Review of perspectives applied in the assessment of organic food networks

Summary

Value is a key concept for understanding how organic food networks function because values are the foundation of the organic production practice, thus value must be given a significant role in assessing and balancing the effects of organic food networks. At the same time value is a loose concept, widely used and with various meanings in different scientific perspectives, in which ontological difference produces different perceptions of what values are. Assessing organic food networks is thus a complicated process, since the perspective which is chosen has important implications for the analysis and for the outcome of the assessment. This paper reviews five perspectives which predominate in the assessment of food networks, 1) Food Science, 2) Discourse Analysis, 3) Phenomenology, 4) Neoclassical Welfare Economics and 5) ANT. The perspectives are compared with regards to how the food network is assessed, how value is measured and how organic is understood. It is concluded that the perspectives focus analytically on different aspects of the same phenomena and differ in terms of where value is found, but also in the degree of reductionism applied, which factors are included in the analysis and whether or not the analysis focuses on the individual actors or the network as a whole.