Managing place and distance: Restructuring sales and work relations to meet urbanisation-related challenges in Swedish forestry

Elias Andersson, E. Carina H. Keskitalo and Kestin Westin

Forest Policy and Economics, 2020, vol. 118, issue C

Abstract: Drawing upon interviews with representatives of all the major forestry organisations in Sweden, this paper explores how, in their sales and services, they work to overcome the growing distance between forest owners and forests. The results indicate that increasing distance to forest owners in terms of sales and services work is largely dealt with by reorganisation of the sales process. Through trust-building activities such as modifying office structure and local work processes, and use of new technologies such as personalised forest websites/apps, previously local trust-building processes are being deliberately digitized and implemented through new technology and, in some cases, offices in cities. However, the results also suggest that these processes potentially affect the way in which forest as a resource and a place is constructed and interacted with. For example, it can be treated as an object of desire that is produced and marketed; as a place of knowledge and expertise that produces specific social and sales relations; and as a place of production to legitimize modern industrial forestry. Through this, forest management is constructed as an economic or technical issue that can be managed at a distance from the property.

Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1389934119304174
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:forpol:v:118:y:2020:i:c:s1389934119304174

DOI: 10.1016/j.forpol.2020.102267

Access Statistics for this article

Forest Policy and Economics is currently edited by M. Krott

More articles in Forest Policy and Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().