Thursday, July 31, 2008
UnHarvard UnBusiness School???
I would like to ask Bill Friedland to comment on the "UnHarvard UnBusiness School" (UhUbS)idea. Bill has an idea to organize social scientists to serve and engage with agrifood change agents to advance the transformation of the system. He proposed the UhUbS idea as a way launch this collaborative exercise. This organizational format was thrown out to participants at the RSS meetings this week and generated some interest. There remains a bit of 'fog' about the idea but it is also important to diffuse this conversation to a broader audience outside the RSS family meeting in Manchester. Bill, give us an operational definition of this idea, please. - Wynne Wright
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Hey Wynne:
Here's an excerpt of Bill's second post to the Blog:
"I knew a bit about the Harvard Business School (HBS) and how it carried on its mission of research by building cases that generated a comparative literature on how and why some businesses succeed and others fail, the influence of internals structures, external and “environmental” developments, problems of family succession, etc. HBS builds cases which are used to reproduce their MBA grad students. I asked myself: why don’t we have something like that? I recognized that the likelihood that anyone would come along with a couple of hundred million bucks to found such a school had a probability ranging around 0.00000001%.
I filed that idea away but continued to brood on it: how would something following the HBS model be developed? It couldn’t be at one university, nor could it be in a distinct department at that non-existent university. What was clear was that there were good researchers working on the alternative movements, producing a literature that was, in typical academic fashion, cumulative but which accumulates very, very slowly. If you have a school at a single university with faculty and students interacting continuously, a lot of frontier-pushing gets done fairly rapidly. Could we do something like this with the alternative agrifood researchers...?
It seems to me that Bill is asking us to seriously consider a semi-coordinated research agenda, or set of research programs. He is challenging us - given our regularly expressed commitments to social movements and agrifood transformation - to explicitly focus on why, and to what extent, agrifood efforts succeed or fall short of their goals and across what kinds of spatial and temporal scales.
So, here in Michigan, someone might look closely at the question of who it is that can pull of agritourism, CSAs, and farmers' markets, which kinds work, which sorta work, which don't and which largely reproduce already existing and problematic environmental problems, labor relations and cultural inequalities. Someone might look at how agricultural sustainability sometimes means conserving profits more than it means reproducing ecological, familial and community resources. Someone could look at the pockets of "foodie" culture in the state and their relationship to food security, local provisioning, land values and development patterns. Someone could look at the movement legacies and connections between old Farmer's Union activists and new organic, agroecological and/or fair trade activists and the ways those legacies and connections build successes or impede innovation. I'm sure there are tons of other options or opportunities...
Were cases such as these, and many many more, to be a focus of researchers in the regions Lou Swanson laid out in 1988's Agriculture and Community Change - updated to take into account combined and uneven patters of agrifood globalization - then we'd be building a comparative arena of scholarship utterly different than the disparate, non-cumulative and often incommensurable materials we have today - particularly as it might relate to public agrifood sociology.
I guess, for that matter, a graduate students' comps might be structured so as to generate a review of the possibilities for synthesis within existing case studies. If a synthesis can be made that'd be great, if it couldn't it'd be great to see folks ask why not and what it'd take to move in that direction.
Or at least that's my initial sense of things... and I wasn't even there. Others?
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