Trajectories and Mercantifers

Abstract

All persons, no matter how influential or powerful they may be, face a continual choice between performing tasks themselves and performing them in concert with others. The choice of concerted action may develop in a variety of politarian directions including cooption, coercion and cooperation as well as engaging in an appropriate mercantifer (Coase, 1937/1990). A person engaging in a mercantifer has chosen to employ a set of existing social relationships in tackling the task at hand and has rejected the alternative courses of either employing her own resources or directly mobilising others for this purpose. The choice of a mercantifer is, thus, a choice in favour of collective action.³

Trajectory means a series of elements, which may be things, actions or ideas that are contiguous, consecutive and consistent because they are linked by flows, stows and transformations.

This chapter can be seen as a statement of the way in which behaviours of persons are, in principle, connected to economic processes in the form of mercantifers. As such it represents an example of an argument which sustains the view that both under- and over-socialised versions of social analysis are misled because both imply that social forces are irrelevant to explanations of the behaviour of persons (Granovetter, 1990).