Community-supported agriculture serves as counterexample to market demands of globalization

A compelling new paper from the August issue of the Journal of Consumer Research explores the community-supported agriculture movement and its survival in the face of economic globalization. Organic food was once an economic haven for small farms who distributed their goods predominantly through local channels such as farmers’ markets and food co-ops. In the contemporary marketplace, however, the vast majority of organic food production occurs on large-scale, industrial farms whose goods flow through global supply chains. In the United States, more than eighty percent of all sales in the organic category hail from brands owned by corporate conglomerates.

As Craig J. Thompson and Gokcen Coskuner-Balli (University of Wisconsin, Madison) explain: “A key premise of co-optation theory is that the capitalist marketplace transforms the symbols and practices of countercultural opposition into a constellation of trendy commodities and de-politicized fashion styles that are readily assimilated into the mainstream. Co-optation thesis is ultimately a tale of creeping commercialism that steadily erodes the socio-political force of a counterculture’s symbolic protests.”