Beyond the farm gate: Production-consumption networks and agri-food research

The term agri-food research has become a convenient shorthand term to describe an expansion of sociological interest over the last to or so years in the relationships between agricultural production and: increasingly industrialized networks of food production, processing, distribution and retailing; the development of transnationalized modes of regulation and governance; environmental discourse, policy and social movements; and competing understandings and uses of 'rural' space. This paper critically reviews two theoretical approaches that have challenged the dominant theoretical trends that have underpinned this reorientation of the 'rural' social research agenda-actor-network theory and vertical analysis. It is argued that applications of both approaches have frequently failed to transcend the very shortcomings they identify in agri-food studies, and suggestions are made as to how production-consumption relationships may be more adequately theorized and investigated.