ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a social psychological window on the phenomena of supply chain realignment in a neo-liberalising context and examines the evolving relationship between farmers and processing companies in New Zealand's export sheep meat and dairy industries throughout the late 1990s. Dairy farmers remain simple commodity producers. Cooperation is a natural human behaviour built on tacit knowledge. Conventional analysis of the pastoral and agri-food sectors in New Zealand has traditionally paid little heed to accounts of social relations between actors other than to broadly describe their occurrence and political and regulatory raison d'etre by way of structural relations. Many studies in social interaction, including cooperation, systematically incorporate the social representation dimension. In the context of supply chain linkages this involves each party's perspective, role of networks and information in shaping representations, supply chain decisions, strategies and practices of each party.
