Creating Sustainability: The Social Construction of the Market for Organic ProductsChapter N. 1: Reflections on globalisationThis chapter starts with some reflection on the concept of globalisation and reviews the literature in sociology of agriculture and food and rural sociology that deals with this issue. Two contrasting bodies of literature are confronted: the political economy studies that share a macroscopic level of analysis and focus attention on food production and food industries. These underline the growing homogenisation of food provision brought about by the new possibilities offered by trade liberalisation processes to TNCs . The second body of literature, that can be categorised as studies about the 'new ruralities', represents a different line of interpretation of the globalisation phenomenon. Attention is still focused on production, but the aspects that are investigated are the "universal" processes of endogenisation and selection of scientific and technological knowledge reached by the actors involved in the production processes. The latter studies show that new forms of production, which are linked to new patterns of consumption based upon the symbolic nature of food, health concerns and the desire to promote conservation of the natural environment, lead to the emergence of many differentiated rural spaces. In short, this literature suggests that rural change is driven by a highly 'cultured' set of consumption aspirations.The second section of the chapter investigates how these new hapter presents a brief analysis of the current approaches in sociology of consumption and the insights that they provide in understanding the evolution of food consumption in Europe and the rise for the market of organic products.Three perspectives are here discussed:The first one is the body of literature that shares a structuralist approach. Among these studies particularly relevant are the contributions of the anthropological studies of M. Douglas, (1979) that in the late 1970s and the 1980s stressed the role ...