All these premises having, as I think, been clearly made out, it is impossible that the rulers now on earth should make any benefit, or derive any the least shadow of authority from that, which is held to be the fountain of all power, Adam's private dominion and paternal jurisdiction; so that he that will not give just occasion to think that all government in the world is the product only of force and violence, and that men live together by no other rules but that of beasts, where the strongest carries it, and so lay a foundation for perpetual disorder and mischief, tumult, sedition and rebellion, (things that the followers of that hypothesis so loudly cry out against) must of necessity find out another rise of government, another original of political power, and another way of designing and knowing the persons that have it, than what Sir Robert Filmer hath taught us.

Two Treatises of Government.

What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

From a world history perspective, the most noticeable trend in the history of the late 19th century was the domination of Europeans over Non­Europeans. This domination took many forms ranging from economic penetration to outright annexation. No area of the globe, however remote from Europe, was free of European merchants, adventurers, explorers or western missionaries. Was colonialism good for either the imperialist or the peoples of the globe who found themselves subjects of one empire or another? A few decades ago, the answer would have been a resounding no. Now, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the more or less widespread discrediting of Marxist and Leninist analysis, and the end of the Cold War, political scientists and historians seem willing to take a more positive look at Nineteenth Century Imperialism. One noted current historian, Niall Ferguson has argued that the British Empire probably accomplished more positive good for the world than the last generation of historians, poisoned by Marxism, could or would concede. Ferguson has argued that the British Empire was a \" liberal \" empire that upheld international law, kept the seas open and free, and ultimately benefited everyone by ensuring the free flow of trade. In other words, Ferguson would find little reason to contradict the young Winston Churchill's assertion that the aim of British imperialism was to: give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to place the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain. It should come as no surprise that Ferguson regards the United States current position in the world as the natural successor to the British Empire and that the greatest danger the U.S. represents is that the world will not get enough American Imperialism because U.S. leaders often have short attention spans and tend to pull back troops when intervention becomes unpopular. It will be very interesting to check back into the debate on Imperialism about ten years from now and see how Niall Ferguson's point of view has fared! The other great school of thought about Imperialism is, of course, Marxist. For example, Marxist historians like E.J. Hobsbawm argue that if we look at the l9th century as a great competition for the world's wealth and …

The New Imperialism

The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1, Reason and the Rationalization of Society

'Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony', American Journal of Sociology, 83, pp. 340-63.

This article examines the structure of contractual relations between growers and first handlers in California fruit and vegetable markets. Evidence on existing structures is collected from on-site interviews and from a small mail survey of market intermediaries who contract with independent growers. Four generic instruments are identified—input control, field visits, quality measurement, and residual price risk—which are used to coordinate relations between growers and first handlers and which help to alleviate information asymmetries and align incentives between contracting parties. Drawing from our interviews and survey, we offer examples of how each of these instruments are employed.

Incentive Instruments in Fruit and Vegetable Contracts: Input Control, Monitoring, Measuring, and Price Risk

Industrial agriculture has extensive environmental and social costs, and efforts to create alternative farming systems are widespread if not yet widely successful. This study explored how a set of grain farmers and rotational graziers in Iowa transitioned to agroecological management practices. Our focus on the resources and strategies that farmers mobilized to develop opportunities for, and overcome barriers to, transitioning to alternative practices allows us to go beyond the existing literature focused on why farmers transition. We attend to both the ecological and socioeconomic context of innovation by comparing processes of technical change in two contrasting regions of Iowa. Farmers cultivated farm-level biodiversity and enterprise diversity, developed new cognitive and psychological competencies, and overcame barriers to innovation by developing external network linkages with peers, knowledge organizations, and federal policies. Our research provides insights into how biophysical, cognitive, structural and market considerations can be integrated into research efforts that aim to make sense of innovation toward sustainable agriculture.

Transitions to agroecological farming systems in the Mississippi River Basin: toward an integrated socioecological analysis

Precision farming—use of digital geographically referenced data in farming operations—is the leading example of a cluster of emerging information technologies in agriculture. To date, the vast majority of academic and promotional literature addressing precision farming has focused on the field and farm-level economic and environmental benefits of site-specific allocation of crop inputs (fertilizer, pesticides, and seeds). In this paper, we question popular perceptions of the technology and pursue a sociological analysis through identification of consistencies between precision farming and the political and economic requirements of an industrializing agriculture. Through promotion of a public commitment and a technical mechanism to mitigate farm chemical pollution, precision farming legitimates chemically-based agriculture in an era of rising environmentalism. Further, precision farming is based on, and will advance, the commodification of agricultural information—appropriation of field and farm-level decision processes through substitution of capital for local knowledge. By automating farm-level data collection and information management and by reducing agriculturalists' reliance on public sector agricultural research and extension, precision farming supports further integration of on-farm activity into a coordinated system of industrial manufacture.

Precision farming: environmental legitimation, commodification of information, and industrial coordination

Precision farming (also known as variable-rate, prescription, site-specific, or soil-specific farming) is rapidly becoming the most touted of emerging technologies in American agriculture. Scarcely an issue of the mainstream agricultural print media is now published without at least some mention of the current applications of and new developments in precision farming. Precision farming-application of georeferencing technology [i.e., global positioning satellite system (GPS)] for purposes of data recording and navigational control for field operations-is increasingly hailed as a means of increasing production efficiency while simultaneously mitigating agricultural pollution. The claims surrounding precision farming-that capitalizing on extant agroecological heterogeneity, through a just-enough and just-in-time approach, will produce economic and environmental benefits simultaneously-are clearly very appealing. Further, we think it is very likely that precision farming and its variants will play a growing role in the restructuring of agricultural practices over the next several decades.

The Political Economy of Precision Farming

List of Contributors. Acknowledgements. Introduction S. Wolf, D. Zilberman. I: Context and Analytic Principles. 1. Beyond the Endless Frontier: From the Land Grant to the Entrepreneurial University H. Ezkowitz. 2. Generation and Commercialization of Knowledge: Trends, Implications, and Models for Public and Private Agricultural Research and Education W. Lacy. 3. Public Research/Private Alignments G. Rausser. 4. Challenges for Public Agricultural Research and Extension in A World of Proprietary Science and Technology B. Wright. 5. Finance, Organization and Impacts of U.S. Agricultural Research: Future Prospects W. Huffman. 6. Agricultural Knowledge Systems: Issues of Accountability C.B. Flora. 7. Institutional Innovation in Natural Resource Management: A Conceptualization and Some Australian Examples J. Cary. II: Empirical Studies. 8. Land-Grant/Industry Relationships and the Institutional Relations of Technological Innovation in Agriculture: Longitudinal Evidence from National Surveys of Agricultural Scientists F.H. Buttel. 9. Structure of Public-Private Knowledge Networks in Plant Biotechnology: An EU-US Comparison I. Theodorakopoulou, N. Kalaitzandonakes. 10. Offices of Technology Transfer: Privatizing University Innovations for Agriculture D. Parker, et al. 11. Origins of Public-Private Knowledge Flows and Current State-of-the-Art: Can Agriculture Learn from Industry? J. Senker, W. Faulkner. 12. Institutional Relations in Agricultural Information Systems S. Wolf, et al. 13. Innovative Models of Technology Generation and Transfer: Lessons Learned from the South L.A. Thrupp, M. Altieri. 14. Whither Agricultural Extension Worldwide? Reforms and Prospects W. Rivera. 15. Agricultural Extension: Generic Challenges and the Ingredients for Solutions G. Feder, et al. III: Conclusion. 16. Institutional Dimensions of Knowledge System Design and Analysis S. Wolf, D. Zilberman. Index.

Steven A. Wolf

Papers

Incentive Instruments in Fruit and Vegetable Contracts: Input Control, Monitoring, Measuring, and Price Risk

Transitions to agroecological farming systems in the Mississippi River Basin: toward an integrated socioecological analysis

Precision farming: environmental legitimation, commodification of information, and industrial coordination

The Political Economy of Precision Farming

Knowledge generation and technical change : institutional innovation in agriculture