Cultivating Institutions: Organic Agriculture and Integrative Economic Choice

Abstract

The practice of organic agriculture has recently grown and gained significant attention in many parts of the world. As alternative food systems proliferate into popular culture and take an increasingly large market share, social scientists from an array of disciplines have attempted to give meaning to the phenomenon. This article takes a unique approach to organic agriculture, by reframing it within the classical social theory of Tönnies and Durkheim and the new institutionalism in economic sociology. This theoretical lens illuminates the novelty of organic agriculture as a site where rationalities are shifting in the economic field of agriculture. Organic agriculture, I argue, has created an opportunity where economy, society, and environment are being ideologically blended together within an institutional environment in which they have been conceptually and pragmatically divided.

Keywords:

• economic sociology
• institutional change
• new institutionalism
• organic agriculture
• social theory

Acknowledgments

I thank Sylvia Fuller and three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier drafts.