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Paper info: Will the market transform when focus shift from generating product to avoiding waste?

Title


Will the market transform when focus shift from generating product to avoiding waste?

Authors


Andreas Brekke
Norwegian School of Management
Norway
Andreas Brekke

Place of Publication


The paper was published at the 28th IMP-conference in Rome, Italy in 2012.

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Abstract


The main purpose of this paper is to investigate what constitutes a food market when looking at it from a food waste project. This is, however, closely linked to the purpose of reducing the amount of food being wasted. The Confederation of Norwegian Enterprises (NHO) is hosting a project with the ambitious goal to reduce food waste in Norway by 25% by 2015. One of the work packages in the project scrutinizes how industrial networks can contribute to food waste reduction. Several companies involved in producing, delivering or retailing different food categories are forming networks to discuss the causes for food waste in each supply chain and come up with solutions for reductions. This is the empirical setting. Business actors joining together to find the real causes for food being wasted anywhere from the farm to the shop floor. Their discussions and their findings are presented and analyzed with the aid of insights from sociology of translation and IMP researchers’ translation of this scientific tradition. One finding is that the frames in food market exchange practices are overflows in a food waste project and vice versa. Sorting the overflows into exchange practices, normalizing practices and representational practices gives insights helpful to understand the important elements in food markets and paving the way for finding solutions on how to reduce food waste. Another finding is related to how consumers of food become more tightly connected to the representation of industrial activities in a network description when focus is on food waste. Both these findings can contribute to the ways markets (including consumers) are described in the IMP approach and thus also the constructive application of the approach.