PLACE AND FOOD PRACTICE
- a road trip
1. The road to practice: starting from economic geography
2. Test drive: An example from current work on food tourism synergies
3. Traffic jams, road blocks and diversions: Questions and challenges
Henrik Halkier (halkier@cgs.aau.dk)
Laura James (laura.james@humangeo.su.se)
Economic geography & theories of practice
• Starting point: how to conceptualise learning and
innovation across different kinds of boundaries
• Firms, geographical, sectoral
• Developing links between food & drink and tourism sectors
• Communities of practice (Lave & Wenger 1991)
• Mutual engagement, joint enterprise, shared repertoire
(Wenger 1998)
• Knowledge is ‘leaky’ where practice is shared, ‘sticky’ when it is not
(Brown & Duguid, 2001)
• People are members of multiple communities
• Innovation in geographically dispersed communities
Practice in economic geography:
some issues…
• Emphasis on different kinds of ‘community’ developing
though social interaction (Vallance, 2011)
• Professional/Epistemic/CoP; Craft-based, Professional,
Expert/Creative, Virtual (Amin & Roberts, 2008)
• Underplay situated context of ‘knowing in practice’:
similarity = learning
• Retention of cognitivist conception of knowledge and
learning (stocks, flows, circulation)
• Learning within or between established
communities/networks? (Nooteboom, 2008)
Moving forward (1)
• Knowing-in-practice rather than circulation/absorption of
knowledge
• Learning to practice but also learning as changing old
practices & creating new ones
• Creative and constructive practices: ‘the kind of practice
that obtains when we confront non-routine problems’
(Knorr Cetina, 2001:175)
• Different perspectives on boundary crossing
•
•
syntactic, semantic, pragmatic boundaries (Carlile, 2004)
transfer, translation, transformation
Moving forward (2)
• Reckwitz (2002: 249): Practice as '...a routinized type of
behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected
to one another: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental
activities, ‘things’ and their use, a background knowledge in the
form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and
motivational knowledge'.
• Nicolini’s (2012) sensitizing questions/dimensions of practice
• Key and marginal actors, sayings and doings, practical concerns,
temporal organization
• A more fine-grained, process-oriented approach
• Firms, institutions, networks, policies: NOT starting points
Food tourism platforms
• Why food and tourism?
• Branding, boost local food production, extend tourist season
• From feeding tourists (industrialised, national distribution, pre
fab, limited seasonality)
• To ‘Local’, artisan, traditional, quality, experiences…
• Key practices
• Producing food, retailing, catering and hospitality, developing
tourist products/experiences, promoting tourism
• Adaptation, transformation, creation, new connections
between practices
Food tourism in North Jutland
Why?
 Branding, boost local food
production, extend tourist season
Taking a practice perspective
 Key and marginal actors
 Sayings and doings
 Practical concerns
 Temporal organization
Interviews
 food producers, retailers,
policymakers
Laura James – laura.james@humangeo.su.se
Henrik Halkier– halkier@cgs.aau.dk
Jammerbugt Signature dish
• adapting existing practices
• fixed items on menus
• story telling
• linking in new ways
• use of local suppliers?
• new practice
• make recipe public
• joint branding
• DMO developing networks
Hals local food market
• adapting existing practice
• adding food to existing summer Saturday markets
• producers travelling further to participate
• linking in new ways
• local business development and tourism promotion
connected through development of summer food market
• new practice
• DMO developing local product by initiating event
Key findings
• Support for marginalised ‘quality’ food production
practices, but small scale
• Focus on adapting visible practices (menus, markets) &
new temporality (outside main season) rather than
localising food chain
• Some practices ‘too difficult’ to change/link together:
buying practices of supermarkets and restaurants
• Differences and dependencies between practices
• What is at stake when practices must be changed or new ones
adopted?
• Brokers and boundary objects
Traffic jams, road blocks, diversions
• Defining and delimiting practices
• Zooming in and out?
• Unit of analysis/starting point
• community; profession; project; organisation?
• Research methods
• participant observation, following boundary objects/spanners;
analysing boundary discourses…?