constituent parts and continue to shape the paths of the discussions.

The concept of the ‘national innovation system’

The term ‘national innovation system’ was coined in 1992 and it served as an umbrella
term for much that had hitherto been only loosely connected (Freeman 1995; Lundvall
1992). 1 The creator of the term is amazed by how rapidly it came to be used to
institutionalise innovation policies carried out by the players in a specific institutional
field not only in the Nordic countries of which the first paper spoke, but also in
the EU and OECD area (Lundvall 2007). Innovation models become a means to
develop national policies for economic growth (Lundvall and Borrás 2005), and to
institutionalise a national innovation system to administer the policies.
In Norway, with its strong and pervasive public sector, that system has considerable
influence. The Norwegian political economy has been aptly labelled ‘democratic
capitalism’ (Sejersted 2001, 2002). It is a redistributive economic system. The private
sector does business for the sake of producing a surplus. This is the ‘capitalism’ part of
the system. The government draws in resources through taxes and fees and redistributes
them for infrastructure, education, health and culture purposes, all of which are to a large
degree ‘free’ for the citizens. The pattern of redistribution follows political decisions, the
‘democratic’ part of it. These decisions influence the conditions for economic activity.

1 The term national innovation system is also used to refer to aggregate outcomes of all innovation
activities in a country (Tidd et al. 2005), but that is another literature that is of less relevance for the
discussion here.


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The private and the public sector (not least the many government-owned enterprises)
have a common interest in continued economic growth. This is part of the reason why
theories of innovation have gained such importance and an institutional infrastructure
to support innovation has emerged. The strong central government is a driving force in
generating innovations and there are millions of NOK involved in support of innovation
activities.

The Norwegian national innovation system

The national innovation system consists of five main national institutions: The Ministry
of Trade and Industry; two government venture capital funds cum consultancies named
Innovation Norway and SIVA; the Norwegian Research Council responsible for
innovation research; and SkatteFunn, a tax credit system set up to help fund innovative
R&D activities in the private sector. The other players on the field are those that are
a priori identified as legitimate participants, in counties, municipalities and the private
sector. Some companies aim to gain access to the field and the funds that follow from
being acknowledged as a legitimate participant. How the system came to be established
and how it is constantly redefined as the result of political processes is not a theme here.
Likewise, the five national institutions employ hundreds of people engaged in complex
decisionmaking processes, and these are also not thematised. Of importance are the
decisions, which serve to channel large amounts of money, but not in the direction of
professional trade.

The Ministry of Trade and Industry

The Ministry is firmly in charge of everything to do with business, and hence to

do with innovation. It funds the other four government agencies that make up the
innovation system and thus represents its administrative apex. This is how innovation
was thematised at the time of the project referred to above, when the scope of the
national innovation policy was most clearly thematised in a white paper on the science
and research policy. Here one of three areas of national priority was research-based
innovation and entrepreneurship. 2 The reasons given for the priority of that area were
as follows:

It is better, both for society and for individuals, to prepare for new growth
and establishment of profitable companies, than to deal with unemployment
and unused resources after the fact. One of the most important tasks of the
innovation policy is to increase the economy’s and the companies’ ability to
change and innovate, so that the costs that change always entails are as small as

2 A white paper on innovation was placed before the Parliament in December 2008, and here
innovation in trade was discussed in relation to its specific conditions and needs (Stortingsmelding
7. Et nyskapende og bærekraftig Norge). It remains to be seen how the reorientation will affect
the policies and flows of money through the system, and the changes in perspectives and possibly
practices will be worth a separate discussion. This paper deals with the context for the experiences
at the time of the projects.


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possible, and that the change is the least painful. (Stortingsmelding 20 2004–2005,
Chapter 6.1.1. Translation mine)

This echoes the preoccupation with innovation as a source of economic growth in

economic theory. The white paper did not define innovation any further, and left the
realisation to be worked out by the relevant government agencies.

Innovation Norway – in support of remote areas

The government institution with the most explicit emphasis on innovation is an agency
known as Innovation Norway. It is owned by the Ministry of Trade and Industry,
but at its board sits mainly representatives from the private sector. The institution lends
money to innovative companies, and also provides services like counselling, competence
development, networking and branding. In 2007, the institution had about 1 billion
NOK (about 112 million Euros/152 million USD) to support innovation activities. In
the annual report for 2007, the two industries mentioned as especially important are
tourism/travel (reiseliv) and the maritime industry. The home page adds the following
sectors: energy and environment, health, information technology, oil and gas, culture
and experience and agriculture. Professional trade is not one of these, and this may have
to do with the institution’s emphasis on development of remote areas of the country.
The institution started out in 1961 as ‘The fund for development of districts’
(Distriktenes Utviklingsfond). Districts refer to the non-urban areas of the country.
From 1994 it was ‘The state’s fund for development of industries and districts’ (Statens
Nærings- og distriktsutviklingsfond). In 2004, it merged with several other institutions
and began its new operations under the name Innovation Norway. The institution has
units all over the country and the employees base their activities on extensive local
knowledge. The ambition to contribute to economic development in the districts is
noticeable. Innovation Norway shapes the national discourse on innovation with a
language in which the districts of Norway appear concisely and meaningfully.

SIVA – in support of remote areas

The Industrial Development Corporation of Norway (Selskapet for Industrivekst)

is a holding company owned by the Ministry of Trade and Industry. Its income,
which in 2007 was nearly 266 million NOK (30 million Euro/40 million USD),
comes partly from the Ministry of Trade and Industry and the Ministry of Regional
Development, and partly from income on property and shares. SIVA was funded in
1968, and as Innovation Norway it aims to develop strong regional and local industrial
clusters and with emphasis on the districts or remote areas of the country. Unlike
Innovation Norway, SIVA is actively engaged in the ownership, establishment and
management of incubators, business gardens and science parks throughout the country,
to realise its stated aim to contribute to the improvement of the national infrastructure
for innovation. Infrastructure in this context refers to the physical infrastructure of
buildings as well as information infrastructures and social networks. Again, the priority
given to development in remote areas partly excludes professional trade, although there
are examples of trading companies in its business parks.

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Research Norway – in support of research-based innovations

Research has long been identified as the main source of innovation, and still has a
high priority in Norway, even though the level of R&D is low compared with other
countries (Wendt 2007). Most research and development funding in Norway is from
public sources, and private sector R&D activity is low compared with other countries
(Wendt 2007). This is one reason why the government has taken such an active interest
in innovation, not least through its funding of Research Norway. In 2007, the Council
administered about 6 billion NOK (675 million Euros/914 million USD). The funds
come mainly from the 16 different ministries, which all have their separate priorities,
and the council also strives to comply with the national science policy as outlined in the
white paper referred to above.
The Council is organised into four divisions: science, large initiatives, inno-
vation and administration. The innovation division has a number of programmes
to support innovation-related R&D, and the main part of the project portfolio
concerns projects connected with technology in one form or the other: oil and
gas, environment, bio-production, maritime industries, transport, and information
technology. Development in the health sector, experience/tourism and the public
sector are other areas of priority. In other words, the basic schema on technology and
productive sectors is still recognisable in the Council’s interpretation of the national
innovation policy, and again that leaves little room for professional trade, although
exceptionally, it is thematised more fully in one of its publications (Norges forskningsråd
2007a).

SkatteFunn – in support of research-based innovation

Another public institution in support of research-based innovation is SkatteFunn, a tax

credit system. SkatteFunn is managed by Innovation Norway in collaboration with the
Norwegian Research Council. SkatteFunn is, in theory, open to any registered company
with a qualifying R&D project. The Norwegian government set up SkatteFunn in 2002
to support innovation, and it replaced an older tax credit system (Cappelen et al.
2007, 2008). In 2007, the total tax credits companies gained through the nearly 4000
projects was about 1.4 billion NOK (158 million Euro/213 million USD). The sectors
supported by SkatteFunn mirror those supported by the Council, SIVA and Innovation
Norway – manufacture and technology. A preliminary report from an evaluation
of SkatteFunn reveals that less than 3% of the projects that qualified were in trade
companies (Cappelen et al. 2007: 57).
The application system to SkatteFunn also indicate a lack of conceptual space
for trade. Each applicant has to fill out an electronic form, and to describe the R&D
project according to a specific template. One item in this template is a specification
of the kind of technological innovation involved in the project. Of the many different
categories, there is none, except the category ‘other’, under which a trade company
may define its core activity – the buying and selling of goods. There is not even a
category like ‘logistical innovation’. The taxonomy indicates that the fund is geared
towards innovations of products and/or technologies for producing them, not their
distribution.

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45
% of total companies with innovation

40

35
30

25
Series1
20

15
10

5
0
innovation for
innovation

innovation

innovation

innovation

and/or market
Organisational

process, org.
Process
Product

Product

process
the market

Market

innovation
and/or

innovation
Product

Prod.,
Type of innovation

Figure 1 Types of innovation in Norwegian companies 2002–2004

Source: www.ssb.no/innov/tab-2007-12-18-02.html
(Accessed 30 January 2008)

National innovation statistics

The national statistics on innovation support the view that innovation is the
characteristic of manufacture and technology (Figure 1). Two sets of national statistics
deal with innovation. The first is an annual survey of R&D activities conducted by
Statistics Norway, and it is too aggregate to yield specific information about retail. The
second is thorough and extensive, and connected with a pan-European effort to map
and compare innovation, Eurostat’s Community Innovation Surveys. Eurostat is the
statistical institution of the European Community. The statistics include a wide range of
aspects of innovation, and is quite up to date with the present day’s academic discourse
in its use of concepts and categories. 3
These statistics generate a picture of a substantial number of innovations, and are a
source of information for everyone participating in the discourse on innovation. They
are revealing about the level and types of innovation in Norwegian companies. They
are not limited merely to technological innovation, but extend their scope to include
organisational, market and branding innovations, which would mean that they capture
activities and endeavours specific to trade. However, that is not really the case, as the
following statistics reveal (Figure 2).
There is apparently innovation in trade, but only in the wholesale part of it. In
Norway the wholesalers make up about one third of the number of enterprises, employ
about one third of all employees, and their turnover is about half of the total in the trade
sector, and it is only in this part of the sector that innovation has been identified. In

3 Again I use the statistics that are most applicable for the period in which the projects in the chains
took place.


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70

Average of total in sector, %

60

50

40 Product, process, organisation

30 and/or market innovation

20
10

0
e

ce
le

al
n
ur

io

ot
sa

i
rv
t

ct
ac

t
le

Se
ru

or
ho
uf

st

ct
an

se
n
Co
M

te
iva
Sector Pr

Figure 2 Innovation according to industry in Norwegian companies,

2002–2004 (self-reported)
Source: www.ssb.no/innov/tab-2007-12-18-02.html
(Accessed 30 January 2008)

the half (or more, depending on the definition) of the trade sector that does the actual
selling of goods, there is no innovation if we are to believe the statistics.
If we go behind the numbers to the way they are compiled, a different picture
emerges. The design of the statistics is defined in a manual used by all countries that
compile them (OECD 1997), and in this manual retailing is listed as a category to
be included. However, the central statistical unit of the EU, Eurostat, only requires
data from manufacture and primary sectors: data from other economic sectors may be
collected on a voluntary basis (Eurostat 2006). In Norway the choice has been made
not to gather data from retailing. Another interesting fact is that there 22 categories by
which to distinguish between different types of technology and manufacture, and only
one for trade. In other words, there is a nuanced language for dealing with manufacture,
but not for dealing with trade. One does wonder though, why non-technological forms
of innovations are included in the statistics, but ‘non-technological’ companies are not.
There are few traces of innovation in the statistics simply because there are no data on
it. That does not necessarily mean that ‘there is no innovation in selling goods’.

Mutually supportive institutions

The practices of these national institutions are mutually supportive, for example in the
joint management by Innovation Norway and Research Norway of the SkatteFunn
tax credit system, or by the data sources they all use. It has also been demonstrated
that companies that have had contact with either of the institutions are likely to
be or become involved with the others (Cappelen et al. 2008: 37; Hægeland and
Mjøen 2007: 37).

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The main emphasis of the national discourse is either research-based innovation

or innovation in remote areas of the country, neither of which makes much space for
trade. None of the chains that I worked with had anything even remotely resembling a
research or innovation department or R&D personnel, and I did not hear of any other
company that had. Also, trade was limited in the remote areas. The major retail chains
have their headquarters in the urban centres of the country, and the malls are located
just outside cities. Even the small independent shops that still remain are located in
areas where there are a sufficient number of people to constitute a market, usually at
the crossings of major roads.
The majority of companies in Norway do not have dealings with the national
system of innovation, but as is self-understood, the innovative companies are the ones
that take part in the discourse on innovation. Hence, a mutually reinforcing circle of
meaning emerges. The companies that manage to gain status as innovative by becoming
part of the national discourse get funds because they are innovative, and are used as
sources for data on innovation. If you are ‘real’ you get funds, which make you more
‘real’ and so on.

Professional trade as ‘matter out of place’

The rationality of economic theory and the outcomes of the interactions of the national
system of innovation seem to contribute to generate the white spot as far as professional
traders are concerned. The system of thought and the system of practice are partially
linked, but the linkages are such that they serve to establish one particular economic
‘reality’. There may be another contributing factor which has to do with the nature of
the business itself. Ambivalence towards trade has been reported from many different
places and times, so even if local conditions are different, there seems to be a more
general mechanism at work.
The historical pattern in Norway is that professional trade was for centuries mainly
in the hands of foreigners. In the middle ages the Hanseatic League dominated until
its final downfall in the 16th century (Zimmern 2007). Then, professional trade all but
disappeared until the time of the great nation-building project, about 1814 (Opsahl
and Sogner 2003). Foreigners who dominated commerce were naturalised and ventured
into profitable industrialisation projects and the rapidly developing industrial economy
that emerged in tandem with the nation state. Trade was left to the vagaries of the free
market (Niemi et al. 2003), and operated on the margins of the industrial establishment.
Today, the situation is that everyone needs to go to a store to buy just about
everything needed for daily living. Historically, it was understandable that the stranger
traders from which one got a few critical and some luxury goods were not included in
everyday social interactions. Today when most daily needs are met by goods bought
from nearby stores, one would have expected that trade would have been incorporated
into the taken-for-granted naturalness of the everyday. Yet shopping is not a simple
straightforward affair, as has been demonstrated in consumer research (Miller 2001;
Benson and Ugolini 2006). It involves the negotiation of a number of paradoxes and
concerns, both on the part of the traders as was demonstrated by the references to
literature on professional trade, and on part of the customers. I suggest that part of
the reason for this is that professional trade crosses all sorts of boundaries, conceptual,
organisational and physical, and that this categorically situates it as ‘matter out of place’.

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As Douglas (1966) has shown, a customary way to deal with ‘matter out of place’ is
to define it as taboo or impure, and treat it with ritually prescribed precaution. The
sheer secularity of trade, especially in mundane everyday goods, makes that unfeasible.
Silence and avoidance are more convenient options.

Anthropology and vicious cycles of

‘reality’ – concluding discussion

Three types of conditions that serve to generate a white spot on the map of the economic
process have been identified. One is the rationality of the basic economic schema,
another is the priorities of the institutions that make up the national innovation system.
The third is more a cultural explanation that relies on sorting out the classificatory
schema that generates particular ‘matters out of place’. These three types of conditions
mirror what Wilk and Cliggett (2007) have identified as the three main approaches
in economic anthropology: the rational, the social and the cultural. However, as the
discussion has made clear, none of them are sufficient on their own. Economic theory
presupposes the existence of someone who actively makes use of the models, which
in this case are found in the national system of innovation. However, there are other
priorities and rationalities at work in that social system, in particular the relatively
high importance of development of remote areas in Norway, which indicates its
embeddedness in a wider social system. Here rationalities and cultural distinctions
other than those found in economic theory are operative, and may well influence it
in turn. In the messy flow of everyday activities there is interdependency between the
rational, the cultural and the social that no amount of analytical clarification can explain
away. Anthropology has been criticised precisely for its commitment to conscientiously
bringing the mess out, and for not contributing to grand theorising. But perhaps what
we lack is not grand theory – there is in fact a fair amount of it. Perhaps what we need
now is to situate the grand theories empirically. The existence of powerful knowledge
regimes and expert systems aided by powerful information technologies is a threat to
the varied diversity of human experience and by assuming the air of the ‘real’ they
assume a naturalness that constrains the scope of possibilities.
What has happened in the innovation field in Norway is one example of this and
mirrors what has happened with other theories that have had the mixed blessing of
serving as blueprints for political action, ‘as a result of policy, social science images of
the world come ever closer to producing the particular “reality” which then conditions
the possibilities of practices at the level of daily livelihood’, and then ‘in a subsequent
round local actors become the informants for further social scientists, thus producing
what we might call the vicious cycle of “reality”’ (Smith 2006: 624).
Smith deals with ‘regional economies’ and how the discourse and EU policies shape
the opportunities in poorer regions in Spain. The interest in innovation has generated
a similar ‘vicious cycle of “reality”’. In the discourse on innovation are embedded
specific means, material, linguistic and experiential, by which a world of innovation
comes into being. These means serve to produce and reproduce a pattern in which only
some practices gain legitimacy as ‘real’. Other studies point in the direction of the same.
One study finds that in the Pyrenees, as the result of EU policies: ‘the big shepherds
are making more profit from subsidies than from the meat produced by the animals’

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(Vaccaro 2006: 372). The ‘quality agriculture discourse’ in France constitutes another
such field in which there is ample room for manoeuvre – for those who manage to
establish themselves as legitimate participants (Heller 2006). In an analysis of salmon
farming in Tasmania, the role of the expert in defining reality against the haphazard
knowledge of the locals is a central theme (Lien 2007). A similar pattern is observed in
an analysis of how experts regard artisan miners in Congo as a nuisance, even though
they are the source of the actual innovative solutions in the real, physical operation of
the production (Mantz 2008).
What anthropology offers each of these examples is geographically and historically
situated accounts, accounts based on reflections with people on their experiences and
on observations of social interaction and exchange. Anthropology is committed to
make use of local categories to understand local phenomena, to use existing knowledge
as a means to compare and situate the particular, and only from there attempt to
reach for high abstractions. What are produced are ethnographic accounts about the
clutter of lived experience and the often contradictory solutions to practical dilemmas.
Anthropological accounts then may never really get ‘off the ground’, but they certainly
do not dissolve in the air of abstraction.
In a refreshing take on anthropology’s potential today, Carrithers states that the
subjunctive mood of anthropology generates ‘knowledge of spacious possibilities and of
unintended consequences that crowd closely around certainty’ (2004: 433). Innovation
was once loaded with possibility. It once had a subjunctive mood more characteristic of
anthropology than declarative mood of economics. However, over the years, that core
of the idea has crumbled under the weight of the vast literature on what innovation is,
the shapes of the flows of money, and the studies and statistics that confirm what it
‘is’. Precisely the grounded nature of the anthropological accounts makes it possible to
dismantle and explore such certainty. That may actually contribute to bring the project
of science forward. Not by encasing it in a priori notions and neat schema, but by
empirically situating and testing any type of certainty.

Acknowledgements

This article was written as part of a postdoctoral fellowship granted by the Norwegian
School of Management, for which I am very grateful. I also want to thank Tore
Bakken, Tor Hernes and Yngve Johannessen for comments on an earlier and very
different version of the paper. The article was completed while I had the honour and
joy of being a visiting scholar in the Department of Anthropology of the University
of Chicago. Research Norway, the national council for research funding, funded the
projects mentioned in the article.

Benedicte Brøgger
Department of Innovation and Economic Organisation
Norwegian School of Management
Nydalsveien 37, 0848 Oslo
Norway
benedicte.brogger@bi.no


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