The Social Life of Coffee: Imagined Communities and Market Manipulatio

The capacity of some to manipulate the pricing and distribution of goods and services to advantage themselves at the expense of others has no doubt been with man since they were cognitively aware of their presence and reliance on an organizational structure with which to engage this activity. As markets have evolved into more formalized legal-rational institutions, creating and disseminating information and offering signals to observers of the judgments traders are making about that information, from the local to global circuits of power it becomes more necessary to interrogate these institutions as valid and fair arbiters of value and subsequent distributers of vital resources. If markets are signaling mechanisms are they sending useful signals? This dissertation addresses this question by contextualizing the use of manipulation in the coffee market historically as a means of social action and specifically as an instance of a modern and successful attempt to influence this market through the manipulation of futures markets. To accomplish this goal this thesis advances the discipline of economic sociology by identifying three necessary questions: What is the structure of the market and what are the rules and norms that allow it to persist over time? How does it construct value? And how does it respond under crisis conditions? It makes several major contributions in the field of economic sociology: first, it connects the futures markets to the physical coffee market as an important component in the valuation structure and links it to specific trade practices, i.e. price-to-be-fixed contracts; second, it identifies the social life of coffee and its linkage to the social practices and tastes of a consuming public which is so critical in understanding how value is assigned; and lastly, it utilizes an innovative perspective of the imagined coffee trading community as a way to connect market participants horizontally in the geography of flavor and horizontally within the interaction value chain as they share trade practices, language and customs in the creation and execution of ongoing business. The thesis concludes that manipulation is a social construction that requires the exercise of power over multiple platforms. Further, by contextualizing the exercise of manipulation it lays bear the socio-political demands of multiple parties in the exercise of power and the need for stability across multiple constituencies.