Social Logistics: Private Entrepreneurs and Food Supplies to the “Far Reaches” of the Russian Arctic

Abstract

The article focuses on the ways in which private entrepreneurs from Russia’s “Far Reaches” – Arctic territories lacking reliable communication infrastructures – make their choices regarding purchases, contractors, and supply chains. Taking social logistics as a range of social factors that are embedded in entrepreneurship and are instrumental in shaping actual logistics solutions, I attempt to show the specifics of supply and delivery chains used by private entrepreneurs working in the area under consideration. These chains are highly irregular and flexible, while entrepreneurs’ rationality for the choice of shipment locations is often not cost minimization but other factors. Drawing on approaches developed in the emergent field of anthropology of logistics, I examine the functioning of practices within the current logistical order and argue that the latter does not necessarily imply reliability of freight traffic and that the alternative rationalities for choosing shipment locations still do not necessarily contradict its foundational principles.