FOOD REGIME AND DIGITALIZATION: A STRUCTURAL APPROACH TO TECHNOLOGICAL ORGANIZATION

Abstract

This article re-evaluates the relationship between digitalization and food regimes within a historical and relational framework. The food regime approach examines agricultural production and food circulation in relation to particular forms of capital accumulation, the interstate system, the international division of labour, and class power relations. Meanwhile, the proliferation of digital technologies throughout the agri-food system is reorganizing different stages of the food chain, from production and circulation to finance and retail. Nevertheless, while the literature on digital agriculture generally adopts a descriptive approach that catalogues the fields of application of technological innovations and focuses on their social consequences, the structural position of technological organization within the food regime approach has not been sufficiently clarified.

Drawing on the Althusserian conception of structural causality, this study aims to establish a systematic theoretical connection between these two bodies of literature. The food regime is conceptualized as a contradictory fundamental unity that exists through the historically specific articulation of multiple, relatively autonomous levels. Technological organization is defined as one of the relatively specific and articulated regions within the economic level, alongside production, circulation, and other such regions. Within this framework, digitalization is conceptualized not as an autonomous technology externally added to the corporate food regime, but as a historically differentiated subregion of the region of technological organization, structured around data, platforms, and algorithmic systems.

Digitalization is analysed through three interconnected processes or elements: datafication, platformization, and algorithmic governance. The central argument of the study is that digitalization is not an autonomous technology externally added to the corporate food regime; rather, it constitutes a historical subregion of technological organization within the economic level, differentiated on the basis of data, platforms, and algorithmic systems. While it is determined by the regime, it simultaneously conditions the material operation of economic relations. What is at stake here is not a symmetrical form of mutual determination, but a metonymic relation established through the connection between structure, level, and region, in which the structure exists immanently within its constituent terms.