Local Food Talks

This book is the author''s published M.Sc. thesis, which was completed in December 2008 at the University of Guelph. Based on an action research approach, this study looks at how communicative facilitation can contribute to the development of social organizations of innovation using local food as the context. The findings suggest that, given some conditions, communicative facilitation can foster joint learning opportunities that can help improve the participants'' common understanding around a particular issue. In this research, communicative facilitation also helped identify the relevant stakeholders of a social organization and establish clear inclusion criteria, which seems to have generated social inclusion. Overall, it can be said that the main role of communicative facilitation in the development of social organizations of innovation is to contribute to the key elements of the networking process.