Managing growth in medium-sized organic businesses: Implications for local orientation and resilience building

Abstract

This article explores how locally oriented organic businesses adapt to handle crises during a growth process to build resilience, how these businesses maintain the local orientation when growing and what the implications are for the relationship between territoriality and organic production. We explored four cases of organic businesses in Sweden, Norway, Germany and Austria. The cases can be described as Values-based Territorial Food Networks. All cases experienced challenges and crises during their growth processes and sought to provide stability and flexibility in order to deal with change. The restructuration process required internalising learning into their organisations, using diversity in a strategic way and forming long-term partnerships within their value chains. While organic certification was never at stake, the meaning of ‘local’ shifted in some of the cases.