The Frafra migrants face the problem of establishing economic forms, durable relations of partnership and hierarchy, in the city slum. Three basic models for how to go about this present themselves. The most obvious and apparently profitable of these is the contractual ethos of the civil society they think they have joined, that is individualism, rationality, market, impersonal law — the bourgeois package of city life. Here economic relations are in principle entered into freely and by choice, but the contract imposes binding obligations sanctioned by state law. There are several reasons why this does not generally work. State law does not apply except in the form of occasional punishment. Markets are erratic and the substantive conditions of rational calculation are largely absent.

XREF: Connects to Polanyi's embeddedness argument that markets require institutional and legal scaffolding not spontaneously present.

Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking…, loc. 2426