Hybridizing money and moral: the case of Value Based Food Chains

Summary

Value Based Food Chains (VBFC) differ throughout Europe but are often found to share the same problem of integrating and maintaining their values as the chain grows. In this paper we analyse a number of VBFC that has succeeded in this manoeuvre. We argue that the success of these cases rely on the capability of the VBFC in question to combine both normative values and economic concerns equally, by allowing the two to become hybridised. The hybridisation, we argue, helps securing the reproduction of the central normative values without reducing them to an ‘added value’ to pass from one actor to another. Theoretically, we build our approach on social systems theory together with the theory of essentially contested concepts. Empirically, we draw on a number of cases from the project ‘HealthyGrowth’.