Academic Papers On Food Cooperatives From a Sociological View?

September 18, 2023 11:57 AM

Hi. I am trying to find scholarly papers on food cooperatives from a sociological perspective in North America or Europe but I am having a hard time finding them from a Sociological perspective specifically or a gendered perspective as well.
posted by RearWindow to Education (6 answers total)

Gently, you are entering a graduate program. If you need to Ask Metafilter to do your research for you, you are not succeeding at your graduate studies. You should be working with your advisor/instructor/mentor/peers. In this case, research librarians in your institution's library are a great resource. Also, Google Scholar. But probably this is not the right venue.
posted by Alterscape at 12:01 PM on September 18, 2023 [36 favorites]

Where have you tried searching already, and how did you go about it?
posted by avocet at 12:02 PM on September 18, 2023 [8 favorites]

My general advice is to find some promising journals, Agriculture and Human Values and Gastronomica come to mind. Then just skim through the table of contents for the past several issues and download any articles that come close to what you are looking for. Their bibliographies need to be up to date and will often point to articles that you will find even more useful.
posted by spamandkimchi at 12:14 PM on September 18, 2023 [3 favorites]

I wonder if you might have some luck finding papers in Entrepreneurship and Business journals, and then checking the citations - food coops came up a bit when I did an MBA - and business research tends to borrow heavily from sociology.
posted by stray at 12:26 PM on September 18, 2023

So... I just typed "food coops sociology" into plain old Google, and found this as the second overall result. Not even Google Scholar, just Google. It's a review article from the American Journal of Sociology about a book with the term "food cooperatives" in the title. This, an article with a three page bibliography, was also on the first page. The immediate results I found simply by googling the terms in your question does lead me to believe you haven't actually done much research on your own, but if you'd like to start, taking those two articles, looking for other work by their authors, and then looking through the bibliographies for cited works would be a remarkably easy place to start. (Assuming that this isn't just a shameless attempt to get us to do your homework for you.)
posted by kevinbelt at 12:51 PM on September 18, 2023 [10 favorites]

Here's the path:

>Your university library's website
>Click on the list of databases (might be called "Articles & Databases")
>Either look for the list of databases in Sociology or the letter S
>Look for a database called SocINDEX or Sociological Abstracts or something like that
>In that database, start with a very simple search like food cooperatives and browse the results.

>If that doesn't get you what you want, then go back to the library website and look for "Reference help" or "Ask us" or "Ask a librarian." Use their online chat to get some help with keywords, or make an appointment with the librarian for your department/program.
posted by bluedaisy at 1:23 PM on September 18, 2023 [10 favorites]