Farm enterprises as self-organizing systems: A new transdisciplinary framework for studying farm enterprises?
The growing attention to sustainable food production and multifunctional agriculture calls for a multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary research and development perspective on farming, one that is able to grasp the environmental, social, technical, and financial aspects of a farm and the dynamic relationship between the farm enterprises and the surrounding world. Our thesis is that a transdisciplinary approach needs to build on a working ontology that goes beyond the epistemology of each discipline and that is not just pieced together of the ontologies connected to these different epistemologies. Based on a review of three prevailing theoretical frameworks within the field of agro-sociology (the farming styles approach, the Bawden approach, and Conway’s agroecosystem approach,) we argue that the existing theories do not offer such a transdisciplinary theoretical framework. Drawing on ideas from Actor-Network theory (ANT) and Luhmann’s theory of social systems, this paper argues that a new concept of “farm enterprise” as a self-organizing social system. This approach could serve as a useful ontological platform for understanding a farm-enterprise as an entity independent of a scientific observer.