Producer-consumer Relationships Research Articles

Cows on Facebook and Instagram

This article analyzes producer–consumer relations in social media marketing in the Swedish dairy industry. The article discusses how ideas of interspecies intimacy are publicly performed in an interactive process between the dairy industry producers and social media users. Two examples from the Swedish dairy industry were chosen for analysis: one Instagram account and one Facebook account. The analysis shows how the pages are premised on spectacularly visualizing the emotional labor and performances of cows for capital accumulation. The dairy industry’s social media presence encourages the media users to engage in building the perception that Swedish dairy farms represent an idyll where the cows are willing producers of the milk that is taken from them, and the dairy industry is loving, caring, and compassionate. Thus, the social media marketing represents a co-opting not only of the ideals of participation that social media holds but also of the ideals of ethical consumptions.

The social role of food and new producer-consumer relations The Case of Sundom, Vaasa, Finland

The social role of food and new producer-consumer relations The Case of Sundom, Vaasa, Finland

Spatialities of Hunger: Post-National Spaces, Assemblages and Fragmenting Liabilities

This contribution addresses the casual structure and spatialities of food insecurity. Drawing from scholarly debates on periphery, I illustrate the limited explanatory range of state-centered periphery-approaches in order to comprehend the recent constellations of conflict and hunger. I argue that increasingly dynamic and post-national spaces of food insecurity emerge. Due to complex power geometries, these spaces are driven by realigning and territorially-stretched arrangements of action (e.g. global producer-consumer relations), by technologically enhanced new temporal configurations (e.g. speculation and high frequency trade in food), by the performances of metrics (e.g. models of food price and value-constructions shaping food security), and by the reflexive effects of knowledge production. In order to comprehend these dynamics, concepts capable of capturing new assemblages are required.

ALTERNATIVE FOOD NETWORKS AND NEW PRODUCER-CONSUMER RELATIONS IN FRANCE AND IN BRAZIL

Abstract This paper presents an analysis about agroecological alternative food networks and new producer-consumer relationships in France and Brazil. The investigation method is based on descriptive and qualitative research about 20 cases (qualitative interviews), selected with stakeholders (farmers, traders, consumers and food experts) in France and Southern Brazil. A typology about the characteristics and organization to short circuits trade is provided. The results show that alternative food networks are very diverse and dynamic, being a social, economic and environmental option to family farming, strengthening local markets and reconnecting producers and consumers. In these countries, the successful initiatives of alternative networks occur in places where there is coordination between food networks stakholders such as the government, NGOs, private enterprises, farmers and consumers' organizations.

Dynamic Scheduling of Irregular Stream Programs toward Many-Core Scalability

The stream programming model has received much interest because it naturally exposes task, data, and pipeline parallelism. However, most priorwork has focused on the static scheduling of regular stream programs. Therefore, irregular applications cannot be handled in static scheduling, and the load imbalance caused by static scheduling faces scalability limitations in many-core systems. In this paper, we introduce the DANBI programming model, which supports irregular stream programs, and propose dynamic scheduling techniques. Scheduling irregular stream programs is very challenging, and the load imbalance becomes a major hurdle to achieving scalability. Our dynamic load-balancing scheduler exploits producer-consumer relationships already expressed in the DANBI program to achieve scalability. Moreover, it effectively avoids the thundering-herd problem and dynamically adapts to load imbalance in a probabilistic manner. It surpasses prior static stream scheduling approaches which are vulnerable to load imbalance and also surpasses prior dynamic stream scheduling approaches which result in many restrictions on supported program types, on the scope of dynamic scheduling, and on data ordering preservation. Our experimental results on a 40-core server show that DANBI achieves an almost linear scalability and outperforms state-of-the-art parallel runtimes by up to 2.8 times.

Beyond Production and Standards: Toward a Status Market Approach to Territorial Innovation and Knowledge Policy

MacNeill S. and Jeannerat H. Beyond production and standards: toward a status market approach to territorial innovation and knowledge policy, Regional Studies. Current theoretical and policy models of innovation are usually production based and give prominence to producer–supplier relations. Drawing on a socio-economic approach to markets, the paper reconsiders these established models in order to broaden the understanding of innovation and territorial knowledge dynamics. The premium segment sports cars innovated in the UK's West Midlands is examined and the production and standard market of the global automotive industry is contrasted with the status market in which new local innovation embed across specific supplier–producer and producer–consumer relations. A status innovation policy approach is finally proposed to address innovation in developed economies.

From “Food from Nowhere” to “Food from Here:” changing producer–consumer relations in Austria

The notion of a “third food regime” implies simultaneous processes of further global concentration and integration and at the same time resistance through new emerging producer–consumer relations. This paper examines these processes by looking at Austria over the last 30 years. While direct producer–consumer cooperatives established at an early point, today forms of community supported agriculture (CSA) are rare. This paper explains this by identifying a shift of the entire food system from “food from nowhere” to “food from here.” The account follows the early emergence of alternative food networks through the political appeal to consumer patriotism in connection with Austria joining the EU, to a sustained positioning of retail chains with regional and national food products. The paper argues that this satisfies the needs of a large proportion of consumers and discourages the emergence of new food initiatives. The paper follows the development of different approaches and their transformations until today. Thus a picture evolves of changing, and partly progressing consumer–producer relations in response to wider societal and political transformation processes. The results explain why the movement towards CSA is currently weak in Austria, but demonstrate at the same time how alternative food networks may contribute to a transformation of the food system.

Harvesting a knowledge commons: collective action, transparency, and innovation at the Portland Fish Exchange

While localist visions of alternative food systems advocate for the expansion of local ecological knowledge through more proximate producer-consumer relationships, globalized seafood supply-demand chains persist. Moving beyond this dichotomy, commons scholars recognize that collective action among resource users at the local level can shape cross-scalar producer relations with government and more capitalized firms operating in regional and global markets. In the case of the New England groundfishery, a quasi-public fish auction not only transformed the scalar, logistical, and financial parameters of harvester-buyer relationships, it altered the production and use of local knowledge among some harvesters, and their technological choices. Resulting markets offer potential benefits that extend to broader publics, by increasing the monetary value and experimental development of a knowledge commons. Qualitative analysis of field data shows that with new market transparency, fish are no longer valued as an undifferentiated commodity, but as a variety of products with individually nuanced price structures. Displacement of local seafood buyers incurred some shoreside job losses, but fishers on smaller, owner-operated boats in multi-generational fishing harbours benefit particularly from new opportunities compared to larger, fleet boats due to different labour relations, allocations of decision-making responsibilities, observational contexts, and associated information flows. Implications for the mobilization of knowledge-action linkages to influence formal resource management arenas merit further research.

Certification and Neoliberal Governance: Moral Economies of Fair Trade in the Eastern Caribbean

ABSTRACTMany consumers and food‐justice activists regard Fair Trade as a moral alternative to markets dominated by corporate agribusiness. Fair Trade frames producer–consumer relationships in the language of reciprocity and justice rather than the impersonal logic of the market. Despite its moral economy discourse, the movement embodies neoliberal assumptions that regulation and development should occur through the realm of consumer choice rather than state intervention. To receive the higher prices that Fair Trade promises, farmers are subject to certification processes that heavily regulate their planting practices and development priorities. Here I explore the contrasting views of economic morality held by Fair Trade organizations and Caribbean banana farmers. Farmers do not view Fair Trade in terms of the lofty values of social justice and reciprocity animating the movement's discourse. Rather, they operate with a working definition of economic morality similar to those elucidated by E. P. Thompson, James Scott, Marc Edelman, and others who have examined peasant and worker responses to injustice. From farmers’ points of view, compliance with Fair Trade certification should at least enable them to persist in agriculture. As Fair Trade prices have fallen while surveillance of their working lives has increased, many regard this notion of economic morality as increasingly violated.

Kings and commoners: Agroecology meets consumer culture

The global agrifood system is examined in various scholarly literatures, including consumption studies, which are not well integrated. This paper presents data on producer–consumer relations from a small agroecology (vegetable box) scheme in England in order to ground an analysis of ‘ethical consumption’ within this wider agrifood context. It draws on the work of Daniel Miller in particular in order to theorise consumer motivations among box scheme customers, while critiquing the implicit ‘eco-pragmatism’ of Miller and of other consumption sociologies. Employing a range of perspectives – including McKim Marriott’s transactional analysis and the agrarian populist impetus in the food sovereignty movement – the paper articulates a revised green critique of contemporary consumerism which, it is argued, can illuminate some of the theoretical presuppositions of consumption theory and inform emerging efforts to establish agroecology and sustainable food production.

Territorial Knowledge Dynamics: Making a Difference to Territorial Innovation Models and Public Policy?

The concept of territorial knowledge dynamics (TKDs) has been introduced as an update to existing territorial innovation models (TIMs), questioning the focus of TIMs on technological innovation, as well as the traditional distinction between production and consumption. This paper considers whether the TKD concept can “make a difference” compared to traditional TIMs, in general, and, in particular, in relation to public policy played out at the regional level. This paper identifies three elements highlighted in the TKD concept, which have been introduced as additions to the literature on TIMs. These involve the necessity of acquiring a combination of different types of knowledge in innovation processes, establishing external relations and taking into consideration the complexity of producer and consumer relations. This paper analyses the role which has been assigned to the administrative region within the framework of three selected TIMs, the regional innovation system, clusters and the learning region, and the way in which policy has been implemented in regions in ways that relate to the three elements highlighted in the TKD concept. This paper suggests that the main way in which the TKD concept adds to existing TIMs is with its focus on active regional outreach, in establishing external relations and supporting producer–consumer relations. The TKD approach could be seen as a new “intermediate synthesis” in the ongoing process of the TIM concept development, much like the learning regions a decade earlier.

Stubby

There is a growing trend of performing analysis on large datasets using workflows composed of MapReduce jobs connected through producer-consumer relationships based on data. This trend has spurred the development of a number of interfaces---ranging from program-based to query-based interfaces---for generating MapReduce workflows. Studies have shown that the gap in performance can be quite large between optimized and unoptimized workflows. However, automatic cost-based optimization of MapReduce workflows remains a challenge due to the multitude of interfaces, large size of the execution plan space, and the frequent unavailability of all types of information needed for optimization. We introduce a comprehensive plan space for MapReduce workflows generated by popular workflow generators. We then propose Stubby , a cost-based optimizer that searches selectively through the subspace of the full plan space that can be enumerated correctly and costed based on the information available in any given setting. Stubby enumerates the plan space based on plan-to-plan transformations and an efficient search algorithm. Stubby is designed to be extensible to new interfaces and new types of optimizations, which is a desirable feature given how rapidly MapReduce systems are evolving. Stubby's efficiency and effectiveness have been evaluated using representative workflows from many domains.

Intelligence Producer–Consumer Relations in the Electronic Era

Discussion and debate about the proper relationship between those who collect and analyze intelligence—intelligence producers—and the officials who receive and use that intelligence—consumers—began...

Gulf-Asia Relations as “Post-Rentier” Diversification? The Case of the Petrochemical Industry in Saudi Arabia

: As the Gulf states embark on industrial diversification away from oil, their relationship with Asia is in the process of undergoing a significant transformation from uniform producer-consumer relations in the petroleum sector to a more complex multi-sectoral interaction. This article examines Saudi Arabia's relations with China and Japan in the petrochemical sector, the oldest and most competitive manufacturing sector in the Gulf economy, in order to provide insight for what Gulf-Asia “post-rentier” relations will be like in the future. China and Japan show mutually distinctive patterns of interaction with Saudi Arabia. China is in a horizontal relationship with Saudi Arabia, providing export and investment opportunities, but also increasingly competing in trade. Japan is in a vertical relationship, benefiting Saudi Arabia with technology transfer through inward investment and aid. Such varying patterns reflect their different levels of development, suggesting the need to discern “Two Asias”, and urging studies on Gulf-Asia relations to refocus on the roles played by advanced economies in Asia as well as those by China and India in the Gulf economy.

Low-Power Snoop Architecture for Synchronized Producer-Consumer Embedded Multiprocessing

We introduce a cross-layer customization methodology where application knowledge regarding data sharing in producer-consumer relationships is used in order to aggressively eliminate unnecessary and predictable snoop-induced cache lookups even for references to shared data, thus, achieving significant power reductions with minimal hardware cost. The technique exploits application-specific information regarding the exact producer-consumer relationships between tasks as well as information regarding the precise timing of synchronized accesses to shared memory buffers by their corresponding producers and/or consumers. Snoop-induced cache lookups for accesses to the shared data are eliminated when it is ensured that such lookups will not result in extra knowledge regarding the cache state in respect to the other caches and the memory. Our experiments show average power reductions of more than 80% compared to a general-purpose snoop protocol.

Mapping out the regulatory environment and its interaction with land and property markets

The purpose of this paper is to explain how the regulatory environment created by planning and building regulations interacts with land and property markets. Since this regulatory environment operates as a form of intervention within property markets in general and the development process in particular, it is essential first to understand the nature, structure and operation of land and property markets. These are covered in the first section. The second section identifies the aims and components of the planning system and building regulations. From this basis, four broad types of policy intervention are reviewed in the third section. These cover policies that seek to shape, regulate or stimulate market activity, and those that aim to build state or market capacity to produce desired outcomes. The final section uses the private residential development process as a case study to explore the extent to which state intervention can influence producer–consumer relationships in one important market sector. The paper argues that effective intervention in land and property markets requires the creation of a broad range of policy tools and their appropriate deployment to suit particular market circumstances.

Risky Business: Archaeology by Robert's Rules

Robert S. Santley approached archaeology like a favorite board game--he loved the intellectual strategies and he took seriously the rules of engagement. This essay explores Robert's archaeological game plan and highlights his emphasis on ancient political economies. This emphasis is well represented along two fronts: settlement pattern studies to model economic geography and craft production analysis to address producer-consumer relationships. His contributions to these fields are framed in terms of "Robert's Rules"--the basic rules of the game that structured Robert Santley 's archaeological pursuits.

The reflexive consumer

Drawing on a detailed reading of the work of Peppers and Rogers (1993, 1997, 2004, 2005), this paper argues that their work offers an emblematic problematization of traditional mass marketing, which articulates a new mentality of marketing — collaborative marketing. Collaborative marketing, implemented through the practices of CRM, reframes the role and identity of the individual consumer within producer—consumer relationships, transforming them from sovereign chooser to active collaborator, or as they are termed here, reflexive consumers. Using Foucault's concept of governmentality the paper articulates the achievement of this transformation and the central role of reflexivity in this transformation of the consumer. We conclude that in redefining the nature of marketing, RM and CRM form new relays of power linking producer and consumer and that these relays re-interpret the antagonism between freedom and subjugation that lie at the heart of producer—consumer relationships.

The Urgency and Necessity of a Different Type of Market: The Perspective of Producers Organized Within the Fair Trade Market

The development of the certified Fair Trade market was initiated by a group of indigenous communities in Mexico. Over time, their vision of Fair Trade as a different type of market has become increasingly marginalized by an emphasis on poverty reduction. This article presents their understanding of what Fair Trade should and should not be. It presents the key principles of the Fair Trade market as effectiveness, ecological sustainability, social sustainability, and more direct producer–consumer relationships. The key challenges that confront Fair Trade in living up to these principles are the need to democratize the formal structures of Fair Trade so as to give a greater voice to small producers and to link with other social movements to confront the dominant neo-liberal trade regime.

Between Mothers and Markets

The purpose of this article is to examine the role of homemade food in the construction of family identity. The article examines how homemade, its interface with markets’ competing food offerings, and intergenerational perspectives on homemade can cast light on competing understandings of the family, social relationships, and the market. Using two empirical studies conducted in a Midwestern cultural setting, findings highlight the importance of family meanings of homemade food, the role of homemade food in demarcating the realms of the family and market, the influence of producer-consumer relationships on threats posed by the market to a coherent family identity, and the qualitative changes in the social reproduction of family identities that result from divergences in homemade food meanings and practices across generations.