Crossing Conventions in Localized Food Networks: Insights from Southern Italy

In this paper I demonstrate the analytical potential of the concept of hybridity for understanding localized agrofood networks, that is, production systems whose products are embedded in the history, geography, and culture of a particular place and community. I use the notion of hybridity as a way of describing how local producers do not necessarily follow one specific production logic, whether of scale or variety. The research shows that they exchange, borrow, absorb, and appropriate practices, technologies, knowledge, and conventions from all available models of production. The nature and the extent of the exchange, and thus of hybridization, vary according to the nature of the product, to the position a particular firm occupies within the network, and ultimately, to individual and collective conceptions of how production can and should be organized. The specific ways that firms coordinate transactions between one another and how they develop relations with markets also reflect the producers' choices among different models of organization. Hybridity matters in relation to rural development policies. The entry of local food products into modern marketplaces through a series of intermediate steps, some modern, some traditional, opens up an opportunity to rethink the alleged opposition between industrial and artisan production within localized food networks. As I will show, between industrial and artisan producers, objectives may diverge, but there can also be strong positive exchange. Although industrial producers link up with buyers by serving increasingly wide, even global, markets, artisan producers help retain expertise within the territory of production, anchoring the product deeper into the culture, history, and geography of the area. Institutional actors should recognize and enhance such synergies apart and beyond the technical aspects of production.