Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future: Stories from Global Frontiers

By Joost Beuving

Presenting a new interpretation of entrepreneurial behaviour, this book focuses on how entrepreneurs consider the future, looking at their social practices, language and rituals through which they neutralize or smoothen future unknowns. The study theorizes entrepreneurial behaviour as ‘future-work’: the social practices, language and rituals through which entrepreneurs neutralize or smoothen future unknowns. The study is grounded in ethnographic case material from global frontiers: second-hand car dealers in West Africa; exporters of fresh fish from Lake Victoria, East Africa; farmed fish entrepreneurs in Greece; and investment bankers in Financial America. It targets students and scholars from the social sciences and economics, and it has theoretical and practical implications.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Jun 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9781805390053

Joost Beuving

Joost Beuving is a lecturer and senior researcher in economic anthropology, Department of Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen. He is the co-author of Doing Qualitative Research: The Craft of Naturalistic Inquiry with Geert de Vries (Amsterdam University Press, 2015).

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Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future

Max Planck Studies in Anthropology and Economy

Series editors:

Stephen Gudeman, University of Minnesota

Chris Hann, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

Definitions of economy and society, and their proper relationship to each other, have been the perennial concerns of social philosophers. In the early decades of the twenty-first century these became and remain matters of urgent political debate. At the forefront of this series are the approaches to these connections by anthropologists, whose explorations of the local ideas and institutions underpinning social and economic relations illuminate large fields ignored in other disciplines.

Recent titles:

Volume 11

Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future: Stories from Global Frontiers

Joost Beuving

Volume 10

Thrift and Its Paradoxes: From Domestic to Political Economy

Edited by Catherine Alexander and Daniel Sosna

Volume 9

Wine Is Our Bread: Labour and Value in Moldovan Winemaking

Daniela Ana

Volume 8

Moral Economy at Work: Ethnographic Investigations in Eurasia

Edited by Lale Yalçın-Heckmann

Volume 7

Work, Society, and the Ethical Self: Chimeras of Freedom in the Neoliberal Era

Edited by Chris Hann

Volume 6

Financialization: Relational Approaches

Edited by Chris Hann and Don Kalb

Volume 5

Market Frictions: Trade and Urbanization at the Vietnam-China Border

Kirsten W. Endres

Volume 4

Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism: Precarity, Class, and the Neoliberal Subject

Edited by Chris Hann and Jonathan Parry

Volume 3

When Things Become Property: Land Reform, Authority, and Value in Postsocialist Europe and Asia

Thomas Sikor, Stefan Dorondel, Johannes Stahl and Phuc Xuan To

Volume 2

Oikos and Market: Explorations in Self-Sufficiency after Socialism

Edited by Stephen Gudeman and Chris Hann

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/series/max-planck

Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future

Stories from Global Frontiers

JOOST BEUVING

First published in 2023 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2023 Joost Beuving

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Beuving, Joost, author.

Title: Theorizing entrepreneurship : stories from global frontiers / Joost Beuving.

Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2023. | Series: Max Planck studies in anthropology and economy ; volume 11 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023000731 (print) | LCCN 2023000732 (ebook) | ISBN 9781805390046 (hardback) | ISBN 9781805390053 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Entrepreneurship. | Businesspeople.

Classification: LCC HB615 .B4467 2023 (print) | LCC HB615 (ebook) | DDC 338/.04--dc23/eng/20230428

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023000731

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023000732

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80539-004-6 hardback

ISBN 978-1-80539-005-3 ebook

https://doi.org/10.3167/9781805390046

The study of the human condition is not the same as the study of the spread of viruses and the density of clouds and the movements of the stars. Human nature does not follow laws like the law of gravity, and to believe that is to take an oath to a new religion.

—Jill Lepore, If Then

Contents

List of Illustrations

Prologue

Acknowledgements

Introduction. The Problem of the Future in Studying Entrepreneurship

Chapter 1. Time and Entrepreneurship in Social Theory: Barth, Schumpeter and Keynes

Chapter 2. The Social Construction of Individualism: Fish Entrepreneurs on Lake Victoria, Uganda

Chapter 3. Profit-Making and Dreaming of Fortunes: Second-hand Car Dealers in Cotonou, Benin

Chapter 4. Telling Stories with Numbers: The Social Life of Investment Bankers

Chapter 5. The Relevance of the Policy Context: Aquaculture Entrepreneurs in Greece

Conclusions

Epilogue: Value and Validity of the Case Study Method

References

Index of Subjects

Index of Key Thinkers

Illustrations

Figures

Figure 2.1. Lake Victoria and the research area in Masaka district, including the Ssese islands

Figure 2.2. Business contacts, Herman Kirimega

Figure 2.3. Business contacts, Bosco Ssekyewa

Figure 3.1. Shipping routes and major car markets in Western Europe

Figure 3.2. Shipping routes, ports, trade flows and major car markets in West Africa

Figure 3.3. Port and car markets in Cotonou

Figure 3.4. Business contacts, Abdul

Figure 4.1. Business contacts, Bill Broeksmit

Figure 5.1. Greece and important points in the company histories

Figure 5.2. Business contacts, Galaxidi

Figure 5.3. Business contacts, Selonda

Tables

Table 2.1. Survey of boat ownership among 109 fish entrepreneurs

Table 2.2. Survey of four prominent boat owners during a two-week period

Table 3.1. Average selling prices on the Cotonou car market

Table 4.1. Bankers’ suicides key statistics

Prologue

This is an anthropological study that tells stories about entrepreneurship, so let me open this book with one.

It is a Tuesday morning, halfway through January 2001, still very early with sunrise a few hours away. I get off the city bus that has taken me from the central station to a residential area in the northeast of the city of Utrecht, The Netherlands. Given the early hour, it is surprising that the bus is filled to capacity: it will be another hour before the city comes to life and the morning rush hour begins. The composition of my fellow passengers gives a first indication as to why. Almost all of them are young men, and many are dressed in oversized winter coats, perhaps to protect them from the winter cold, though the weather this morning is actually not that bad. Their behaviour is also noteworthy. They all get off with me at the same bus stop and then walk in small groups through the residential area where the houses are still in deep rest. An early riser could see how the groups of men stride towards what appears to be a large, open area surrounded by a man-high iron fence. Swelling noises emanating from it give an indication as to their destination: in the distance, the sound of revving car engines can be heard mixed with the busy chatter of a large crowd.

As usual, I had boarded the bus unaccompanied, and I decide to walk with three men with a distinctive West African appearance. On the bus, I had overheard them conversing in French, and with my rusty school French I ask if I can join them, to which they agree with a curt nod. The men appear to be ill at ease, they cast nervous glances here and there; meanwhile, one of them is looking at a scrap of paper with what appears to be directions. We enter the gate towards the end of the fence, where a security guard gives us a stern glance to which the men respond with some hesitation, and then the guard admits us; the three men look visibly relieved. Once inside, we can see a large number of neatly parked cars, at which the men stare for a moment. They then huddle around the scrap of paper, and I can see that on the back is written what appears to be a neatly prepared shopping list. The list, on closer inspection, contains brands and types of cars, with further details, such as the year of manufacture and special options like air-conditioning, written between brackets. The three then look about them, straighten their shoulders and walk towards the waiting cars.

As the above fragment suggests, the men have come to visit the Utrecht Veemarkt (literally: cattle market), at that time one of western Europe’s largest open-air second-hand car markets (following the pace of gentrification, it was closed and subsequently transformed into a luxurious residential area a few years later). Traditionally, the Utrecht Veemarkt catered for the national second-hand car market, and it was one of many such markets across western Europe. During the 1990s however, Utrecht Veemarkt transformed into a major hub in a global frontier of second-hand car dealing, bringing together a wide range of groups of traders, but also transporters, financiers, street-level bureaucrats, mechanics and so on from across the world. From the Utrecht Veemarkt, a multitude of connections developed with major seaports – the port of Antwerp in particular – but also Amsterdam and Hamburg. Here, the second-hand cars were put on specialized car-carrying ships to overseas destinations, chief among which were those in West Africa. That I ran into West African men on this early Tuesday morning is therefore no coincidence; the vast majority of those visiting the Utrecht Veemarkt hail from that part of the world, often exploiting their personal networks to export second-hand cars with a view to making some money.

Later in the morning, I run into the three men again, and over plastic cups of weak coffee I strike up a conversation with them. They confide in me that this is their first visit to Utrecht, matching my observations at the bus stop. The men, who happen to be cousins, originate from Mali, in West Africa, and they have lived in Brussels for a few years, not far from the Midi station, home to a large community of West African migrants. They have held an assortment of small jobs, meanwhile economizing on daily expenses to allow them to save up money. With their savings, they had ventured into second-hand car trading in Brussels but, because there were so many others doing likewise, they found it difficult to make a profit. A local friend had steered them towards the Utrecht Veemarkt and provided them with directions. He had also advised them to wear the oversized coats: to prevent prying eyes from seeing how much cash they were carrying. But the friend had forgotten to mention one important thing. The three men had boarded a train from Brussels, expecting to be able to drive the cars that they would purchase in Utrecht back to Brussels. This turned out to be an unexpected problem: none of the cars they were considering buying that morning had the required MOT certificate. They could thus not drive them back home on the public road, although this was essential for their further business plans. Disappointed with this unforeseen outcome, they finished their coffee and wandered back to the bus stop empty handed, returning home by train.

This story points to an economic universe with which I became acquainted during the early 2000s. My acquaintance did not follow from design: I stumbled on the fascinating world of the second-hand car trade through happenstance. I was trained in tropical land use with a minor in development sociology at Wageningen University, a university with a strong focus on agriculture, and I was destined for a professional future as a rural development worker. For several reasons, I had lost my appetite for this career perspective and I began looking for a job in The Netherlands, not sure what I wanted to do with the rest of my professional life. On graduation in 1998, through a study friend I landed a position at INZET, an advocacy organization based in Amsterdam that sought to improve the negotiating power of poor countries in the South in international trade. My supervisor at INZET, Joyce Kortlandt, had formulated the audacious idea of looking into the export of second-hand cars from Europe to West Africa. At the time, the use of old cars from Europe was associated with environmental pollution in West African cities. My supervisor’s idea was further to make second-hand car exporting countries such as The Netherlands pay for the health fall-out in West Africa allegedly caused by the cars’ exhaust emissions. Although my academic interest in the environmental and health aspect was lukewarm, I quickly warmed to the idea of finding out more about the Europe–West Africa second-hand car trade. The task at hand consisted of a desk study scrutinizing European export statistics, but not long into the project I decided to visit the Utrecht Veemarkt about which I had read in the national newspaper while preparing for the topic.

During my successive visits to the Utrecht market, various riddles for research began to suggest themselves. For instance, the three men were cousins, and they prepared for their trip by relying on a friend, so how do social relations affect second-hand car dealers’ decision-making processes? Did the fact that the friend had supplied them with incomplete information perhaps say something about larger social dynamics in the car business; might they have been cheated, for instance? Also, the men resorted to a particular behaviour: they had come wearing oversized coats to avoid others inferring what their plans were in terms of spending money. But why was it important to conceal this? How could others possibly benefit from this knowledge, and how would that knowledge then translate into an economic advantage? The logistical complexity of the second-hand car business presented a further riddle. Here is a business linking various parts of the world through bureaucratic practices (the MOT requirement is a case in point) and logistical procedures (getting a car actually shipped out involves reams of paperwork); a basic understanding of these appears key in business success. But how do entrepreneurs such as the three men prepare for that, and how do their preparations (or lack thereof) affect the outcome of the business? Finally, what to make of the revving of the car engines that dominates the soundscape of the Utrecht market? Was this perhaps a way to test the car’s qualities in the absence of other diagnostic tools? And why was such testing actually needed?

I attempted to find answers to these research riddles once I had secured funding for a PhD project. The PhD resulted in various journal articles and eventually a dissertation (in 2006) that offered partial answers; an explicit theoretical statement tying together the various riddles remained elusive. However, I felt sufficiently inspired to look for further leads in new research. This began with a study of the social life of fishermen on Lake Victoria. Again, this began as an unplanned step. An evening spent in an Amsterdam café with a friend who had undertaken a study in rural Uganda sparked my interest. I learnt that once upon a time fishing on Lake Victoria may have been a local affair, catering for domestic food markets, but in the course of the 1990s a global frontier had begun to form connecting the shores of the lake via long and complex export chains to overseas supermarkets. Obviously, fishing is not the same as car dealing, but as I worked on this project it dawned on me that observing the Lake Victoria fishermen resulted in similar research questions. For instance, I learnt how fishermen operate in small teams, and how their composition is rarely stable. At the same time, they face numerous difficulties: finding fish may take many days (the fishermen do not have dependable diagnostic tools such as sonar at their disposal); the catch is often rejected by the fish-processing factories (they look for a uniform size distribution to speed up the fileting); and their fishing gear may be destroyed by bad weather or be stolen. In view of this, I wondered about the social forces shaping the fishermen’s entrepreneurial behaviour, and how that affected the organization and planning that goes into the fishing.

With these riddles partially solved, I subsequently became interested in the role of macroeconomic policy, especially economic reform; this struck me as an important condition impacting on the questions in which I was interested. The expected outcome of reform is economic revival and, if this is true, it should be evident in growth in firm activity, especially export sectors. I therefore shifted my attention to a study of aquaculture entrepreneurs in Greece. This Mediterranean country saw the creation of what appeared to be a more favourable business climate – the anticipated result of economic reform policies promoted by a neoliberal reform agenda (austerity). In the same movement, local Greek entrepreneurs pioneered the farming of marine fish for export that found a ready overseas market and attracted foreign investments. Importantly, in the context of the Greek fish export boom, different forms of entrepreneurial behaviour appear to have formed. I observed how some groups of Greek aquaculture entrepreneurs take small and cautious steps towards the future, basing their economic decisions primarily on practical considerations. Yet, I noted how others resort to grand and sweeping gestures that seem to ignore entirely the multitude of practicalities that go into farming fish. These observations sensitized me to the possibility that, in the same policy environment, entrepreneurs may form different ideas about what they consider to be a good business opportunity (or not). A mechanistic explanation whereby entrepreneurial behaviour is primarily a response to a macroeconomic environment may therefore be defective. I gradually began to realize that what actually happens in firms in the sense of how entrepreneurs form ideas about the future in a changing business environment is an essential driver of entrepreneurial behaviour.

Although by this time I had begun to gain a stronger sense of theoretical direction, pointing towards the relation between entrepreneurial behaviour and the future, I also realized that my three cases were biased by an important common element: car trading, fish exporting and fish farming have a correspondence in a shared world of directly observable facts: cars and fish, as well as the equipment and organizing practices that surround them, have tangible properties. To encapsulate a more comprehensive theoretical statement, I then added the world of investment banking as a fourth case. This was based on the consideration that one cannot see a securitized derivative or some other financial product to the extent that one can see a car or a fish; financial products are merely represented as numbers on a screen or a sheet of paper. I further learnt that investment banking had boomed since the 1980s, coinciding with the creation of a multitude of new financial products, providing fertile testing ground for my unfolding theoretical idea. A study of secondary source material grounded in a rich corpus of investigative journalism suggests the following additional riddles. First, in view of the intangibility of financial products, how are the basic facts of banking established? It is especially relevant to note that those who purport to be experts in this – bankers, financial traders – rarely agree on key definitions. This is linked to what emerged as the second riddle: investment banking appears to be a closed world where social boundaries are controlled fervently – outsiders do not get in easily, but, more importantly, neither do insiders get out easily. (This changed after the financial crisis when tenacious researchers brought to light several scandals in the financial world; their work made writing the banking chapter possible.) How does the resulting social entrapment then rhyme with the noted dissensus about the basic facts, and how does this affect how, in the financial world, entrepreneurs look towards the future?

Trying to find answers to the numerous questions that the four cases presented to me has occupied me over the past two decades; in fact, it does so to the present day. In the study that lies before you, I am suggesting answers that hopefully result in a better theoretical understanding of entrepreneurial behaviour. That said, I must also caution against too optimistic expectations. First, these are perhaps not full answers to the extent that they give a comprehensive overview of car dealing, fish exporting, fish farming and banking. The cases that follow merely seek to provide a ‘best fit’ to a theoretical statement. Second, this book does not offer some grand theory of entrepreneurship. In fact, one of my underlying concerns in writing this book is my growing dissatisfaction with grand theory in advancing new ideas about entrepreneurial behaviour. At the same time, new ideas are urgently needed in order to come to grips with the challenges of the twenty-first-century global economy. It is true that entrepreneurship in our era has produced tremendous economic successes that make modern society possible; yet, it is also credited with worldwide economic meltdown, uprooting the everyday life of our own – and quite possibly also following – generations. An important message of this book is that both outcomes may be different sides of the same coin. Dissecting this coin is what this book is ultimately about. I hope to make this clear by expanding on stories of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial behaviour, adding an extra layer of explanation by way of theorizing. Now, in order to move forward; let us continue with some more stories.

Acknowledgements

Work for this study began about twenty years ago, and it took me on an academic journey to various academic institutions in The Netherlands, especially University of Amsterdam, VU University Amsterdam and Radboud University Nijmegen. I thank my colleagues there for their valuable support, with special mention of Professor Toon van Meijl and Professor Eelke de Jong.

I thank the numerous individuals in West Africa, East Africa, Europe and the United States who granted me access to their lives for this study, especially Abdul, Bosco, Herman, John, Lara and Spiros. Hopefully, I have given your stories the voice they deserve.

The fieldwork for this book was made possible with funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, WOTRO Science for Global Development, and various Faculty and Department travel grants, for which I am grateful.

In 2021, I wrote an initial version of Theorizing Entrepreneurship at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle, Germany), while affiliated there as a visiting fellow. I am indebted to Professor Biao Xiao, a director of the MPI, for his generous invitation, as well as to various MPI colleagues for their stimulating thoughts, with special mention of Professor Chris Brumann, Dr Mario Schmidt and Professor Thomas Widlok.

The Dutch Association of Volunteer Organizations (NOV) kindly offered me a working space in my hometown, Utrecht, which expedited the writing process. I thank Mark Molenaar and Joost van Alkemade for their generous hospitality and welcome.

Many important insights that found their way into this book first emerged in conversations with my academic friends Professor Jan Kees van Donge, Dr Edwin Rap, Dr Jens Andersson and Dr Geert de Vries. Also important were the numerous parenthetical conversations about economic life with Dr Jill Alpes, Dr Eelke Heemskerk, Dr Hans Marks and Dr Luuk van Kempen. I thank you for your unconditional faith in this study as well as for your numerous insightful comments.

Catherine O’Dea is thanked for language editing: your professional touch is present everywhere in the book. You furthermore planted the seed of this book many years ago during a memorable visit to Dublin.

At Berghahn, I thank Anthony Mason and Tom Bonnington for their professional editorship, and the editors of the Berghahn book series ‘Max Planck Studies in Anthropology and Economy’, Professor Chris Hann and Professor Stephen Gudeman, for welcoming this study in the series. Two anonymous reviewers took time off from their busy work schedules to review this book, for which I am deeply thankful.

Parts of Chapter 2 were previously published as ‘Chequered Fortunes in Global Exports’ (Beuving 2015); parts of Chapter 3 appeared previously as ‘Cotonou’s Klondike’ (Beuving 2004); parts of Chapter 5 were published as ‘Business Events as Fieldwork Site?’ (Beuving 2019a); parts of the Epilogue were previously published as ‘Contacts in a Box’ (Beuving 2019b) and as ‘Ethnography’s Future in the Big Data Era’ (Beuving 2020).

This book could not have been written without the continuous love and support of my partner, Dr Tessel Jonquière, and our two daughters, Coosje and Mijnke: without the three of you, my future makes no sense.

Many have contributed to this book, but the sole responsibility for errors and omissions is obviously mine.

Utrecht/Nijmegen, September 2022

Introduction

The Problem of the Future in Studying Entrepreneurship

[P]eople make choices based on expectations about an uncertain future. Decisions like whether … to buy new factory equipment or lay off workers [are] never obviously rational or irrational in the moment, because long-term consequences cannot be predicted.

—Zachary Carter, The Price of Peace

Background to the Study

This anthropological study tells stories about entrepreneurial behaviour with the purpose of arriving at a new interpretation of such behaviour that explains not only goal-rational (economic) behaviour, but also behaviour that seems irrational (non-economic).¹ Such a new, comprehensive interpretation is urgently needed to overcome a major contradiction in contemporary entrepreneurship studies. Various global economic shocks, epitomized by the 2008 financial crisis, have sounded the intellectual death knell for the optimistic idea that entrepreneurs generate business successes by responding rationally to a stimulating economic environment. The wholesale failure of this hitherto celebrated idea has swayed the pendulum towards interpretations emphasizing irrational forces in entrepreneurial behaviour, such as overconfidence or herd behaviour. Yet, entirely dismissing the idea of goal-rational entrepreneurial behaviour is not very satisfactory either, as many entrepreneurs are found to behave as if they are goal-rational – a stance that finds apparent support in the economic successes of twenty-first-century global business tycoons such as Warren Buffet (Schroeder 2009), Jack Ma (Clark 2016), Elon Musk (Soni 2022) and Steve Jobs (Isaacson 2015). In order to solve this intellectual conundrum, I argue that we must take seriously the problem of time, in particular future time, in studying entrepreneurship. The temporal dimension of entrepreneurship has been overlooked – and sometimes deliberately ignored – in academic discourse over the past forty years, essentially construing entrepreneurial behaviour as timeless. To clarify how I bring time back into the study of entrepreneurship, let me continue with a brief ethnographic fragment, recorded many years ago in West Africa.

It is a cold and rainy June afternoon in 2004, on an ordinary market day in the port town of Cotonou, home to West Africa’s largest cluster of second-hand cars from Europe. My Beninese friend Abdul, a man in his early thirties who has been dealing in cars for about two years, is seated next to me on the bonnet of a tired-looking second-hand Toyota Corolla. Abdul heaves a deep sigh and casts an empty look at the virtually deserted car market. It does not look like he will sell the Corolla today. It has been about two weeks since Abdul last sold a car, and, when this happened, he sold it at a loss. His cousins in Europe, who sent him the car to sell on their behalf, had unexpectedly pressed him for money – and not in a pleasant way. With his financial reserves down for some time, Abdul had little choice but to accept a low price and forgo his own cut: a serious decision, as selling cars constitutes his livelihood. He is therefore in trouble. ‘If this carries on, it will soon be finished for me,’ Abdul explains. I remind him that he made a similar comment a few months earlier. He offers me a wry smile and repeats what he told me then: ‘Tomorrow may look better; you know, after all, car business is good business!’

Abdul’s remark is even more surprising given the wider context from which he is speaking. From a distance, it is hard to credibly maintain that the West African trade in second-hand cars constitutes good business. That became apparent to me when I scrutinized the financial accounts of several of my research participants halfway through my fieldwork in Cotonou. It was obvious that few of them succeeded in generating a stable income from car trading, and, for the vast majority of them, the car business consisted of scraping together meagre funds at the very best, and bankruptcies were a common outcome of their business. To some extent, these business misfortunes relate to the position in which Abdul finds himself. He is a reseller of cars, meaning that he has limited control over prices: he has to accept what his European cousins offer him. A similar pattern of losses and stagnation emerges, however, regarding traders who import second-hand cars directly themselves. They too struggle to make ends meet, and only a few have accumulated sufficient capital to allow them to move into the more secure world of wholesaling and transporting cars, which is where the large profits accrue. To illustrate this peculiar pattern with a key statistic: of the 107 car traders that I consulted during fieldwork, only about a dozen could be considered as having developed a stable business. So why is it, then, that Abdul insists that car business is good business?

The scene with Abdul stuck with me, and, after a long gestation, it eventually culminated in my writing this study. Over time, I