NOVEL FOOD, NEW MARKETS AND TRUST REGIMES: Responses to the erosion of consumers' confidence in Austria, Italy and the UK

By R. Sassatelli, Alan Scott. European Societies: The Official Journal of the European Sociological Association, 2001

120 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The public debate around food confidence stimulated by food scares, the opening up of wider food markets and the introduction of GM foods provides an opportunity to analyse citizens' identification with their community sociologically, as it is reproduced through mundane practices. In order to do so, this article examines the GM food debate in Italy and the implications for food and agricultural policy of Austria's entry into the EU. Britain, with its highly industrialized agriculture and political commitment to open markets and new technologies, acts as a bench-mark. We distinguish between disembedded and embedded trust regimes; the former being predominant in freer markets and the latter a resource which can be mobilized in cases where remnants of ‘traditional’ agricultural production and supply can still be found (Italy and Austria). The increasing emphasis upon the regional origin of food, its traceability and organic production by key actors - the state, consumers' movements, retailers and marketing boards - we interpret as a confidence-building strategy which attempts to address deficits in disembedded trust resulting from widening chains of interdependency, crises such as BSE and the introduction of unfamiliar new technologies.

Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Plant Science, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/07da63ad5a2687f51aad5221ee71da476ca14233

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

1. D. Maye
2. B. Ilbery
3. P. Oosterveer
4. Arthur P. J. Mol
5. J. Kirwan
6. A. Tregear
7. J. Wiskerke
8. D. Wright

In Plant Science

1. D. Maye
2. B. Ilbery
3. Arthur P. J. Mol
4. J. Kirwan
5. P. Oosterveer
6. A. Tregear
7. O. Schutter
8. J. Wiskerke

In Strategy and Management

1. Arthur P. J. Mol
2. P. Oosterveer
3. D. Maye
4. J. Kirwan
5. B. Ilbery
6. A. Tregear

Citations in the corpus

• The interpersonal world of direct marketing: Examining conventions of quality at UK farmers’ markets (2006, background): “…coli, BSE,1 and Foot and Mouth) have acutely focussed consumer attention on the production and distribution of their food, and dented their confidence in ‘conventionally’2 produced food and the ‘uniform standards’ that underpin it (Goodman, 1999; Marsden et al., 1994; Sassatelli and Scott, 2001).”
• Alternative (Shorter) Food Supply Chains and Specialist Livestock Products in the Scottish–English Borders (2005, background): “In an examination of consumers' confidence within Austria, Italy, and the United Kingdom, for example, Sassatelli and Scott (2001) interpret the growth in novel food markets and promotional actions by key actorsöthe state, consumers' movements, retailers, and marketing boardsöas confidence-building…”
• The Importance of Consumer Trust for the Emergence of a Market for Green Products: The Case of Organic Food (2015, unknown): “Notably, Sassatelli and Scott (2001) distinguish between ‘‘embedded’’ and ‘‘disembedded’’ trust, the former being the traditional, personal, and localized form of trust and the latter a more universalistic and institutional form.”
• Consumer trust in different food provisioning schemes: evidence from Beijing, China (2016, background): “Thus, different trust regimes, i.e., ‘relatively stable and coherent set(s) of definitions of and institutional approaches to food safety’ (Sassatelli and Scott, 2001, p. 238), emerge, among which we distinguish three ideal types: government-based trust regimes, market-based trust regimes and civil…”