The traders of Central Bazaar, Astana: motivation and networks

Trading in Astana’s Central Bazaar rests on mutually beneficial people-to-people contacts, or personal networks. Twenty-five years after the Soviet collapse, personal networks are pivotal in whether one succeeds in an informal market economy. I argue that networks cannot be disassociated from trader motivation, which serves as a measure of how these networks evolve over time. I describe how those traders who were driven primarily by lifting themselves out of economic precarity tended to build strong social networks; these strong social networks sometimes evolved into ‘unconditional’ social networks, by which I mean a trader supporting others even though doing so has no commercial benefit. At the other extreme were traders driven by ambition and goal attainment. I argue that such traders are less likely to establish and maintain social networks. Between these two extremes is a middle ground, where traders alternate between strong and weak social networks.