Social Embeddedness in Farmers Decision Making

Reciprocal interactions among farmers and consumers can be seen as the central point of market exchanges in Civic Agriculture (CAs). This work exploits the concept of social embeddedness as a conceptual tool for describing some phenomena related to CA. Social embeddedness concept might help to understand how consumers and producers behave in the market beyond the paradigm of neoclassical economics theory. The objective of this study is to empirically evaluate which attitudes may influence farmers decision to participate to several types of CAs. Our results confirm the strong role of social embeddedness phenomenon in those forms of CAs characterized by personal relations between farmers and consumers: A greater presence of community relations implies a greater role of social embeddedness on farmers decision.