Farm enterprises as self-organizing systems: A new framework for studying farm enterprises?

TL;DRAbstract

The growing attention to sustainable food production and multifunctional agriculture calls for a general perspective of farming that is able to grasp the social, technical, and economical aspects of a farm and the dynamic relationship between the farm enterprises and the surrounding world. The dominating theories within rural sociology reveal their shortcomings when they are applied to grasp the dynamic entity of a farm enterprise and its co-evolution with the structural surroundings, market, technology, knowledge, policy etc. The claim of this paper is that a new concept of a farm enterprise as a self-organizing social system can serve as a fruitful framework for studying the development of multifunctional agriculture in a changing global society. 
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\nIn this framework, each farm is understood as a self-organizing node in a complex of heterogeneous socio-technical networks of food, supply, knowledge, technology etc. This implies that a farm has to be understood as the way i

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