174 Participatory Processes
demonstrate that they are more successful than others, while others prove unsuitable
in the light of changing social and ecological conditions. Thus selection appears,
while the provisional end result of the selection is the starting point for the search
for and creation of new variation.
Farming is like ‘a dance through time’: time and again variation and selection
result in new socio-technical networks, new types and connections. While these
new expressions emerge, others degrade and disappear – sometimes stealthily,
almost unnoticed, at other times abruptly.
This brings us to the second storyline. It concerns the heterogeneity of farming
as the (temporally and spatially confined) expression of this ‘dance through time’.
In Chapter 3 of this book, I will discuss in detail the farming styles that can be
distinguished in contemporary Frisian dairy farming. I will try in particular to
describe these styles as projects, as ‘self-reflective strategies for patterning the net-
work of the social’ and, hence, as part of a more comprehensive socio-technical
network.
The remainder of the book builds upon this, particularly Chapters 6 and 7,
which discuss selection, and Chapter 9 in which variation is discussed. More pre-
cisely, in Chapters 6 and 7, I analyse the interaction between the development
opportunities inherent in various farming styles and the dominant agro-political
project – that is, the process of modernizing agriculture – while the interaction
with a new agro-political project, in which rural development has a central role, is
analysed in Chapter 9. Chapter 8 forms a link: there the central theme is the exten-
sive erosion of trust, the essential ingredient in the functioning of expert systems.
The third storyline can be summarized as a systematic critique of various forms
of determinism: of technological determinism (in Chapter 4, inter alia, where the
doctrine of production functions is discussed); of economic determinism (in
Chapter 5); but especially of what is called structural determinism, which has over-
run the social sciences (including rural sociology). Chapters 6 and 7, which discuss
modernization as ‘the unfolding of structural patterns and relations’, can be under-
stood as a critique of structural determinism. There the agricultural knowledge
system, the expert system that represents, propagates and realizes this structuralist
notion like no other, is discussed at length.
The fourth storyline is the obvious counterpart of the third: it entails a search
for a more adequate concept of structure. I have already commented on it in this
introductory chapter. In this book, I will test the concepts and notions raised in
this chapter, to arrive at a conclusion in the final chapter (Chapter 10). I will also
summarize the critique of the contemporary expert system in Chapter 10. Chap-
ter 9 forms an important prelude to this, which brings us to the fifth and final
storyline. Chapter 9 concerns new development opportunities that reach beyond
the current misery. In the discussion of these opportunities, I use ‘rural develop-
ment’ as the connecting concept. Chapter 9, the ‘battle for the future’, is also
concerned with the social and political struggle that was waged in the 1990s over
the realization of new development opportunities.