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Cognitive mapping, flemish beef farmers’ perspectives and farm functioning: a critical methodological reflection

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Abstract

In this paper we reflect on the effectiveness of cognitive mapping (CMing) as a method to study farm functioning in its complexity and its diverse forms in the framework of our own experiment with a diverse group of Flemish beef farmers. With a structured direct elicitation method we gathered 30 CMs. We analyzed the content of these maps both qualitatively and quantitatively. The central role of the concept “Income” in most maps indicated a shared concern for economic security. Further, the CMs indicated that farmers dealt with this shared social reality differently, as the relationships included in their maps referred to different functional processes relating to revenue streams, marketing strategies, investment decisions, dependence on production inputs, on-farm resource management, and personal well-being. With a clustering algorithm we grouped farmers based on the relationships in their maps, which allowed us to trace some of the broader patterns within the data, such as the existence of more business- and investment-minded farmers, in contrast to farmers focused on their quality of life, and animal production-oriented in contrast to marketing-oriented farmers. Taking into account farmers’ comments, we find that the applied methods had limited capability to classify farmers based on their perspectives on farming. Still, the system presentations proved useful to study what aspects farmers were working on or towards, and how these aspects may actually fit together as a whole. CMing was therefore mostly effective in exploring farm functioning in its complexity, and less so in exploring farm functioning in its diversity.

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Notes

  1. Critical realist philosophy is according to multiple authors (Jansen 2009; Nuijten 2011; Koutsouris 2012) a more adequate philosophical foundation for the application of systems methodologies in the agricultural sciences. Critical realism helped us to analytically distinguish between systems representations, the actual beliefs of farmers and their farms, which we put forward in this paper. Critical realism also heavily informed the assumptions we make throughout this paper about the existence of a concept-depended yet not concept-exhausted social world. Critical Realism indeed provides a sophisticated account about the nature of natural and social entities and mechanisms, and how they give rise to actual events and experience. In this paper we don’t attempt, a systematic assessment of CMing from a critical realist perspective. For this mostly methodologically oriented paper, our discussion remains mostly at the level of experience and actual events. For accessible introductions to critical realism and its implications for interdisciplinary and social scientific research see Bhaskar et al. (2018) and Danermark et al. (2019), respectively.

Abbreviations

CM:

Cognitive map

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Acknowledgment

This study was supported by the Flanders Research Institute for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food Own Capital Fund. The authors would like to express their special gratitude towards the farmers who shared their time and experiences with us for this study, as well as to the editor, Dr. Matthew Sanderson, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Flanders Research Institute for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, Social Science Unit, Burgemeester Van Gansberghelaan 115, 9820, Merelbeke, Belgium

    Louis Tessier, Jo Bijttebier & Fleur Marchand

  2. Université catholique de Louvain, Earth and Life Institute, Sytra, Croix du Sud 2 / L7.05.05, 1348, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

    Louis Tessier & Philippe V. Baret

  3. University of Antwerp, Institute of Environment and Sustainable Development, Groenenborgerlaan 171, 2020, Antwerpen, Belgium

    Fleur Marchand

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  1. Louis Tessier
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Correspondence to Louis Tessier.

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Tessier, L., Bijttebier, J., Marchand, F. et al. Cognitive mapping, flemish beef farmers’ perspectives and farm functioning: a critical methodological reflection. Agric Hum Values 38, 1003–1019 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-021-10207-z

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