Landowners rural embeddedness

Abstract

Farmers' social embeddedness has historically been investigated through agri-industrial modernisation or by post-productivistic rural development. In this paper, we investigate farmers' social embeddedness in five case areas characterised by different types of short food supply chains and contribute with a nuanced perspective on factors influencing different types of social embeddedness. We collect data of the self-reported assessment of farmers' contribution to the activities in the local community using a questionnaire among landowners in rural areas, and the data are analysed using a logistic regression model. We find that farmers’ social embeddedness depends on individual farm characteristics in the terms that small and part-time farmers show less social embeddedness than fulltime farmers, and we find an effect from the different case areas. Last, we suggest broadening the social embeddedness into three components: community embeddedness, responsibility embeddedness and the traditional production embeddedness.