ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the frameworks most notably the food regime approach and commodity systems analyses responsible for redirecting sociologists away from an almost exclusively productivist orientation to one more open to the entire food chain. The aforementioned 1989 Friedmann and McMichael piece views the global food system as driven as much by historically specific political variables as economic logic. Regime-type research is careful not to divorce agriculture and the food system more generally from state agricultural policies and the capitalist world-economy. David Burch and Geoffrey Lawrence (2009), to give a final example, write about a financialized third food regime. This describes the increasing trend of finance institutions becoming increasingly involved in the agri-food system while agri-food companies come increasingly to behave like financial institutions. The commodity systems approach emerged in the 1980s as part of the new sociology of agriculture. Lawrence Busch and Arunas Juska were among the first to offer a sustained ANT-inspired commodity systems approach.
