Voiceless but empowered farmers in corporate supply chains: Contradictory imagery and instrumental approach to empowerment
通过批判性话语分析联合利华YouTube视频，揭示可持续农业想象如何通过工具性赋权限制小农在供应链中的权力，并指出这种赋权可能制造新依赖。
There have been calls for a shift of focus toward the political and power-laden aspects of transitioning toward socially equitable global supply chains. This article offers an empirically grounded response to these calls from a critical realist stance in the context of global food supply chains. We examine how an imaginary for sustainable farming structured around an instrumental construction of empowerment limits what is viewed as permissible, desirable, and possible in global food supply chains. We adopt a multimodal critical discourse analysis to examine the sustainable farming imaginary for smallholder farmers constructed by one large organization, Unilever, in a series of videos produced and disseminated on YouTube. We expose the underlying mechanisms of power and marginalization at work within the sustainability imaginary and show how ‘empowerment’ has the potential to create new dependencies for these farmers. We recontextualize the representations to show that while the imaginary may be commercially feasible, it is less achievable in terms of empowering smallholder farmers.