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Crisis scholarship has so far remained inattentive to the uneven entanglements and encounters that operate in what are designated as times or spaces of crisis, such as conflict and war. Indeed, scholarship on crisis suffers from a division between scholars who study the effect of crisis on privileged groups and locations and those who research marginalized communities. This has led the first to approach crisis as an exceptional moment, and the latter to argue that crisis is a semi-permanent condition. The lack of exchange between these two bodies of crisis scholarship has resulted in insufficient consideration of the divergent experiences of the nature and temporalities of crisis by unequally situated actors. This article looks at the contact zone forged by the 2001–2021 Afghanistan war to demonstrate that temporalities of crisis manifest themselves in varied and uneven ways, depending on the positionality of actors. Empirically, this article draws on interviews conducted with western Afghanistan veterans and with Afghan interpreters who worked as linguistic and cultural brokers. By contrasting the experiences of Afghan interpreters with that of the international soldiers who were dependent on their brokerage, I show how differential structures of power and privilege shape what constitutes a crisis, who is touched by it and how and when crisis makes itself felt. Close analysis of the narratives of Afghan interpreters also challenges scholarship which presents brokers as crisis opportunists, who subsequently experience an existential crisis and tragic demise (Distiller and Samuelson 2005, Gaskill 2023). Instead, I develop the argument that brokers' relationship to crisis can be better understood when the relational and spatio-temporal frames to situate their actions are expanded. I suggest that the cliché of the tragic broker is unsettled when tracing the strategies of Afghan interpreters over time and with attention to the interactions with those for whom they broker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we focus on human rights brokerage in Nepal and Sri Lanka – two countries undergoing different kinds of post-war crises, which opened spaces and demands for brokers. We zoom in on the lives of two individuals who became human rights brokers in these turbulent moments of change, and explore their positionalities, roles and effects as brokers. We seek to move beyond simplistic portrayals of such brokers as a dissembling, self-interested and professionalized class of gatekeepers, and instead focus on the brokers' narratives, understandings, and everyday practices. Based on detailed life history research, this article reveals a more complex picture of brokerage during crisis. It is argued that we need to take seriously the accounts of human rights brokers, how they understand their own positionality, actions and impacts on society. We focus on the complex temporalities surrounding human rights brokerage in post war contexts; how brokers mediate between a traumatic past (linked to human rights abuses and justice denied) and a desired future (involving restitution, access to rights and justice) in the context of an unstable present marked by violence, churning politics, and institutional inertia. Human rights brokers' ability to navigate these contested understandings of time is shaped by their own past histories and their current positionalities. Whilst being cautious not to generalize from the lives of two human rights brokers, our work offers a corrective to accounts of brokerage as a value-free, transactional activity; instead, we reveal how, for these brokers at least, ethics, values and political beliefs played an important role in driving their actions, even though declared goals were rarely met in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International assisted reproduction depends largely upon the work of various brokers. They mediate and articulate global assisted reproduction assemblage, the mobilities of intended parents, surrogates, ova donors, gametes and embryos through connecting different people, things and places, utilizing their specialized information on logistics, language, laws and access to networks of surrogates or ova donors and clinics. Such networks and assemblages are fluid and subject to change, particularly in times of crisis. We use two senses and temporalities of 'crisis' in our analysis, exploring how change in the form of crises may be both creative and destructive to brokerage. We examine firstly the cyclical crisis experienced by intended parents undergoing fertility treatment who are navigating the uncertainties, risks and low chances of success of assisted reproduction. The crisis that infertility presents catalyzes the need for brokers who mediate scarce information around cross-border options for care and resources, creating new opportunities and spaces for intervention and a means through which intended parents regain agency to pursue their future family. The second form of crises examined is episodic crises such as experienced when the international surrogacy industry was banned in Thailand or the war in Ukraine. As the ties of communication, mobility, and social practice rupture, brokers may either lose their status and ability to mediate entirely or transform and recreate it in new forms. They invent new 'fixes' to problems and adapt their modes of communication and work. At these ruptures the self-interests of brokers and the moral logics of business are often revealed through mistrust and demands over money, a change in relationship with clients, or in some cases absconding entirely for self-protection. These reveal the creativity and adaptability but also the potential vulnerability that may emerge in the relationship between brokers and their clients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the development of digital technology, the music industry experienced a severe crisis in Nigeria, as elsewhere. This technology made the copying of music easy and enabled artistes and users to produce and share music and video content on social media and other internet platforms. The emergence of streaming services changed this dynamic again and provided new opportunities for artistes and later also for the music industry. In Nigeria, several local entrepreneurs created streaming platforms, offering Nigerian and/or African music, and soon after also global platforms and producers began to launch their services in the country. Based on digital ethnography and field research in Nigeria, this article examines the developments in the music sector and its copyright institutions and discusses the broker characteristics of the streaming platform owners. It explores how far internet platforms, or rather their owners, particularly in the field of music, can be considered brokers or mediators of the music industry crisis, and how their affordances have changed the perception of this crisis over time. The article also examines how these platforms have transformed and mitigated the piracy crisis more recently, raising hopes among the music industry and a new generation of artistes in Nigeria for a sustainable music market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inter-ethnic brokerage between friends, i.e. having friends with different ethnic backgrounds who are not friends with each other, is essential to social integration processes in multi-ethnic societies. This study examines the relation between inter-ethnic brokerage in adolescent friendship networks and individual mental wellbeing in the school context. Using data on friendship networks from a large-scale study of more than 2,700 seventh-graders in German secondary schools, I analyse the interplay between triadic brokerage structures and ethnicity, combining network analytical methods with linear regression techniques. The results show that brokerage in general is associated with lower mental wellbeing. This negative association is stronger for brokerage between friends with different ethnic backgrounds than for brokerage between friends with the same ethnic background. Furthermore, the negative association is not stronger for inter-ethnic brokerage, where the broker has the same ethnic background as one friend, than for inter-ethnic brokerage, where all actors belong to distinct ethnic groups. The results indicate no differences between ethnic majority and minority students. Though inter-ethnic brokerage is vital to bridge ethnic divides, this study highlights the psychological challenges inter-ethnic brokers may face. It emphasises the relevance of investigating brokerage in inter-ethnic friendships and going beyond dyadic perspectives on inter-ethnic contact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThis paper analyses participation in multiple protest episodes to explore the potential for people to broker relations between same-issue and different-issue episodes. Through an analysis of original survey data from six European countries, we map two-mode networks of individuals and protest episodes in each country to identify protesters in two brokerage positions: coordinators that can broker relations via same-issue contentious episodes and boundary spanners, that can broker relations via different-issue episodes. Combining network and regression analysis, we identify the individuals occupying such positions and characterize their protest participation. We find that embeddedness in different types of activist networks is the most important predictor of brokerage positions. However, the two brokerage positions are associated with different types of embeddedness. By fleshing out the importance of individuals in shaping contentious fields, we offer a unique insight into protest networks, thus advancing the sociological understanding of collective action with an innovative mixed-methods design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Migration infrastructures are susceptible to disruptions and necessitate ongoing maintenance and repair to ensure the smooth facilitation of mobility flows. While the prevailing notion attributes the mending of infrastructures primarily to state initiatives, this paper seeks to enhance the understanding of how non-state actors execute maintenance and repair, especially in times of unprecedented disruptions. By examining the experiences of labor and education brokers operating within the Vietnam-Japan and Nepal-Malaysia migration corridors during the COVID-19 pandemic, this study explores the ways these intermediaries navigated disruptions in migration infrastructures and devised creative solutions to surmount contextual constraints arising from these disruptions. It argues that migration brokers "make do" by adopting the tactic of cutting down, and the strategy of stocking up. These practices are adopted not only to survive and wait out the infrastructural disruptions but also to anticipate and prepare for a post-pandemic scenario of resumed mobility. With a focus on brokerage practices during times of immobility, the paper shows how migration brokers maintain migration infrastructures and subsequently highlights their crucial roles in the ongoing process of infrastructuring migration. While states and border regimes continue to be highly relevant in how migrants move, the role of the brokers in mending infrastructural disruptions points to the dynamic nature of migration brokerage and challenges the misconception of self-perpetuating migration infrastructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I reconstruct the networks of Babylonian urban dwellers during the reign of Darius I (522–486 BCE) based on 803 tablets from 10 private archives in Babylon. The main aim is to examine the structure and connectivity of the network that connected different urban families and groups of individuals outside the families. I focus on the positions individuals occupied within the network that yielded them the power to connect smaller parts of the network. The first approach used to identify and analyze these positions is the betweenness centrality measure. The second approach is the analytic concept of brokerage, the role of mediating between two or more individuals or communities that would otherwise have no connection to each other. I identify differences in the ways that the intermediate position of brokers affected the formation of the network. These brokerage roles resulted from families' strategies to increase their household wealth by constructing and optimizing marriage, prebendary, and business relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investments in the digital welfare state are often driven by the promise of removing intermediaries between the state and citizens, yet they continue to play a key role in the last mile delivery of state services. By intermediaries, I mean people who interface between bureaucrats and citizens. Their work, often as proxies for citizens, is not only to simplify bureaucratic procedures for them, but also help insulate them from bureaucratic apathy. Based on 18-months of ethnographic fieldwork, I describe the work of intermediaries around government offices, who (in)visibly support citizens in navigating the bureaucratic procedures of enrolling into Aadhaar, India's biometrics-based national identity number. Building on Julia Elyachar's conception of "phatic labor," I position such intermediaries themselves as infrastructure and illustrate how their affective networks can be leveraged to orchestrate a form of distributive justice to ensure that being marginal does not preclude a citizen's access to welfare services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does position in the friendship network affect social status in early adolescence? Previous research shows that friendship relations are not equivalent to popularity hierarchies, but favorable positions in the friendship network should allow students to gain status. We use four waves of longitudinal network data and dynamic panel models with fixed effects to estimate the impact of network position on social status. Degree centrality and brokerage opportunity both exert large impacts on status, even compared against the effect of prior status. The results suggest future research on friendship across social identities, as well as network structure and hierarchy in adolescent social systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how weak countries deflect systemic pressure towards change and even succeed in preserving old institutions to their advantage. By expanding Goddard's theory of embedded revisionism to smaller powers, the study identifies strategies these states deploy to improve access and brokerage. We use the UN General Assembly Sponsorship Dataset to locate multilateral brokers and, after detecting Cuba's centrality in this arena, we proceed to a heuristic case study. Havana's maneuvers to offset its vulnerability during and after the Cold War reveal a mix of structural, institutional, and compulsory power. Specifically, its renewal of the Non-Aligned Movement even after the end of bipolarity, its maintenance of autocracy amidst the pressures for democratization, and later support of radicalized Latin American leaders provide insight regarding unexpected sources of network power available to a resilient rogue state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to the phenomenon of global warming, the transportation sector aims to mitigate carbon emissions by promoting the use of public transportation. This study employs social network analysis to propose effective improvements to the public transportation system, focusing on bus stop locations and route networks in Hwaseong City, South Korea. Two networks were constructed based on existing public transportation routes and usage data at each bus stop. The findings and implications are as follows: Analyzing the public transportation network from a network perspective can effectively contribute to improving the public transportation network route system. By evaluating centrality and brokerage for the existing routes, it is possible to identify inefficient routes and develop efficient route modification plans. Based on actual usage patterns, excessive bus supply and unnecessary bus stop locations can be identified, allowing for the establishment of appropriate operational plans. This can lead to improved operational efficiency and cost savings. Rational route design and operational planning can enhance public transportation services and promote increased use of public transportation. Ultimately, this contributes to sustainable development through carbon reduction in the transportation sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores some relational mechanisms that may facilitate strong inter-organizational alliances, and the associated trust, in collective action fields. It departs from mainstream research on trust by focusing on organizations rather than individuals. The article focuses in particular on three mechanisms: embeddedness (i.e. the role of individual members' multiple involvements as facilitators of sustained inter-organizational exchanges), familiarity (the role of previous interactions in facilitating cooperation and thus generating trust), and brokerage (the role of trusted leaders in bringing different organizations together). These mechanisms may affect trust creation in two different ways: by facilitating dyadic alliances between pairs of actors and by facilitating actors' incumbency of the same network position, regardless of being directly connected. Illustrations come from data on environmental groups in Milan in the mid 1980s, civic organizations active on various public issues in Glasgow and Bristol in the early 2000s, and organizations active on the urban environment in Cape Town in the early 2010s. While the exercise is exploratory in nature, the relational mechanisms identified may represent some of the building blocks for a systematic explanation of alliance building and trust emergence. Moreover, data from urban polities with different levels of democratic consolidation and cleavage pacification illustrate the importance of adding a comparative element to our explorations of the relationship between trust and collective action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Partnership Securities' Issuance Manner Act of 1997 mentions to an agent bank that a guarantee by the partnership securities' publisher is entrusted to it, so that if necessary, it can on its own initiative pay out of that guarantee the principal, interest on account and realized interest of the partnership securities to their holders. Contrary to the original idea, that bank is thus not the guarantor but the representative, i.e., the representative in paying the above amounts from the 'fund of guarante'. This agency is also seen in the name that the legislature has assigned to it, namely the 'agent' bank. But whose agent is this, Partnership securities' publisher or holder, Given their designation by the publisher, they first appears to be the publisher's agen, but more precision shows the opposite; because they take over mortgage (assurance) deposited by the publisher, whereas we know the mortgage must be taken by the mortgagee and principally kept at his disposal, so they are partnership securities' holders agent. Therefore, the issue arises that considering the partnership securities' transferability, how can principals change but agents' representation remain the same. Here it seems that legislature in this case likely, under influence of the other countries' law, considers agency to be transferable in all cases of agency, brokerage, undisclosed commission, tenure to transportation, commercial representation, and in general, in all forms of commercial agency. Not the binding nature of agency but only its transferability is meant. In this regard, what attracts attention is transferability of agency's representation (not revocation of agency) with death, incapacitation or change of the principal, but on a case-by-case basis, it can also think about death, the incapacitation and changing the agent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study aims to explore the relationship between network position and innovation under major environmental turbulence. Design/methodology/approach: The authors use a difference-in-differences identification approach using the 2009 Industry Revitalization Plan in response to the global financial crisis as a natural experiment with a sample of Chinese listed firms from 2001 to 2017. Findings: The findings show that a major environmental turbulence can facilitate firm innovation, and firms that occupy central positions in the interlock network show worse innovation performance while firms with high brokerage show better innovation performance. Originality/value: The literature on environmental implication has largely focused on the threats and overlooked the potential opportunities. Moreover, social network literature has elaborated on the benefits and constraints of network positions from a static perspective but largely overlooked their implications facing environmental change. By exploring the bright side of major environmental turbulence and including this factor as a key contingency in exploring the effects of centrality and brokerage, this study integrates external environmental context with social network research and provides empirical evidence responding to the call for more attention to network dynamics and extends our understanding of the context-contingent network effects on firm innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoliberal reform of welfare and integration regimes affects service provisioning for migrants and refugees across Europe. This article studies the effects of competitive tenders (aanbestedingen) as a modality of such reform on the political possibilities of small-scale grassroots initiatives that support recent newcomers in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. This article studies these dynamics from the perspective of activists who self-identify as brokers and who assist the organisers of these small-scale initiatives. So far, existing research has rarely looked at the interstices of literature on brokerage and literature of neoliberal reform nor applied literature on neoliberal reform of the nexus of integration/welfare governance in cities—despite evidence that brokers have appeared as critical figures in the context of neoliberalisation and (re)politicisation. Brokerage and neoliberal reform are part and parcel of urban theorising and so are collaborative dimensions to urban governance, urban approaches to asylum and integration, and urban inequalities. Combining studies on brokerage with studies of neoliberal reform, this article shows that brokers make use of their positioning in-between the city administration and small-scale grassroots organisations to engage in a form of world-making that re-connects resistance to depoliticised elements of arrival infrastructure—while trying to help small-scale support initiatives to formalise. The main argument is that the interplay between informal and formal infrastructure gives unique insight into the political-economic dimensions of infrastructuring and to constitutive contradictions that underpin neoliberalisation. It is based on long-term ethnographic research, including a year of full-time fieldwork in Delfshaven, a classic arrival quarter.

In many organizational settings, individuals make evaluations in the context of affect-based negative relationships, in which an evaluator personally dislikes the evaluated individual. However, these dislikes are often held in check by norms of professionalism that preclude the use of personal preferences in objective evaluations. In this article, we draw from social network theory to suggest that only individuals that are network brokers—those who have the cognitive freedom to flout organizational norms—act to down-evaluate the peers they dislike. We evaluate our theory using two complementary studies: one field site study and an experiment. Our results, consistent across two different methodologies, suggest that overlooking an evaluator's negative relationships as well as the network positions that constrain or enable an individual's actions may lead to distortions in ubiquitous organizational peer evaluations processes and outcomes.

In this paper, we investigate the role of brokers in the regional innovation network and its influence on innovative and collaborative outcomes. For this purpose, we make use of data from the European Patent Office and Eurostat in the period 1986–2015. We first build the regional collaboration network based on co-inventorship ties, and then we identify the brokerage roles played by each region, using the original taxonomy proposed by Gould and Fernandez (1989), to disentangle their impact on innovation and collaboration. Finally, we investigate regional collaboration intensity and how it interacts with brokerage roles, highlighting its mediating effect. Our findings indicate that brokerage roles contribute to the extension of collaboration networks, but also that they are not efficient for the creation of innovation. Collaboration intensity, on the other hand, enhances both innovation and collaborative outcomes and shows how a region can benefit from being a broker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bridging gaps between educational stakeholders at the classroom, school, and system levels is essential to achieve sustainable change in primary and secondary education. However, transferring knowledge or building capacity within this network of loosely coupled stakeholders is demanding. The brokerage concept holds promise for studying these complex patterns of interaction, as it refers to how specific actors (brokers) link loosely coupled or disconnected individuals (brokering). However, different research traditions, in terms of theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches, and various stakeholders examined in their role as bridge builders make understanding the role of brokers, brokering, and brokerage in changing educational practice challenging. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to provide an overview of the current literature on these concepts in educational change research. In a systematic literature review based on 42 studies, we analyzed each study's theoretical assumptions, methodological approach, scope in terms of stakeholders involved, and empirical findings. First, the literature review revealed that research on educational change refers to four different theoretical frameworks when focusing on brokers, brokering, or brokerage. Second, our results indicate that predominantly qualitative approaches have been applied. Third, using content network graphs, we identified teachers and principals as among the most frequently analyzed brokers. Fourth, four relevant aspects of the empirical findings are presented: brokers' personal characteristics, conditions that enable brokering, successful brokering strategies, and outcomes of brokerage. Finally, we outline a future research agenda based on the empirical evidence base and shortcomings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the western Indian city of Jodhpur, computer typists provide migration brokerage services to Pakistani Hindu refugee‐migrants and Indian immigration officers. Such encounters and their interpretations contrast with the Indian state's emphasis on governmental proximity and immediate state‐subject relations. Though computer typists—who I am calling brokers—are essential mediators, their acts of mediation are underrecognized. Immigration officers' strategies of mediation, such as intermittently acknowledging typists, implicate brokerage as both part of and distinct from the everyday bureaucratic workings of the state. I argue that through their acts of mediation, brokers are essential to bureaucratic work and have come to embody the fuzziness surrounding where the state begins and ends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How and why does brokerage become pivotal to guest work governance? While research on intermediaries in temporary migrant labor programs has proliferated in the last decade, there is limited analysis of the conditions that create regulatory roles for brokers and shape their policy and social impacts in host states. By analyzing the causes and consequences of documentation brokerage in Thailand's guest work formalization process, I link sociological work on brokerage with relational conceptions of state power. Drawing from 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Thailand, I argue that gaps in the state's regulatory infrastructure amid heightened coercive policy enforcement create profitable opportunities for brokers to act as intermediaries between migrants, employers, and state offices to facilitate policy implementation. The informality and opportunism of such brokerage, however, can also generate activities that undermine official policy, with varying consequences for state control. Comparing brokerage between two sites, I show that brokers in each location improve the state's capacity to formalize migrant labor, but the added social/regulatory dimension of the border in the second site creates brokerage opportunities that push the boundaries of official policy. In both sites, documentation brokerage imposes adverse economic effects on migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mumbai's municipal bureaucracy introduced an online complaints platform in 2016, promising increased transparency and improved public service. This article argues that this "smart" urban technology, which records grievances against land encroachments and violations of building codes, strengthens existing class and caste inequalities in who can access and manipulate state land administration. Through an ethnographic exploration of Mumbai's bureaucracy, it makes visible a complex system of negotiation—locally known as "māṇḍavlī"—that structures a range of tacit practices of exchange and mediation between politicians, bureaucrats, and brokers. Although these arrangements remain intact, the online complaints platform has reduced the discretionary power of low-level bureaucrats by centralising and rendering opaque the functioning of ethically ambiguous local brokers. By re-focusing attention on the everyday operation of smart urban technologies within the municipal body in the megacity of Mumbai, this article furthers the agenda of alternative smart urbanisms from the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, scholars have explored the pivotal role Jewish merchants played in feeding and arming European armies from 1500 to 1800. Yet they have ignored the problems these merchants faced when they cast outside national borders to urban centres far from the battlefield, a multi-national mobilisation of resources known as the 'fiscal-military system'. This article uses a case-study of one Jewish merchant, Jacob Levi, from the port of Genoa to explore the essential brokerage role of ethnic-religious minorities in the early modern fiscal-military system. With knowhow built through his private businesses as well as a network of his co-religious, Levi became one of the most important suppliers of grain for the Bourbon army of northern Italy from 1702 to 1706. But foodstuffs did not transit alone; as Levi's records show, other war matériel accompanied grain, none more volatile than the at-least 17,000 barrels of gunpowder that Levi transited through the port in these years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the realm of commercial contracts, a specific group of contracts can be classified as permissive contracts. This category includes brokerages, agency contracts, employment contracts, and commercial representation. The rules and consequences associated with permissive contracts have far-reaching implications for legislative processes, court judgments, quasi-judicial bodies, and executive authorities. The authorized status of the obligated party and the presence of a trust description are two crucial factors determining the nature of these contracts. If the fulfillment of the permissive obligation lacks a trust description or occurs outside the boundaries of authentic consent, it constitutes a breach of contract or, at the very least, renders the contract non-binding. The findings of this comparative research reveal that within the legal system of England, such contracts are recognized as forms of agency contracts or representation. In Imamiyyah Jurisprudence, although no specific discussion has emerged regarding commercial permissive contracts due to their novelty, based on the general principles established in Imamiyyah Jurisprudence, these types of commercial transactions can be classified as permissive contracts. In the legal system of Iran, considering the challenges addressed in legal doctrine, there is overall compatibility between commercial permissive contracts, Imamiyyah Jurisprudence, and the legal system of England.

Retail trading platforms have gained popularity in recent years as brokers for ordinary people to trade speculative assets such as stocks and cryptocurrencies. These platforms earn revenue from their users’ risky trading and through derivative products, where the platform benefits as the traders lose. The platforms thus operate with conflicts of interest: what is good for the platform and its users are not necessarily the same. We explore how retail trading platforms navigate these conflicts of interest in a case study of the global and multi-asset broker eToro. Through an analysis of three different types of brokerage — financial, informational, and social — we show how the platform obfuscates its roles and operations to mask underlying conflicts of interest. In the end, we argue that the interweaving of brokerage roles compounds platform power as platforms can exploit their gatekeeping position and information asymmetry to promote their preferred transactions at the expense of users and complementors. The analysis thus contributes both to the specific understanding of retail trading platforms and to the general discussion of conflicts of interest in platform power.

When COVID-19 struck India in March 2020 the central government announced a nationwide lockdown to slow the spread of the virus. In Delhi, the suspension of normal economic and social life precipitated a crisis of hunger for the thousands who depend on daily wage labour to feed their families. Many of these workers were unable to access the city's Public Distribution System for subsidised food supplies because they lacked the correct paperwork. In response, the Delhi government implemented an online system, known as E-Coupons, through which those affected could apply for emergency rations. However, this digital system proved complicated to navigate for the marginalised people that it was aimed at. In the east Delhi neighbourhood in which this research took place brokers offering digital connections and online form-filling services proliferated in the crisis, but often provided unreliable or incomplete support to those in need. Recognising the need for digital mediation and support for the marginalised we argue that networks of reliable community advocates are required if welfare bureaucracies are to be digitised through mobile governance projects such as E-Coupons. The human mediation and advocacy, which underpins these schemes should be acknowledged and included in system design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As trade and economic activities expand and spread in this era, the brokerage contract plays an important role in wealth trading and the exchange of goods and services in various trade, industrial, and other fields. A professional acquires the status of a merchant for this work, whether a natural person or a legal entity. The need for brokers and intermediaries continues to increase constantly due to their skills and expertise in bridging views and narrowing the gap between contractors, facilitating the conclusion of transactions. This underscores the impact of the broker's role on commercial and economic life and the necessity to develop laws governing their business, especially given the ambiguity in regulating this topic. From this perspective, the present research examines the broker's role and responsibility by adopting a comparative and analytical descriptive approach. The research is structured into three chapters, aiming to investigate the broker's role and responsibility in performing the functions of the brokerage contract, preserving documents, ensuring implementation, and refraining from prohibited practices. The goal is to draw the most important findings and recommendations, which include recommending the standardization of brokering and real estate brokering procedures, harmonization between the business transaction system project and the real estate brokerage system, recommending the establishment of a private center for trade brokerage with independence and legal person status, and suggesting the addition of some important provisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across various markets, consumers rely on brokers to help them select goods. How do brokers shape consumers' valuation? We address this question by drawing from two independent but analogous ethnographies of brokerage and purchasing in the New York housing market and the New York art market. Building upon the relational turn in economic sociology, we identify the interlocking mechanisms by which brokers influence valuation in face-to-face interaction: Brokers (1) build trust by establishing rapport and displaying expertise, (2) prepare consumers to purchase by priming the consumption setting so that consumers compare a specified set of goods and experience urgency, and (3) posit matches between consumers and products, relying on demographic and cultural characteristics of consumers to complete transactions. Our novel theorization of brokerage has broader implications for understanding valuation and consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on the notion of the migration state, this article introduces the concepts of 'migration rent' and 'immigration rentier states' to describe how states that rely heavily on immigration for their wealth derive unearned income from immigration. Both concepts contribute to better understand of the role of migration in the historical transformation of states and the relationship between state, market and society in rentier monarchies and non-rentier states. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative data, I show that the Gulf monarchies, and Saudi Arabia in particular, progressively governmentalized direct and indirect forms of migration rent through migration control and taxation of migrants, both of which were initially brokered by private actors, notably through the kafala or sponsorship system. In doing so, states institutionalise labour market segmentation and differential exclusion of migrants intersecting class, race, nationality, gender, and age. This produces a 'skill-based order of things'. Rather than outliers, Saudi Arabia offers a magnifying glass that reveals global dynamics of state-led migration control and class-based differential exclusion. Beyond empirical findings, this article thus demonstrates the potential for theoretical innovation in the social sciences based on non-Western polities calling to test the notions of 'migration rent' and 'immigration rentier states' across contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the processes and politics of slum demolitions in the megacity of Mumbai. Scholars of subaltern urbanism have celebrated the political agency and entrepreneurial ability of the metonymic slums in Mumbai. This article argues instead that paying close attention to the dynamics of the lived realities within informal settlements directs us to the limits of ethnographic and archival imagination where fixers operating within the 'para-legal' are practicing a new subaltern urbanism, one that is attentive to the complexity of community within the metonymic slum. Through a detailed analysis of the practices of two fixers, this article shows how, by placing themselves at crucial nodes in the demolition and rehabilitation process, the fixers, on the one hand, were able to delay the displacement of residents; on the other, they created hierarchies in the distribution of resettlement benefits. Focusing on the quotidian practices of fixers operating within the demolished informal settlement brings forth a complicated and contradictory politics that ensure the existence of diverse non-privatized land tenures in the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores how networks for entrepreneurial activities evolve and change during an institutional transition at the macro level. For this purpose, we present the historical case study of Meliá, a pioneering company in the development of the Spanish tourism industry during Franco´s Regime (1939–1975), when the country evolved from interventionism and isolation toward an increasingly market-oriented economy. Our study shows how Meliá's networks co-evolved with their institutional framework, resulting in a transformation in their composition, purpose, and outcomes. Through historical contextualization, our paper allows us to capture the nuances of an institutional transition as well as to better understand the change processes of networks, the significance of strong and weak ties as the firm matures, and the dynamics of network brokerage over time. Therefore, our research contributes to the literature on networks and institutional transitions showing the value of a history-in theory perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Characteristics of real estate agents and brokerage firms have been shown to impact home sales prices. This paper extends the literature by exploring the heterogeneous effects of these brokerage characteristics under different market conditions and market pricing segments. Using the Multiple Listing Service of Chatham County, Georgia, this study finds that agent and firm characteristics are more impactful in cold markets, when homes are presumably more difficult to sell, and for lower priced homes, which are more likely to be purchased and sold by younger and/or less experienced homebuyers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expansion of iBuyer's use of PropTech to major housing markets raises a series of questions for both buyers and sellers when making instant, all-cash offers. This study uses a sequence of experiments to identify the proper implementation of existing behavioral real estate concepts to improve the iBuying process, a burgeoning area of residential real estate. We find strong evidence of anchoring for all-cash offers in that sellers are nearly twice as likely to transact when they are first presented with the net proceeds offer price (market value minus costs) rather than starting with the higher gross market value offer price. After the sale, seller regret aversion becomes strong when the seller's house is subsequently sold for 10% or more than the all-cash buyer paid, but regret aversion is mitigated with communication of the improvements made to enhance the selling price. We further find that sellers do not know which all-cash buyer's Automated Valuation Model (AVM) is the most accurate and are therefore much more influenced by brand awareness than model sophistication. Finally, while the extant literature has examined offer price strategies for home sellers, this is the first investigation of buyer offer price strategies. In stark contrast to selling strategies, pricing strategies do not matter when making an offer to buy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]