ABSTRACT
The complex interdependence and ever more dense networks of interconnections that characterize social living under globalization are transforming local places. As Tomlinson (1999: 9) writes, ‘Putting it simply, connectivity means changing the nature of localities and not just occasionally lifting some people out of them. . . . The paradigmatic experience of global modernity for most people . . . is that of staying in one place but experiencing the “displacement” that global modernity brings to them’. The consequence of this kind of development, Tomlinson (1999: 12) adds, is that local practices and lifestyles need to be examined and evaluated in terms of their global consequences. These insights provide the initial motivation for a study of growing legalization in one of the most determinedly local sectors of economic activity: organic farming. Organic farmers and the local places in which they work and live have become spliced into a complex system of local, national and global legalities, a system in turn that is changing how they work.
