ABSTRACT
A discernible shift occurs in the sociological literature in the late 1980s, after which the title sociology of agriculture no longer adequately describes the empirical and theoretical focus of scholarship of this subdiscipline. Increasingly, terms like “food” and “food system” began to be inserted in the title to reflect practitioners’ and scholars’ budding interest in issues beyond the farm gate. In this chapter, I review some of the frameworks – most notably the food regime approach and commodity systems analyses – responsible for redirecting soci ologists away from an almost exclusively productivist orientation to one more open to the entire food chain. Before doing this, however, I think it would be useful to acquaint the reader with some of the issues that were (and still are) causing sociologists to look “beyond” (and in some cases “prior to,” as in the case of the seed industry) the farm. One of the more interesting developments to occur in the food system has to deal with its concentration in recent decades, giving it the shape of an “hourglass.” After making some general points about concentration in the food system, attention turns to the seed industry in particu lar to explore some of the reasons why, at least within this industry, those trends are occurring.
