Book Description
This article seeks to contribute to our understanding of farm restructuring in transition by asking for driving forces behind organizational change in agriculture. It focuses on the stakeholders' trade-off between internal transaction costs vs. switching costs. The article, then, introduces factors determining the level of these two types of costs such as for internal transaction costs the original size of the firm, inside-ownership, and the type of production, and for switching costs the remaining asset specificity after establishing the formal property rights. The theoretical model is exposed to data from a recent survey in two regions of the Czech Republic by both qualitative and quantitative analysis. The quantitative analysis characterizes the downsizing process of distinguishable restructuring paths of 87 farms. Mechanisms of individual stakeholder decisions on redeployment decisions are elaborated on basis of five qualitative case studies. The article shows perspectives of further farm restructuring in European transition countries.