researchers-and-experts/guthman-fairbairn-pitching-agrifood-tech

Quote / Position

“Performativity and Non-Disruptive Disruption in Silicon Valley” — the structural framing of agrifood tech venture capital pitch as non-disruptive disruption. Agrifood tech investor claims of disruption without the structural labour-displacement that disruption would imply; the pitch structure is performative (the disruption is the pitch, not the deployment).

Context

This paraphrased-position entry is the UCSC critical-food-systems cluster’s substantive analytical framing of agrifood tech investment. The Pitching Agri-Food Tech paper (Fairbairn, Kish, Guthman, Journal of Cultural Economy 15(5), 2022) is the structural critique of agritech investment framing.

Worth knowing because:

• The framing names the structural pattern of agrifood tech venture capital as non-disruptive disruption: investor claims of disruption (yield improvement, labour displacement, scale) without the actual deployment that would deliver the disruption. The pitch is performative; the deployment is partial.
• The framing is substantive analytical contribution: it engages the venture-capital structure of agrifood AI investment, not the technology itself.
• The framing is complementary to the Sullivan ethnography: Sullivan documents the deployment-reality gap (weeding commercial, harvest not); Fairbairn + Kish + Guthman document the pitch-reality gap (pitch-disruption, deployment-partial).

Together the UCSC cluster’s analytical position (Sullivan ethnography + Fairbairn + Kish + Guthman Pitching Agri-Food Tech + Guthman Problem with Solutions UC Press 2024 + Mitchell Taylorism Comes to the Fields 2023 + Friedland et al. Manufacturing Green Gold 1981) forms the corpus’s substantive US critical-voice analytical cluster for agrifood AI and labour.

Source

Fairbairn, Madeleine, Zenia Kish, and Julie Guthman. Pitching Agri-Food Tech: Performativity and Non-Disruptive Disruption in Silicon Valley. Journal of Cultural Economy 15(5), 2022. doi:10.1080/17530350.2022.2085142. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17530350.2022.2085142

(Per Sullivan unit: “Madeleine Fairbairn, Zenia Kish, Julie Guthman (UC Santa Cruz) — ‘Pitching Agri-Food Tech: Performativity and Non-Disruptive Disruption in Silicon Valley,’ Journal of Cultural Economy 15(5), 2022, doi:10.1080/17530350.2022.2085142.”)

(Note: paraphrased-position because the “non-disruptive disruption” framing is a substantive analytical contribution by three authors; the cluster’s analytical position is the structural framing, not a single verbatim line.)