Abstract
This chapter recapitulates the ethnographic journey into the world of market-based fisheries. In summary, the economisation of traditional and labour intensive coastal fisheries from symbols and means of rural independence to objects of investment and profit-making has given rise to a new culture of liberal rural capitalism in which private ownership structures, individual entrepreneurship and market performance decide who stays afloat, rather than collective belonging, community-based forms of solidarity and redistribution. The chapter concludes that social scientists and consumers seeking alternative solutions to the world of large-scale industrialism can no longer simply assume that ‘small is beautiful’ (Schumacher) as ‘small’ and ‘sustainable’ have become important markers for value creation and branding in the neoliberal age irrespective of the underlying property relations and socio-technical arrangements that reconfigure the rural periphery as globally entangled site of value generation and exchange. As a consequence, the role of small-scale industries as means of rural resilience and development is contested.
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Notes
- 1.
See Dobeson (2019, forthcoming).
- 2.
At the time of writing (2014), the Icelandic government had doubled the maximum weight for coastal fishing vessels from 15 to 30 tonnes.
- 3.
This is of course not necessarily an argument against large-scale industrialism. The case of the Icelandic fisheries even suggests that the large-scale industrial fleet forms the backbone for stable markets and prices. From this perspective, large and small corporations represent a successful synthesis, serving different market niches.
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Dobeson, A. (2019). A New Culture of Liberal Rural Capitalism. In: Revaluing Coastal Fisheries. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05087-0_9
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