The global organic food market today accounts for US$82 billion. The United States is the largest single market, worth US$40 billion. The historical growth of the organic food industry has recently attracted the attention of business historians, including Oskar Broberg and Geoffrey Jones. They have explored how the development of the industry was historically contingent by analyzing entrepreneurial motivations and strategies, the relationship between market building and social activism, and the creation of sustainable businesses in a capitalist system.
Michael Haedicke's study brings a sociological analysis of the development of the organic food business in the United States since the 1940s, employing the theory of institutional logics to explain how the business was socially constructed through sector members' social interactions, political engagement, and day-to-day businesses. The author analyzes actions and decisions of those participants in the organic food business based on interviews he conducted with farmers, owners of small organic businesses, managers in mainstream food stores, and environmental and consumer-interest advocates. Archival sources, including meeting minutes, trade journals, and popular magazines, are also critical primary materials used in his analysis.
According to the author, the organic food business was shaped around conflict and compromises between two camps in the sector: what he calls “transformative” and “expansionary.” Whereas the former saw organic food production as a means to establish decentralized and democratic food and agricultural systems, the latter emphasized market growth. Haedicke analyzes how these two views developed over time and how their interactions helped shape the contemporary organic food sector.
The author argues that expansionary understandings have achieved the dominant position in the organic business. During the sector's early years, in the 1940s, organic farming advocates, most notably J. I. Rodale, blended elements of the two understandings to create a vision for organic farming that emphasized both market opportunities and food-system changes. This coexistence of the two views was possible mainly because of the decentralized character of the sector, as conflicts between different visions remained at a local level. During the 1980s, the growth of organic food retailers, like Whole Foods Market, contributed to the expansion of national organic markets, and the sector's economic balance of power began to shift in the direction of larger businesses. As the market grew, due to the lack of a sector-wide certification system, deceptive claims in food labeling became a pressing issue. Hence, Congress passed the Organic Foods Production Act (OFPA) in 1990.
Haedicke identifies enactment of the OFPA and subsequent federal regulations, particularly the National Organic Program of 2002, as a turning point for the organic food sector's further shift toward the expansionary approach. These regulations, contends Haedicke, reflected the principle of market expansion and accelerated the conversion of the sector into the mainstream food industry. His analysis of regulation provides important insights into lawmaking processes and interactions between policymakers and entrepreneurs, to which business history studies about the organic industry to date have paid less attention.
While Haedicke focuses on institutional development, consumer behaviors and consumption patterns do not find much space in his study. Instead, he analyzes how entrepreneurs and advocates imagined the role of consumers and asserts that consumers played a limited role in guiding the sector's development. Neither expansionists nor transformative advocates tried to draw consumers into discussions about a vision and mission for the sector, because they conceived of consumers as purchasers who supported predetermined goals through food shopping, rather than as citizens who could elaborate their views about the business through logical decisions.
As the growing literature in business history and the history of capitalism has integrated cultural analysis into the examination of economic changes, business historians might share Haedicke's interest in the intersection between culture and business. By analyzing how sector members envisioned and created the organic food business, he suggests that culture was diffused into political, economic, and social spheres. However, what Haedicke really means by culture is not very clear. He describes expansionist and transformative views as “cultural understandings” and their conflict as “cultural division.” But these different ways of thinking about the organic food sector were not only cultural but also political and economic, as Haedicke indicates. Although he is attentive to ideological changes within each group, the term “cultural understandings” could curtail the scope of his argument about the emergence of the organic food sector, which was otherwise a co-creation of culture, politics, and economy.
These “cultural understandings” pose another question. Haedicke explains the history of the organic food sector through negotiations between two “cultural contradictions,” that is, expansionary and transformative understandings. But were these views always contradictory? At least some contemporary participants in the sector did not seem to think that way. As Haedicke notes, in the early years of the sector's development, Rodale and other advocates saw organic farming as both a business opportunity and a social movement. A later generation of “expansionists” considered market growth necessary for realizing their environmental and social missions. Haedicke's interpretation of the two understandings is seemingly based on his critical view of expansionary understandings and large organic businesses.
This book's exclusive focus on the United States raises questions about the impact of specific U.S. legislation on the growth of the organic food market. In European countries such as Germany, Denmark, and Switzerland, legislation was presumably not influenced by the idiosyncratic factors that shaped American regulation, yet the industry still became very large, or “expansionary,” to use Haedicke's word. In Denmark, for example, cooperatives, rather than large organic businesses, influenced rule making and organic market growth significantly. A comparative perspective would help clarify to what extent regulations, and negotiations between different “cultural understandings,” served as central forces, or logics, in the creation of the organic food business.
Haedicke's heavy reliance on sociological theories can be a double-edged sword. The text is so burdened by jargon that it is difficult for nonspecialists to follow his discussion, particularly in the introductory and concluding chapters. Nonetheless, his theorization, along with his interviews with sector members, helps unveil complexity and dynamics in the development of the organic food sector.
