INNOVATION IN AGRIBUSINESS

Technology alliances create market development rights that are shared between partners in an alliance relative to codeveloped product technology. Alliance partners will often manage the shared market development rights in a cooperative manner by forming an agreement in which one partner (i.e., the licensor) licenses its market development rights to the other partner in the alliance (i.e., the licensee). The real options and bargaining power literatures provide opposing recommendations regarding whether a licensor creates greater shareholder value by licensing its market development rights to the licensee on a more or less restrictive basis. Empirical analysis of technology alliance contracts reveals that the restrictiveness by which a licensor should license its market development rights to a licensee depends on the licensee's strategic marketing emphasis. Specifically, a licensee will create greater value by following a more restrictive distribution strategy when its partner's marketing strategy emphasizes value creation. Alternatively, a licensee will create greater value when its partner's marketing strategy emphasizes value appropriation by following a less restrictive distribution strategy. From a theoretical perspective, the paper's findings provide early evidence regarding the contribution of marketing strategy toward value creation in technology alliances and help resolve the differing expectations offered by the real options and bargaining power literatures. Managerially, the paper identifies an alliance partner's strategic marketing emphasis as a hitherto unrecognized factor determining when managers should follow a more or less restrictive distribution strategy when licensing marketing development rights within technology alliances

This paper examines, mainly at the theoretical level, current academic debates around private environmental governance, private regulation and its role (or not) in management choices over shared groundwater resources. The conclusions reached are based on a literature review and a theoretical analysis to give possible points for discussion and potential research questions.

A plethora of definitions for innovation types has resulted in an ambiguity in the way the terms 'innovation' and 'innovativeness' are operationalized and utilized in the new product development literature. The terms radical, really-new, incremental and discontinuous are used ubiquitously to identify innovations. One must question, what is the difference between these different classifications? To date consistent definitions for these innovation types have not emerged from the new product research community. A review of the literature from the marketing, engineering, and new product development disciplines attempts to put some clarity and continuity to the use of these terms. This review shows that it is important to consider both a marketing and technological perspective as well as a macrolevel and microlevel perspective when identifying innovations. Additionally, it is shown when strict classifications from the extant literature are applied, a significant shortfall appears in empirical work directed toward radical and really new innovations. A method for classifying innovations is suggested so that practitioners and academics can talk with a common understanding of how a specific innovation type is identified and how the innovation process may be unique for that particular innovation type. A recommended list of measures based on extant literature is provided for future empirical research concerning technological innovations and innovativeness. "A rose is a rose is a rose. And a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet." Gertrude Stein & William Shakespeare

In this edited collection, institutional ethnographers draw on their field research experiences to address different aspects of institutional ethnographic practice. As institutional ethnography embraces the actualities of people's experiences and lives, the contributors utilize their research to reveal how institutional relations and regimes are organized. As a whole, the books aims to provide readers with an accurate overview of what it is like to practice institutional ethnography, as well as the main varieties of approaches involved in the research

McMICHAEL, Philip, Biotechnnology and Food Security - Profiting on insecurity ?

he Global restructuring of agro-food systems Philip McMichael

MINTZ, Sidney, FOOD AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO CONCEPTS OF POWER, trata das relações de poder da determinação dos novos hábitos alimentares e no estabelecimento da nova ordem agraria no economia-mundo

The emergence of a world economy depends on the reorganization of agriculture and food systems to provision the work force and the industries associated with the division of labor. This work emphasizes the central role played by food and agriculture in the world economy. The book includes a historical dimension along with the formulation of the challenges that face the world today. Social scientists of all kinds, but especially economists, sociologists, environmentalists, and political scientists, should be interested in this volume.

This skillfully researched book focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread. "Control the food and you control the people." This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms.The author cogently reveals a diabolical World of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.Engdahl's carefully argued critique goes far beyond the familiar controversies surrounding the practice of genetic modification as a scientific technique. The book is an eye-opener, a must-read for all those committed to the causes of social justice and World peace.

he hunger of 800 million happens at the same time as another historical first: that they are out-numbered by the one billion people on this planet who are overweight.' - Raj Patel Who really decides what we eat and how we think about food? How did the stuffed come to outnumber the starved and why are so many of them poor?Stuffed & Starved is a groundbreaking inquiry into the global food industry. To reveal the stories behind the products in our shopping trolleys, Raj Patel visits rice-paddies in India, coffee farms in Africa, protestor-packed streets in South Korea, UN agencies and corporate boardrooms. As he connects the dots between these places and our plates, he uncovers the real reasons for famine in Asia and Africa, the false choices given us by supermarkets, and a handful of middlemen in control of the world's food supply. He also encounters a growing resistance to this control, from the farmer co-ops of Brazil to the Slow Food kitchens of Italy, and offers a recipe for a healthier, tastier and more equitable food system.

This book explores the economic impact of supermarkets on food supply chains in developing countries, with particular emphasis on the generation/displacement of employment, the (re)-distribution of benefits along the food chain and the role of government is attracting, facilitating and regulating the growth of supermarkets in South America, Africa and Asia. Aimed primarily at academics but will appeal to practitioners in developing countries, civil servants, policy-makers and NGOs. The internationalization of food retailing and manufacturing that has swept through the agri-food system in industrialised countries is now moving into middle- and low-income countries with large rural populations, causing significant institutional changes that affect small producer agriculture and the livelihoods of rural communities the world over. Farmers and policy-makers are struggling to keep up with the wave of new demands being made on their supply chains by food manufacturers and retailers. In the process, new questions and challenges are arising: Can small-scale farmers organize to meet the demands of corporate giants? Should governments liberalize Foreign Direct Investment in the retail sector and expose numerous small shops to competition from multinationals? Can distribution systems be adapted to make markets work better for the poor? This book offers a contemporary look at what happens when the modernisation of food supply chains comes face to face with the livelihoods of rural and poor people. The authors are drawn from eighteen countries participating in the 'Regoverning Markets' programme, which aims to not only improve our understanding of the way modernization and re-structuring of food supply chains is affecting food production and distribution systems, but also identify best-practice in involving small-scale producers in supermarket supply chains, and ascertain the barriers to inclusion which need to be removed. Contents: Part One The Economic and Policy Context: The

This paper contributes a preliminary analysis of the process of agrarian capitalist transition in Arunachal Pradesh, one of the least studied regions of India. Primarily based on information collected through a field survey in eleven villages, the paper seeks to explain the nature and implications of institutional unevenness in the development of capitalism. Institutional diversity is not simply mapped across space, it is also manifested in the simultaneous existence of market and non-market institutions across the means of production within the same village or spatial context. In addition, there is a continuous and complex interaction among these institutions which both shapes and is shaped by this capitalist transition. Primitive accumulation emerges as a continuing characteristic of the on-going agrarian and non-agrarian capitalist transition. Institutional adaptation, continuity and hybridity are as integral to the emergence of the market economy as are the processes of creation of new institutions and demise of others. There is no necessary correspondence between the emerging commercialization of the different productive dimensions of the agrarian economy. These uneven processes are deeply influenced by existing and emerging power relations and by the state. Framed by the Bernstein-Byres debate about the contemporary (ir)relevance of the agrarian question, evidence is presented to justify the conclusion that although the processes at work are far from the classical models of the transition to capitalism, all aspects of the agrarian question remain relevant.

Although modern agriculture has increased food production faster than population growth in recent decades, there are concerns that existing models of 'industrial agriculture' are unsustainable due to long-run trends towards increased fossil energy costs. This has led to suggestions that food production in future will need to be based on smaller-scale and more labour-intensive farming systems. This paper examines political economy arguments that large-scale capital-intensive agriculture has proved more productive. It counterposes these to ecological economics approaches that emphasize the low energy efficiency of capital-intensive mechanized agriculture. The paper argues that discussion of a 'post-industrial' agriculture remain polarized between visions of a more energy-efficient mechanized agriculture on the one hand, and labour-intensive farming by 'new peasantries', on the other. The paper identifies questions that are neglected by this debate, in particular those concerning the productivity of labour in food production and its implications for food prices and the livelihood basis of farming.

This paper attempts to understand why debates and controversies on agricultural water use in India have taken a bipolar form, characterized by clamours and silences, and in which, paradoxically, Indian agricultural water governance and policy has shifted very little in response to the extremely vibrant and intensive public debate and action on water resources. The paper identifies the technical features of water control systems and the institutional features of the Indian (water) governance structure as the material conditions of that polarization and the source of the deadlock. I argue that the form and content of agricultural water use debates and struggles reflect and help to reproduce their material conditions of existence rather than to transform them. The analysis presented here may help to resolve the paradox and suggest new avenues and emphases for critical analysis and public action.

Does the present socio-ecological impasse - captured in popular discussions of the 'end' of cheap food and cheap oil - represent the latest in a long history of limits and crises that have been transcended by capital, or have we arrived at an epochal turning point in the relation of capital, capitalism and agricultural revolution? For the better part of six centuries, the relation between world capitalism and agriculture has been a remarkable one. Every great wave of capitalist development has been paved with 'cheap' food. Beginning in the long sixteenth century, capitalist agencies pioneered successive agricultural revolutions, yielding a series of extraordinary expansions of the food surplus. This paper engages the crisis of neoliberalism today, and asks: Is another agricultural revolution, comparable to those we have known in the history of capitalism, possible? Does the present conjuncture represent a developmental crisis of capitalism that can be resolved by establishing new agro-ecological conditions for another long wave of accumulation, or are we now witnessing an epochal crisis of capitalism? These divergent possibilities are explored from a perspective that views capitalism as 'world-ecology', joining together the accumulation of capital and the production of nature in dialectical unity.

Corporate appropriation of genetic resources, development and deployment of transgenic varieties, and the global imposition of intellectual property rights are now widely recognized as moments of accumulation by dispossession. Though robust and globally distributed, opposition to such processes have been largely defensive in orientation, and even accommodationist in demands for the development of market mechanisms for compensating those from whom germplasm is being collected. A more radical stance founded on legal and operational mechanisms drawn from the open-source software movement could not only function to impede processes of dispossession, but might actually facilitate the repossession of 'seed sovereignty'. Implementation of 'biological open-source' arrangements could plausibly undergird the creation of a protected commons populated by farmers and plant breeders whose materials would be freely available and widely exchanged, but would be protected from appropriation by those who would monopolize them.

Agricultural biotechnology is typically analyzed critically by means of a political ecological focus on the science and its ecological implications - agbio science as a radical, and 'non-natural', break with 'normal' trajectories for 'new plant science'. Surprisingly, less attention has been paid to a range of key political economic issues, many of which were important in the last big food production technology 'revolution', the Green Revolution. This paper will focus on three areas of political economy. First, we discuss the corporate drivers of agricultural biotechnology, and examine whether these drivers have already set the technology so that it cannot be changed. Second, we investigate the present economics and technology of genetic modification in plants, and its possible future. Third, we examine empirical evidence for alternative visions of the technology.