From machinery contractors to service providers. Tensions and disputes in the outsourced agriculture of the Argentine Pampas region

Abstract

Outsourcing as a current practice in agriculture of the Pampean region began to develop more than 50 years ago. During the last decades, however, technological intensification in general, and particularly the one identified with the so-called “precision agriculture”, places subcontracting in a complex network of social relations in which technological innovation itself changes in the organization of production and work and renewal or emergence of new profiles among agents become relevant. The article particularly considers the tensions, conflicts and negotiations resulting from this process, with information from fieldwork carried out in the department of Nueve de Julio, at the province of Buenos Aires.