City Research Online

Abstract

The literature on social intermediaries highlights their role in alleviating poverty and promoting market inclusion in emerging economies through interventions that counterbalance pressures from formal and informal institutions. However, this research centers on interplays between intermediaries and institutions, implicitly assuming that beneficiaries reject their condition of poverty and retain a minimally functioning capacity for reflexive agency, supporting engagement with such interventions. In contrast, our study of slums and rural communities in Kenya and Sierra Leone examines social intermediation amid conditions in which extreme marginalization has fractured beneficiaries’ reflexive capacity, leaving them unable to orient toward purposive action. Using a critical realist relational lens, we develop a process model in which social intermediation unfolds through interdependent morpho-regenerative processes – institutional shielding, relational accompaniment, and entrepreneurial empowerment – that create prolonged protective spaces against oppressive pressures and repair reflexivity gradually until beneficiaries can sustain it on their own. We theorize morpho-regeneration as a custodial practice of ‘with-in’ intervention that restores individual capacities for social and economic participation, enabling more conventional outside-in and inside-up intermediation approaches. Our study offers new insights into the relational dimensions of poverty alleviation and their connection to communitylevel dynamics, with relevance to other contexts where agency is severely destabilized.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This is the author accepted manuscript of an article to be published in the Academy of Management Journal. The final version will be available at: https://aom.org/research/journals/journal
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HB Economic Theory H Social Sciences > HC Economic History and Conditions H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor H Social Sciences > HM Sociology H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform
Departments:	Bayes Business School Bayes Business School > Faculty of Management
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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