Voiceless but empowered farmers in corporate supply chains: contradictory imagery and instrumental approach to empowerment
There have been calls for a shift of focus towards the political and power-laden aspects of transitioning towards socially equitable global supply chains. This paper offers an empirically grounded response to these calls from a critical realist stance in the context of global food supply chains. We...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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SAGE
2018
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/48720/ |
| _version_ | 1848797832498118656 |
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| author | McCarthy, Lucy Touboulic, Anne Matthews, Lee |
| author_facet | McCarthy, Lucy Touboulic, Anne Matthews, Lee |
| author_sort | McCarthy, Lucy |
| building | Nottingham Research Data Repository |
| collection | Online Access |
| description | There have been calls for a shift of focus towards the political and power-laden aspects of transitioning towards socially equitable global supply chains. This paper offers an empirically grounded response to these calls from a critical realist stance in the context of global food supply chains. We examine how an imaginary for sustainable farming structured around an instrumental construction of empowerment limits what is viewed as permissible, desirable and possible in global food supply chains. We adopt a multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to examine the sustainable farming imaginary for smallholder farmers constructed by one large organization, Unilever, in a series of videos produced and disseminated on YouTube. We expose the underlying mechanisms of power and marginalization at work within the sustainability imaginary and show how “empowerment” has the potential to create of new dependencies for these farmers. We recontextualize the representations to show that while the imaginary may be commercially feasible, it is less achievable in terms of empowering smallholder farmers. |
| first_indexed | 2025-11-14T20:10:09Z |
| format | Article |
| id | nottingham-48720 |
| institution | University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus |
| institution_category | Local University |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2025-11-14T20:10:09Z |
| publishDate | 2018 |
| publisher | SAGE |
| recordtype | eprints |
| repository_type | Digital Repository |
| spelling | nottingham-487202018-04-24T14:58:33Z https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/48720/ Voiceless but empowered farmers in corporate supply chains: contradictory imagery and instrumental approach to empowerment McCarthy, Lucy Touboulic, Anne Matthews, Lee There have been calls for a shift of focus towards the political and power-laden aspects of transitioning towards socially equitable global supply chains. This paper offers an empirically grounded response to these calls from a critical realist stance in the context of global food supply chains. We examine how an imaginary for sustainable farming structured around an instrumental construction of empowerment limits what is viewed as permissible, desirable and possible in global food supply chains. We adopt a multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to examine the sustainable farming imaginary for smallholder farmers constructed by one large organization, Unilever, in a series of videos produced and disseminated on YouTube. We expose the underlying mechanisms of power and marginalization at work within the sustainability imaginary and show how “empowerment” has the potential to create of new dependencies for these farmers. We recontextualize the representations to show that while the imaginary may be commercially feasible, it is less achievable in terms of empowering smallholder farmers. SAGE 2018-04-10 Article PeerReviewed application/pdf en https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/48720/1/voiceless%20but%20empowered.pdf McCarthy, Lucy, Touboulic, Anne and Matthews, Lee (2018) Voiceless but empowered farmers in corporate supply chains: contradictory imagery and instrumental approach to empowerment. Organization . ISSN 1461-7323 Critical discourse analysis emancipation empowerment farmer food supply chain oppression sustainability http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1350508418763265 doi:10.1177/1350508418763265 doi:10.1177/1350508418763265 |
| spellingShingle | Critical discourse analysis emancipation empowerment farmer food supply chain oppression sustainability McCarthy, Lucy Touboulic, Anne Matthews, Lee Voiceless but empowered farmers in corporate supply chains: contradictory imagery and instrumental approach to empowerment |
| title | Voiceless but empowered farmers in corporate supply chains: contradictory imagery and instrumental approach to empowerment |
| title_full | Voiceless but empowered farmers in corporate supply chains: contradictory imagery and instrumental approach to empowerment |
| title_fullStr | Voiceless but empowered farmers in corporate supply chains: contradictory imagery and instrumental approach to empowerment |
| title_full_unstemmed | Voiceless but empowered farmers in corporate supply chains: contradictory imagery and instrumental approach to empowerment |
| title_short | Voiceless but empowered farmers in corporate supply chains: contradictory imagery and instrumental approach to empowerment |
| title_sort | voiceless but empowered farmers in corporate supply chains: contradictory imagery and instrumental approach to empowerment |
| topic | Critical discourse analysis emancipation empowerment farmer food supply chain oppression sustainability |
| url | https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/48720/ https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/48720/ https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/48720/ |