Against Food Waste: CSR for the Social and Environmental Impact through a Network-Based Organizational Model

Abstract

This article inductively develops a model of how farmers market organizations can contribute to reduce food waste, fight poverty, and improve public health through innovative Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practices enabled by networked activity systems. To this aim, a ten-year longitudinal case study of one of the biggest Italian farmers markets has been conducted, based on triangulated data from participant observation, interviews, and internal documents collection. This study suggests that farmers market organizations are in the position to leverage their inter-organizational relationships, institutional role, and power to build collaborative networks with businesses, government bodies, and charities, so that concrete CSR-based virtuous circles on surplus food donation are triggered at the organizational field level. Answering the call from United Nation Goals for successful examples on SDG 12, this case presents how several CSR levers can have a social and environmental impact allowing farmers and their market organizations to increase their efficiency and accountability to the local community, improve processes, reduce food waste, and contribute to public health and social inclusion. CSR actions have co-evolved with significant changes in organizational logics and identity, thus enabling accountability to the local community and innovative network-level auditing of the relevant organizational processes.

Accounting and accountability in the Anthropocene

“…Third, and following a sustainability science approach (see Kates et al, 2001;Lang et al, 2012;Wittmayer andSchäpke, 2014 andin accounting Bebbington andLarrinaga, 2014;Moggi et al, 2018), the paper uses a case study focused on one sphere of Anthropocene level disruption: that of biodiversity change in the ocean engendered by seafood production (drawing from Österblom et al, 2015Österblom, Jouffray, Folke and Rockström, 2017). It is here that the interdisciplinary authorship of the paper becomes apparent and we narrate why this case study has been selected to help problematize (Thomson and Bebbington, 2005) accounting-Anthropocene intersections.…”

Food Rescue Intervention Evaluations: A Systematic Review

“…The most common metric reported, used in 14 studies, was the amount of food recovered by weight [19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32]. Comparison across studies is challenging because the time periods examined are not necessarily comparable due to seasonality and other factors.…”

“…Complementary impact metrics, such as reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and water usage, were reported in three articles [21,26,29]. Two provided a detailed explanation of how environmental impacts, as well as food security impacts and monetary value of recovered food were calculated, and both found large reductions in environmental impact associated with food rescue [21,29].…”

Configuring a Trust-based Inter-organizational Cooperation Network for Post-industrial Tourist Organizations on a Tourist Route

“…The social network analysis can be also used to identify relations between network members or between members behavior and structural patterns. This approach is useful in various types of networks, from commercial cooperation between businesses, through public institutions, till resources management like i.e., water [27] or food [28]. Research also [29] indicates that network nodes should be described from the perspective of relations between the actors.…”