Biomateriality and organizing: Towards an organizational perspective on food

Christine Moser*, Juliane Reinecke, Frank den Hond, Silviya Svejenova, Grégoire Croidieu

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

In this introduction to the special issue, we first provide an illustrative overview of how food has been approached in organization studies. We focus on the organizing of food, that is the organizational efforts that leverage, shape and transform food. Against this backdrop, we distinguish the agency of organizations and the agency of food and explore their intersection. We argue that the ‘biomateriality’ of food, i.e. its biomaterial qualities, plays a distinctive role in shaping and affecting organizing and organizations. To do so, we present a conceptual framework for analysing food organizing, which highlights the biomateriality of food and its agentic effects on organizational efforts. Thus, we provide researchers with an analytical toolkit to disentangle the different agents (people, organizations, food itself) and the associated processes and mechanisms that play a role in food organizing. We use this analytical toolkit to introduce the different articles in the special issue and put forward some lines of future research.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)175-193
Number of pages19
JournalOrganization Studies
Volume42
Issue number2
Early online date22 Jan 2021
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Feb 2021

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Silviya Svejenova gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Velux Foundation (Velux Project #00021807 ‘The Temporality of Food Innovation’) for her work on this introduction. The rest of the authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2021.

Copyright:
Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

Funding

Silviya Svejenova gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Velux Foundation (Velux Project #00021807 ‘The Temporality of Food Innovation’) for her work on this introduction. The rest of the authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

FundersFunder number
Department of Organization Sciences
Velux Fonden00021807

    Keywords

    • agency
    • biomateriality
    • food
    • food organizing
    • materiality

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