Pitching agri-food tech: performativity and non-disruptive disruption in Silicon Valley
Pitching agri-food tech: performativity and non-disruptive disruption in Silicon Valley
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DOI：
10.1080/17530350.2022.2085142
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发表时间：
2022-06-21
影响因子：
1.9
通讯作者：
Guthman, Julie
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Fairbairn, Madeleine;Kish, Zenia;Guthman, Julie
粮食和农业最近成为科技行业创新和融资的焦点。快速增长的农业食品科技初创公司有望将科技行业标志性的颠覆性创新引入他们认为僵化、低效和不可持续的行业。本文通过可能是科技行业最突出的叙事类型：公共投资游说，来探究硅谷进军食品和农业领域过程中出现的文化和市场摩擦。在将推销视为一种表演实践的学术基础上，我们展示了推销是如何中介技术部门进入这个成熟行业的。我们对农业食品技术推介的四个关键时刻进行了分析，揭示了精心策划的农业食品问题和解决方案框架是如何发挥作用的，以调和硅谷投资者所要求的改变世界的雄心和盈利潜力，以及粮食和农业根深蒂固的政治经济现实。我们的分析还表明，一种“非破坏性破坏”的趋势（Goldstein， J., 2018）。地球改善：清洁技术创业和绿色资本主义的矛盾。马萨诸塞州剑桥：麻省理工学院出版社)。尽管有意颠覆现有行业，但科技行业主要是对现有技术进行渐进式改进，这些技术通常是与行业现有企业合作开发或销售的，这突显了技术颠覆与真正的系统性转型之间的区别。
Food and agriculture have recently become focal points of tech sector innovation and financing. Rapidly multiplying agri-food tech startups are promising to import the tech sector's trademark disruptive innovation into an industry they deem sclerotic, inefficient, and unsustainable. This paper interrogates the cultural and market frictions attending Silicon Valley's foray into food and agriculture through the lens of what is perhaps the tech sector's most prominent narrative genre: the public investment pitch. Building on scholarship that views pitching as a performative practice, we show how pitches serve to mediate the tech sector's entree into this established industry. Our analysis of four key moments of the agri-food tech pitch reveal how carefully curated framings of agri-food problems and solutions work to reconcile the world-changing ambition and profit-making potential demanded by Silicon Valley investors with the deeply entrenched political economic realities of food and agriculture. Our analysis also suggests a tendency towards 'non-disruptive disruption' (Goldstein, J., 2018. Planetary improvement: Cleantech entrepreneurship and the contradictions of green capitalism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Despite nods to disrupting the established industry, the tech sector primarily offers incremental improvements on existing technologies, often developed or marketed in partnership with industry incumbents, underscoring the distinction between technological disruption on the one hand and genuine systemic transformation on the other.