A perspective on social economy and food systems: Key insights and thoughts on future research
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For a concept that was largely outside of the public gaze a decade ago, “social economy” has, in a short time, captured the attention and imaginations of civil society organizations, mainstream institutions, and funders. Local and national governments, international agencies and foundations are embracing the social economy in an effort to generate new models for development and sustainability. This turn requires clarity and critical reflection on what “the social economy” entails and its possible future directions. In this Perspective, we shed light on these areas, focusing on issues of sustainability and food systems, and in the process, advance three arguments. First, context-dependent diversity is a defining characteristic of social economy. Second, though frequently positioned as a counter-point to neoliberalism, the social economy is far broader and more nuanced. Third, research in the social and informal economies of food has opened critical discussions on the appropriate pathways, effectiveness and viability of such initiatives to transform food systems that structurally promote marginalization, exclusion, food insecurity and ill-health for many. In the current rush to brand all things “social economy”, such critical reflection will play a valuable role in shaping the discussion around those transformative pathways. We conclude by suggesting that the study of social economy has to include deliberate consideration of its informal manifestations, and that food studies scholars are challenged now to develop a comprehensive body of scholarship that articulates impacts and value of social economy in creative and compelling ways.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".