30 the right size is chosen for the right function. They now advocate ‘smart organization’: organizing on a large scale, but delivering on a small scale, so that the human dimension is preserved. They also point out that criticism of large-scale organizations may be actually a means of expressing a much more diffuse sense of unease and dissatisfaction. This is an important observation, which finds support in research indicating that knowledge of and familiarity with intensive farming makes people less inclined to seize upon the scale or size of the operation as the focus of their discontent. For this reason, it is doubtful whether a generic reduction in size is the appropriate way to address social discontent. The food market is a world market. That will never change, not even after the necessary transition towards sustainability. Sustainability must not be equated with smallness of scale, so this exploratory study argues, but actually benefits from a smooth interaction between different scale levels – from extremely small to border-crossing operations. In fact, artisanal livestock farmers who retain a personal hands-on involvement with their processes while simultaneously achieving economies of scale by organizing their logistics, marketing and procurement with other parties have the best cards for surviving the transition to sustainability. Far from standing in the way of the artisanal approach, technological innovations can actually facilitate such methods. As noted, the modernist control philosophy leads in practice to largescale industries. It is then a small step to the diagnosis that the large scale itself is responsible for undermining trust; particularly as the size of the operation is more visible and tangible than the substance of the actual operational processes. However, the exploratory study concludes that this diagnosis is not correct. Large scale is merely a customary and frequent subsidiary effect of the real ‘culprit’: the technocratic, modernist approach that fails to respect the deep-Seated need for connectedness and the human dimension. So it is not so much the large scale in itself that provokes resistance and discontent, but the technocratic approach which historically often accompanies it. Therefore, instead of concentrating on size and scale, the analysis of the lack of trust in the sector should actually focus on ‘the modernist control philosophy’. Put more positively: as long as each component of a system is sustainably organized down to the very last detail, and as long as the various scale levels that interact with each other within a system remain actively focused on promoting connectedness and the human dimension, the scale of the operations does not really matter. Pagina 39
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