Dynamic Brokerage Across Socio-Cognitive Boundaries

In his thesis, Dynamic brokerage across socio-cognitive boundaries: external boundary spanners in South African agribusiness, the promovendus applied a process and multilevel research approach to tackle the understudied phenomenon of dynamic brokerage. The focus was on social cognition as both a casual factor for disassociation and a driver for building non-redundant exchange relationships. The main theoretical contribution of the study, a theoretical construct for boundary spanner brokerage, was used to explain the salience of the brokerage method. The empirical base for the study comprises a case study of the Mauluma Farming Enterprise, an agribusiness at the centre of the land reform process in South Africa. The Longitudinal study portrays colonisation and apartheid as social processes that shaped the agribusiness sector into small worlds of cognition. Boundary spanner brokerage is proposed as a method of promoting sustainable strategic relationships between organizations on either side of the cognitive divide.