Excusing myself (in advance) for sporadic posting

The new academic year is upon us! Unlike my colleagues who face 15 weeks of rhythmic behavior tied to classroom presence, I will be marching to several different drummers in contrapuntal syncopation. I will be teaching two executive courses: one for food industry executives in Canada, which will take me away for about a week each in Calgary and Halifax; and an entrepreneurship course for aggies, which will be taking place in Vermont and Kansas City.

I will have a week in the UK around a conference on evolutionary thinking in economics. This is not to say that economic thinking is evolving, rather it is about using evolutionary models of structure and behavior when thinking about economics. My colleague from the philosophy department, André Ariew, is joining me on this adventure, as we are writing together on the philosophy of organization sciences (including economics). I will be posting about this topic sporadically over the next few months.

I will have a few days in Australia around a speech on entrepreneurship in the agri-food sector in Melbourne at the end of October. Plus a day in transit each way…

Finally, there will be multi-day sojourns to Washington DC, Pittsburgh PA,  and Fort Collins CO.

Cheers!

Dinner in Alsace

I organized a foray into the adjoining region — Alsace — last night with three philosophers of biology for a meal and lively discussion of research. I was joined by André Ariew of the University of Missouri, Elliott Sober of the University of Wisconsin, and Tim Lewens of Clare College, Cambridge University. The drive was about 140 kilometers each way, but the food and discourse were well worth it.

We ate at the Michelin three-star restaurant L’Auberge de l’Ill. This restaurant has been on my “bucket list” since a graduate school buddy – Bob Carney — raved about it. He was right, even 35 years later! Here is the tasting menu for the evening, minus the amuse-guele and a few other ancillary additions (chocolate truffles!). You will be disappointed with Google Translate if you try it…

- Le tourteau émietté aux herbes thaï, nage de concombre aux coquillage du moment et lait de coco

- Le filet de St Pierre poêlé aux spaghettis à l’encre, emulsion de pimentos au bouillon de calamar

- L’oeuf poché et jeune poireau grille sur une poêlée de champignons des prés et des bois

- Le carré d’agneau roti, beignet d’artichaut farci et pommes de terre cuites comme en vallée de Munster parfumées aux olives et au thym

- Les fromages (choices from 25+ on the cheese cart — all magnificent)

- La petite douceur inspire du cocktail Bellini à l’ècume de champagne et à la pêche blanche

- La gourmandise d’abricots au miel d’acacia et à la lavande

Hello from Nancy…

Not a name, the city in eastern France.

I am in Nancy for the quadrennial Congress of Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science. I will have a symposium paper in a few days, but now I am enjoying being an economist listening to philosophers of science (especially biology) examining a variety of interesting topics, followed (variously) by coffee, great food, beer, and wine. Nancy is in the Lorraine region and has a long, colorful history tied to Germany,Poland, Lithuania, Tuscany, and the Holy Roman Empire. It was a center of the Art  Nouveau movement and remains an important university city.

Dinner tonight at Place Stanislas with Jean Gayon of the Institut d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences et des techniques (CNRS and University of Paris) and Werner Callebaut of the Konrad Lorenz Institute in Austria, along with Missouri colleagues André Ariew and Chris Pincock (both of Philosophy). We took on the issues surrounding evolutionary models in economics and biology, fueled by andouillette and braised pork jowls, an excellent Rhone wine, and the local eau de vie called Mirabelle. This will be truly memorable.

Place Stanislas at night

Two posts on the History of Entrepreneurship Thought — elsewhere

I have just written a couple of posts on contributions of Fritz Redlich to the study of entrepreneurship. They appear at the blog of the McQuinn Center on Entrepreneurship as this and that.

Redlich was a fascinating character who is not well known by current entrepreneurship scholars. He was trained in the manner of the  Youngest German Historical School, finishing his doctorate in Berlin, literally, on the eve of Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination. After WWI, he entered the family chemicals business and worked as a private scholar. He eventually completed the major work required for his habilitation (and eventual access to a professorship) just before the Nazis nationalized the family business and forced him into exile in the US. For an excellent biographical sketch, I recommend the eulogy written by Kenneth Carpenter and Alfred Chandler in 1979.

Redlich wrote several papers on entrepreneurship. Many exist only in German and there is no widely available synthesis of them. Others were written in English, as a result of counsel by Joseph Schumpeter to continue his studies on American business leaders and to publish them in English. The posts I note above look at two of these papers.

I have been remiss at keeping this site active. I guess trying to be active here, there, and there has dissipated my energies — which are at a low level, anyhow…

Moving on soon — Kathleen Sprouse

Kathleen at Kunde Winery, Sonoma, CA

Kathleen Sprouse has been an active, productive research assistant for the past two academic years. She will graduate in a couple of weeks. She plans to take a trip to Europe with her sisters (sounds like fun!), then she will prepare herself to enter graduate school. She will begin her masters in Agricultural Economics at Michigan State University, continuing her research interest in entrepreneurship.

Kathleen will complete her degree at MU in agricultural journalism with a minor in agribusiness management. She did an undergraduate research internship in 2009-2010, during which she created an interview protocol for entrepreneurs, using a combination of closed-end questions and narrative analysis. She is adding to her sample of entrepreneurs this year, then she intends to write a manuscript sometime this summer. Her protocol includes videotaping the interviews and coding the videos for particular narrative points. This research design will be carried on over the coming years as part of our long term plan to create and archive some searchable data on ag entrepreneurs.

Kathleen was named as a Mizzou 39 scholar in February; that is, one of 39 outstanding seniors at the University of Missouri. This is a coveted and signal honor here. The “39″ is derived from the founding date of the University.

She has also been the designer of the communication package for The Entrepreneurship Project. Go there and see some of her posts and videos — great stuff! I hope we’ll have additional posts about her ongoing research soon.

Meet Lucy McGowan

Lucy McGowan - Research Intern

Lucy McGowan is a third-year undergraduate at the University of Missouri. Her major is Food Science, but she has developed a passion for the study of entrepreneurial behavior in the overlapping sectors of wineries, regional foods, and tourism. Her passion has resulted in a study of the networking among older and new wineries in the growing Missouri wine industry, using survey methods and the UCINET network anlysis software. She completed a poster presentation today as part of an all-campus celebration of undergraduate research.

Lucy began her project by reading widely, including Georg Simmel (in translation) on tertius gaudens, as well as a number of classic pieces by Lin Freeman, Ron Burt, and David Krackhardt. She taught herself to use UCINET. It was very rewarding for me to observe her methods. She began her empirical work by attending the statewide wine and grape conference, meeting and interviewing staff from the state board and leaders in the industry to better understand the structure of the industry. She tested questions based upon her literature review with these informants and created a web-based survey, which was forwarded to all members in the industry. I would recommend this design to any graduate student.

A manuscript will be forthcoming as part of her summer research internship. I’ll follow up with another post.

The Entrepreneurship Project for Agriculture

We are one month away from the first module of a new off-campus education program called the Entrepreneurship Project for Agriculture. There is a new blog site here to present the program, communicate with the participants, and show off the outcomes.

The project is funded by the United States Department of Agriculture’s competitive grant program for Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development. The USDA funds education programs annually under this title. I was fortunate to be one of the successful grantees from the 2009 program, primarily because my co-PI, Peter Hofherr, is the ideal person to design and lead such a program. There is a brief introduction his bona fides on the site. I am also blessed to have Jill Lucht as program coordinator; she is passionate about small farms, collaborative ventures in food marketing, and alternative agriculture.

Each education program consists of four intensive four-day modules, including a day of site visits with successful entrepreneurs in production agriculture and firms who link to farmers, including public markets, restaurants, retailers, and wholesalers. We will do this in St. Louis, Kansas City,  Marin/Sonoma, and Columbia during the next five months. After each module, we will post pictures and videos, the schedule of activities, and other materials. I’ll note the updates on this site as well.

Forage for Thought 2 – research issues to be explored

In a previous post, I was rather unkind toward the empirical analysis of the grass-fed social movement in this paper by Weber, Heinze, and DeSoucey. I was distressed that the analysis muddied the focal phenomenon of activist interest in an alternative production system to the beef industry norm – corn-based fattening in  commercial feedlots. The alternative, a grass-based diet as espoused by Michael Pollan and others, represents both a social movement and a framing for entrepreneurs to enter the market and connect to consumers. However, this story was confounded by the fact that the researchers festooned the analysis with allusions to other social movements: slow food, organics, local foods, and community-based agriculture.  I also expressed some pique that the primary data collection didn’t distinguish among the respondents (ranchers, journalists, chefs, consumers,…); these actors live in different places in the incipient market and have different roles in the social construction of the new market niche.

So why return to this paper? There are a number of reasons. First, the hypothesis of the paper is important. The authors “suggest that social movements can fuel solutions to three challenges in creating new market segments: entrepreneurial production, the creation of collective producer identities, and the establishment of regular exchange between producers and consumers.” (from the abstract, page 529) As someone who has spent more than thirty years working with agricultural producers on strategic marketing, organizational strategy, and supply chain development, these challenges are REAL.

Furthermore, the trap that the authors fell into – conflating several social movements in the agri-food sector – reflects the salient strategic issue in the sector for the next 20 years. That is, there is a huge number of overlapping social movements around food production and food consumption that can create opportunities for entrepreneurial action. A top-of-mind list would include sustainable production, fair traded products, organic production, low fat/salt/sugar/transfat/whatever diets, animal welfare, locavory and distance-delimited-diets, vegetarianism, and slow food. And each of these has variants that reflect regionality and ethnicity, different perspectives from consumers and farmers, inconsistent definitions, and emotionally charged rhetoric.

So doing a proper job of linking the cultural codes of specific social movements to the social construction of markets is of vital interest to an economically healthy, innovative sector. Beyond that, the paper’s second challenge (creating collective producer identities) is one of critical importance in agri-food. Producers are atomistic agents and no market creation can occur if there is no way for concerted collective entrepreneurship to create (mimic) effective scale to produce, assemble, process, and distribute products to consumers. I am convinced that identity is critical to collective action (more on this in subsequent posts). I have been fiddling with organizational identity work for about a decade, having learned about it from Peter Foreman and David Whetten during a sabbatic  more than 15 years ago. Now I am faced with another uncodified construct: collective entrepreneurship. I hold this to be a particular form of collective action and I am suspicious that the relationships between organizational identity and economic performance are different in incipient entrepreneurial firms and established firms and are different between diffused markets (e.g. all grass-fed producers) and focal organizations (e.g. a local cooperative of grass-fed milk producers).

To quote the Weber et al paper, “producers in the emergent niche need to develop a positive collective identity that is recognized both internally and externally.” (page 546) And, “ In addition, collective identities give rise to cooperative efforts to institutionalize the market category. To create and maintain this community, producers need to establish external boundaries as well as internal cohesion. Cultural codes … supply the resources for both tasks.” (page 547) Now, I think the paper was a bit too blithe in presenting empirical validation for these points, but I am convinced that further research efforts on the collective identity – collective entrepreneurship relationship will be important.

There are two more quotes in the paper that resonate with me. They are tied to prior work by Harrison White and others in the building of exchange relationships in the market.  The first locates a fundamental issue between (business-as-usual) commodity agriculture and the plethora of social movements in the sector. “The exchange value of commodity products is determined by a single or small set of attributes, while price premiums can arise from the relational embedding of exchange or from moral and identity-based associations.” (page 555) I confess that I have professed this in executive education courses and the undergraduate classroom for more than 15 years. I just didn’t have the mass of sociology behind my argument.

The second quote I like is “ [b]ut for a growing group of committed consumers, food consumption is already an expression of identity and morality.” (page 556) We need to understand this phenomenon through the lens of social psychology, as much as sociology, to better construct new markets … and to better teach entrepreneurship to students of agriculture and food.

Forage for Thought 1: A rant

I have been trying for more than a year to do a close reading of a paper by Klaus Weber of Northwestern and two doctoral candidates, called “Forage for Thought: Mobilizing Codes in The Movement for Grass-fed Meat and Dairy Products”, in the Administrative Science Quarterly (find it here). The article touches several points that interest me: differentiating products in the agri-food sector, collective entrepreneurship, and shared identities. Alas, I could never finish the paper. It made me so angry that I slammed it down every time.

My biggest gripe with the research is that it purports to construct a model of the relationships between a social movement (grass-fed beef vs. conventional feedlot-finished beef) and the entrepreneurial opportunity that the social movement affords to create a market segment. The process involves the understanding and mobilization of cultural codes that are common in the social movement that connote high order descriptors (grass-fed connotes sincerity, purity, permanence, etc — see figures 1,2,3; and conventional production connotes deceit, depletion, dirty) and that denote specific expressions that are incorporated into the language of production, social identity, and exchange. This semiotic analysis has some merit (see my subsequent post). But the authors muddied the analysis by confounding “grass-fed” with a variety of production practices, social phenomena, and other baggage. For example, organic production, heritage breeds, raw milk, slow food, multi-species farming, omega-3 fatty acids, and rural communities show up in the three tables of denoted expressions. This was by design. “We also collected data on adjacent markets for organic and local food to better understand the movement’s uniqueness…”(page 536). The authors drew specifically from conferences on local food and organic production.

How, then, can we follow the logic between the codes of the grass-fed movement and the entrepreneurial opportunities afforded by THAT movement, when slow food, organics, and locavory are thrown into the mix? Moreover, they included poultry, bison, goats, and sheep, and pigs (page 536) among the production units they studied. One hesitates to call this sophomoric, though any sophomore that I have taught in the last 30 years would know better than to throw all of these ancillary social issues and species together into a term paper on grass-fed beef. Of course, the vast majority of my students have been students of agriculture and food, even the rural sociologists among them. I know! I know! The title of the article says “grass-fed meat and dairy products”, but (dammit!) what the authors write about in describing the conventional vs. grass-fed industry is BEEF. Never mind that they don’t deliver on dairy products, either.

The authors make a great deal of their “data”: 41 semi-structured interviews with activists, ranchers, farmers, consumers, and journalists (!). They started with 24 respondents from a sampling frame of 50 producers drawn from a universe of 280 producers that are associated with the America Grassfed Association and eatwild.com, a website dedicated to pasture-based production. These 24 nominated “other producers, key figures within the movement, consultants, distributors, consumers, journalists, and chefs” until the researchers  felt that “information from these interviews reached a saturation point.” (page 536). So, saturation was achieved after 17 additional interviews were completed. Nowhere does it state how many of the 17 were chefs, journalists, consumers, distributors, etc.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I have done semi-structured interviews in past research. Good technique. But I have never had the chutzpah to design a single semi-structured survey instrument that I would use across such a disparate respondent group. What does one ask of a chef, a consumer, a rancher, and a journalist in a common instrument? I suppose that is how you get to “cultural codes in common use in the movement”.

The survey data were augmented with archival data: web sites on grass-fed production, “several books on grass-fed production that were recommended by our interviewees” (page 536), all issues of the Stockman Grass Farmer, and 20,000 written comments on the proposed USDA proposed rules for a label for grass-fed production. There were also field notes from conference presentations by “numerous activists, including leaders of advocacy groups or sustainable agriculture, those representing nutritional causes and slow food ideas, chefs, a regional buyer for Whole Foods, farmers’ market coordinators, and managers at natural and conventional supermarkets” (page 537). MORE MUDDYING! This is where I usually through the paper down in disgust.

A couple of thoughts:

1. The USDA gave up on developing a label for grass-fed products about 3 years ago. What does that say about the degree to which the cultural codes were codified?

2. The authors note that in 2006, the market penetration for grass-fed products was 0.2 percent of the meat and dairy sector — as measured by producer numbers. Teeny. But if we looked at market penetration by volume of production from these very few, very small farms, we probably couldn’t see it with the aid of the Hubble telescope. If we were careful and broke this aggregate down into important product classes — fresh beef, fresh milk, cheese and other processed dairy products, would we know more or less about the actual market-making between consumers and producers? I’d say more. I believe these markets are distinct, whether the social movement is or is not.

The remainder of the paper draws several bold ( I am being kind here) statements about what the data show about the roles of cultural codes in attracting producers to this new niche, reducing exit at early stages in niche development, and the creating of shared, or collective, identity among the producers. I just wish there was one datum to support these conclusions.

And, finally: why do the authors insist on calling this an “extreme” case? Why not “revelatory”, “paradigmatic” or “holistic, single” case? Aren’t extreme cases often called “deviant”, because they represent something out of the norm? If I am correct on this, then the grass-fed case doesn’t inform us about how social movements generally affect entrepreneurial activity,

A collection of articles on locavory

The latest issue of Choices, which is an outreach publication of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA), discusses many topics of interest to the study of locavory. These topics include the competing definitions of “local”, the confounding of “local” as a spatial variable with other social variables, and the roles that public policy have in promoting the development of local markets. A quick read suggests that there is much to be absorbed from this issue. Find it here.

Choices can be obtained via free subscription. If you choose to subscribe, it will signal AAEA to continue the publication.