Becoming community economy: how community-supported agriculture diversifies farm labour

Abstract

Analyses of diverse and community economies have formed a fruitful basis for studying postcapitalist possibilities in agrifood systems and the economy. However, diverse economies scholarship has foregrounded the study of the economic diversity landscape encountered and sustained in community economies more than the process of becoming a community economy. To address this imbalance, we study labour in three Portuguese community-supported agriculture initiatives longitudinally rather than cross-sectionally to reconstruct the trajectory of labour diversification from the initiation of community-supported agriculture (CSA) over several years. The analysis of the reconstructed trajectories shows that the CSA setup led to labour diversification in all three case studies. Nevertheless, the findings suggest that “community” should be understood as a possible emergent property rather than an inherent quality of community economies such as CSA. Furthermore, the findings suggest that empowerment and disempowerment dynamics are crucial in diversifying work relations in community economies. The longitudinal approach followed in this study can be fruitfully adopted to various community economies within and beyond agrifood systems to reveal how postcapitalist relations emerge and consolidate in becoming a community economy.