Socioeconomics of Agriculture

Socioeconomics may be under greater pressure to define itself than the “classical” sciences. The latter have largely been defined by the conceptualization of real-world
phenomena: biology, for example, arose because of the willingness to better understand the phenomenon of life in its different specificities. Economics arose to study
and resolve the issue of scarcity. And sociology was created to analyze the dynamics of societal groups.
But socioeconomics? Its name pays tribute to the existence of sociology and economics, so one might either suspect that socioeconomics is merely is a combination
of both sciences (S + E = SE), or that there is an intersection of sociology and economics which is best termed as socioeconomics (S ∩ E = SE). Most past attempts to define socioeconomics as a science in its own right may have been motivated to counter such a simplistic understanding of socioeconomics. In this chapter, we review past attempts to define socioeconomics before the approach is chosen that we applied in this book.

Cut Rita Zahara

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