Prof Michael Winter Distinguished Lecture: Whatever happened to the Political Economy of Agriculture? A personal and affectionate reflection on trends and fashions in British rural studies since the 1980s

I started my PhD in the sociology of agriculture in 1978 at a time when Weberian and Marxist approaches were challenging  the triumvirate of behavioural geography, neo-classical economics, and anthropological community studies, that had hitherto dominated social science approaches to agriculture in the post-war period in Britain.  Much of the new energy was to be found in the Rural Economy & Society Study Group (RESSG) of the British Sociological Association which flourished in the1980s and early 1990s.  In this talk I will consider some of the work that emerged from the RESSG and how its ideas helped to forge a political economy approach to agriculture that seemed set to dominate agricultural sociology for many years to come.  However, while its influence has not entirely withered its dominance was lost remarkably rapidly. I argue that there are three main and quite different reasons for this, first the ‘cultural turn’ in Geography, secondly the rise of Government-funded policy evaluation projects, and thirdly the move towards inter-disciplinary policy-relevant UKRC programmes.  As a result, contemporary approaches to agriculture in the social sciences are more diverse than in the 1980s and there is much to commend in the new diversity.  However,  the decline of the ‘big picture’ work of political economy has its risks if we wish to develop a full understanding of the drivers of change in the agri-food sector.