Paper short abstract:

Direct agricultural marketing practices are seemingly contradictory. They include both entrepreneurial action and farmers' aspirations for autonomy vis-à-vis the market and the state. In doing so, they challenge common categorization and point to the complex interweaving of economy and morality.

Paper long abstract:

In my dissertation project I examine the entanglements of family farming and direct marketing in Upper Austria. The interlocutors market their businesses as “family farms“ and thus draw on discursively powerful notions of traditional agriculture. By referring to "family farming", however, I intend to focus on economic practices in the context of social relationships.

The practices of my research partners correspond to the image of a quasi Janus-faced farmer: at the same time being entrepreneurial, producing for commerce and industry, and being peasant-like, producing self-sufficiently and selling products on the farmers' market. This distinction, which is usually discussed as a consequence of the modernization process, turns out to be a mixture of these two orientations. Direct marketing requires entrepreneurial management, precise accounting and calculation of the business, a genuinely capitalist practice according to Max Weber. At the same time I observe multiple forms of „repesantization“: the farmers draw on old farming practices, which are made usable for today's requirements. I argue that these values, such as family, handicraft or regionality are utilized in the process of self-marketing while direct marketing at the same time enables local agency against market-dominated agribusiness. It is precisely this ambivalence of entrepreneurial action and farmers' aspirations for autonomy that cannot be grasped with conventional categories. Rather, it requires a dense description of the interweaving of economy and morality in everyday farming practice.