Coordination and governance. Healthygrowth Task1 report

Summary

This report studies how the initiatives maintain their values over time, as well as an openness to debates over these values, thanks to the way they set up and then maybe adjust over time their governance modes (both in terms of internal organization and of alliances/partnerships with other actors) and their coordination modes (contracts, agreements and arrangements). It focuses on how within the food chain and between its different partners (producers, buyers, retailers, and possibly also consumers) values are discussed, negotiated, and translated into concrete management, coordination and governance modes, which allow the initiatives to reach a certain degree of stakeholders and network alignment.
Our hypothesis is that specific modes of management, coordination and governance allow to maintain the ‘added value’ of organic market initiatives, and that the stakeholders despite their possible different or diverging visions would collectively elaborate and adjust these modes of management, coordination and governance over time, alongside with the upscaling or growth process of their initiative.
This approach is mainly anchored in the perspectives of the sociology of organizations and markets and its focus on coordination modes (Dubuisson-Quellier, 2003; Dubuisson-Quellier, Lamine and Le Velly, 2011), and of the sociology of controversies (Chateauraynaud, 2011) and its attention to the reconfiguration of arguments and visions over time within a collective of social actors in interaction with the (external) social world.