Organizations that set up to carry out collective purchase and distribution of locally-grown foods, most commonly with ethical purposes, of social solidarity, environmental sustainability and food quality. In Italy, the phenomenon of solidarity-based purchasing groups (where they are called GAS – Gruppi di Acquisto Solidale ) is well consolidated and object of many academic studies. In addition, in recent years new forms of web-based business-oriented purchasing groups are diffusing in several European countries, often managed by a for-profit ‘mother’ company (an example of which is the increasingly successful French company LaRoucheQuiDitOui! , known in Italy as L’AlveareCheDiceSì! ).
Published in Chapter:
Cautious Entrepreneurship: Strategies and Business Orientation of Small-Scale Farmers in the Alternative Food Economy
Raffaele Matacena (University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy)
Copyright: © 2020
|Pages: 18
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-9837-4.ch004
Abstract
Employing qualitative empirical data collected in Italy and England for a doctoral research on small-scale primary food producers in the alternative food economy, this chapter provides an interpretation of the peculiar nature of the entrepreneurialism that characterizes those small-scale farmers who entrust their economic reproduction (at least partially) to short, direct supply chains and alternative food networks (AFNs). The chapter summarizes the strategies implemented by farmers to ‘go alternative' as well as the subsequent transformation of growing and business practices that such a process entails, for then comparing the researcher's empirical results with four studies on farmers' entrepreneurialism. Issues of care, trust, change-orientedness, risk-taking, lifestyle, and autonomy are discussed, and farmers' entrepreneurial spirit is found to be cautious, due to the interplay of a traditional farming business orientation, a more pronounced relational disposition, and the characteristics and requirements of the alternative economy in which farmers are embedded.