Inhibitors to change in agriculture: Is a pluridisciplinary approach needed?

Summary The application of technological development to the agricultural sector requires considerable structural change: increases in the size of farms, substitutions of capital for labour and a consequent outflow of labour. Such changes ought to be brought about by the market mechanism, but in most western countries are impeded by the price policies of Governments. This political opposition originates in the well-integrated farmers organisations which press for a strong emphasis on price policy at the expense of structural or social policies. In this article a systems approach is used to explain this opposition in the context of the actions within and the interactions between the various social systems in which agriculture participates as a subsystem. A tentative descriptive model of this interaction pattern is developed to indicate the interfaces of the different social subsystems, and a pluridisciplinary approach is advocated to incorporate psychological sociological and politicological material into the economic analysis. In a certain sense it is an institutional approach by means of pluridisciplinary research. The last two sections of the article deal with the possibilities and difficulties of such an approach and pluridisciplinary research based on open decision models is advocated. An important subject for research seems to be the socio-economic class-structure of agriculture since the different classes have different views on their position in relation to technological advance and react differently to it.