The social responsibility of businesses has developed into a highly debated issue in recent years. Especially in agribusiness, recent scandals as well as information asymmetries concerning food production have led to high external pressure on firms from the wider public. Being confronted with a...

The paper is concerned with the content of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the food supply chains. The objective is to build the content of CSR in the food chain with a stakeholder dialogue. The research project takes an action oriented approach and is based on case studies. The project...

Research has highlighted a growing gap between public perceptions of farming and the realities of modern agriculture and the food industry. A number of food scandals have exacerbated consumers’ critical perceptions of the agribusiness sector. This can threaten the reputation and legitimacy of...

Rural context and agricultural process are assuming growing credibility as a mean to promote well being and social inclusion in the population as a whole. Fattoria solidale del Circeo” constitutes one of the many examples of social agriculture that have risen in the recent years in Italy....

This article highlights the interaction between social capital, pooling and quality premiums and their influence on cooperative members’ decisions regarding their product quality. A necessary condition for cooperative equitable principles such as complete pooling is that there exists a high...

Institutional problems and the corruptive use of social capital give ground for misuse of institutional gaps and cause intentional failures for financial benefits. Based on social capital theory and transaction cost economics (TCE) this paper describes how the institutional environment in the...

In the past, much rural development planning has relied on the concept of growth poles. With the “new rural paradigm”, we find that place-specific development and bottom-up approaches have become more popular than ever. Such place-based development often envisages the use of social capital....

Drawing on Nahapiet and Ghoshal's (1998) distinction between the structural, relational, and cognitive dimensions of social capital, this paper analyses the performance of Water Communities (WCs) in the Bregalnica region of the Republic of Macedonia. WCs are farmer-managed local irrigation...

The establishment of Geographical Indications (GI) can be considered like an instrument, that from initiative of public policies of rural development, can have application for the protection of territorial agri-food productions that present tipicity. In the case of being Local Agri-food Systems...

Private farming is the dominant mode of agricultural production in most European countries. Not all farmers are equally successful, economically. In this paper it is analysed whether social capital is an important factor contributing to higher agricultural incomes. Based on the findings of a...