Les exploitations bios face à leurs contextes. Des stratégies diversifiées et interdépendantes

[paper in French]This article starts from the observation that organic farms survive and expand, despite the difficulties they face. We analyze these processes by means of organization theories and in particular the Resource Dependence Theory (RDT). We interviewed some thirty organic farmers twice in an interval of ten years in order to identify how they depend on their environments (economic, legal, etc.) and which strategies they implement to have control on them. These strategies are highly diverse, from one farm to another, they are also very unstable and they are characterized by multiple links between them. This analysis of the strategies of organic farmers completes usefully the empirical researches on organic farming; it also questions the assumptions of the RTD, to which we confer a more systemic dimension.