Efforts to grapple with precisely these questions in agrarian studies
have moved in a fundamentally different direction from the social structuralism
of the embeddedness approach. Although drawing to some
degree on poststructuralism and the discursive turn in social theory, the
processual approach taking shape in the agrarian literature grounds the
exercise of power in specific institutional and political–economic contexts.
A key insight is that struggles over material resources, labor discipline,
and surplus appropriation are simultaneously struggles over culturally
constructed meanings, definitions, and identities.
Social institutions are
conceived of not as bounded entities or social structures, but as multiple,
intersecting arenas of ongoing debate and negotiation, the boundaries of
which are fluid and contested. Instead of simply asking what the rules or
relational structures are, the focus in addition is on how interaction takes
place within and among social arenas, and on how definitions of social
institutions and their boundaries are also the object of contestation. Since
social processes are the product of interaction at multiple societal levels,
they cannot simply be read off or deduced from organizational forms or
relational structures. Rather, any effort to illuminate the course of social
change and accumulation in any particular setting requires in-depth
ethnographic and historically grounded understandings.