Abstract
The rising concern of European consumers for pesticides residues left on fruit and of some far distant countries in Asia and Americas for quarantine organisms has turned compliance with SPS requirements into one of the main challenges of the French apple industry. Using transaction cost and cognitive governance theories, we investigate how differences in property rights structures, inter-firm arrangements, and mechanisms of firm governance may impact the modalities of SPS risk management. Our case study of two leading groups of the French fresh apple industry with different property rights structures (cooperative vs. private) and different marketing strategies (customers with more or less stringent SPS requirements) highlight the role of cognitive governance mechanisms (knowledge sharing) in the management of SPS risks. This paved the way for integrating governance structures, cognitive resources, and transaction attributes into a single model.
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Notes
- 1.
The acronym SPS (sanitary and phytosanitary) is used by the WTC for SPS agreements. It includes both regulations on pesticide residues in fruit (S: sanitary) and regulations on the presence of harmful organisms (PS: phytosanitary).
- 2.
The ten top structures represent 35% of total turnover (Crédit Agricole SA, agrifood businesses financial observatory).
- 3.
- 4.
Winter (1987) considers that there are four important dimensions of knowledge transactions: tacitness versus explicitness, system quality versus stand-alone, teachability versus non-teachability, and complexity versus simplicity.
- 5.
- 6.
Nooteboom (2000) considers that in the case of hybrids, seen as complex networks, the theory of knowledge and the vision of the cognitive firm are close to governance problems (Nooteboom 2000), especially considering that efficiency of collaboration and agreement increases when interactions increase and cognitive distance decreases.
- 7.
AFNOR: French Association of Normalization.
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Acknowledgments
The research leading to this paper has received funding from the French National Research Agency (ANR) under the project Sustain’Apple (2014–2018). We are grateful for the comments received for presentation at the eighth international conference on Economics and Management of Networks that was held in cooperation with the Universidad de la Habana (La Habana, Cuba, November 15–17, 2018). We are grateful to Xavier Vernin (CTIFL, Paris) and Zouhair Bouhsina (INRA, Montpellier) for their participation in data collection and comments. We are also grateful to George Hendrikse and an anonymous reviewer whose comments and criticisms helped us further refine our paper.
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Appendix 1 Semi-Structured Interviews
Appendix 1 Semi-Structured Interviews
1.1 Co-op Group A
1.2 Capitalistic Group B
Interviews characteristics
Interview number | Year | Interviewees | Type of firm Position in the group |
|---|---|---|---|
1 | 2014 | Quality manager and head of cultivation | Subsidiary of a subgroup Packing house |
2 | 2016 | CEO | Subsidiary of the group Appel trader |
3 | 2016 | CEO | Subsidiary of the group Head of a subgroup |
4 | 2017 | Export manager and quality manager | Subsidiary of the group Head of a subgroup |
5 | 2019 | CEO | Head of the group |
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Saïsset, LA., Codron, JM. (2019). Hybrids in the French Apple Industry: Opportunistic and Cognitive Differences Between a Cooperative and an Investor-Owned Group. In: Windsperger, J., Cliquet, G., Hendrikse, G., Srećković, M. (eds) Design and Management of Interfirm Networks. Contributions to Management Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29245-4_13
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