Narratives of experience and production of knowledge within farmers' groups

In this paper, we develop an analysis of the processes by which individual experiments are shared within a group of farmers. Based on observations from a community of practice organized around direct seeding techniques, we question the ways in which these local experiences, situated in contrasting physical and social contexts are made into a discourse available for others. We use the conceptual frameworks of the sociology of science and technology and pragmatic sociology, which can account for the tests and processes that ensure the standardization of experience and increased genericity. We show that the use of the analytical framework of the sociology of translation, originally conceived around the study of laboratory practice, opens interesting and useful avenues of research to study the dynamics of other forms of knowledge than the scientific. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.