Organizations and Markets

| Peter Klein |

It’s a pleasure to welcome Randy Westgren as our newest guest blogger. Randy is Professor of Business Administration and Professor of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A specialist in the economic organization of food sector, Randy’s interests span strategic management, strategic marketing, governance, Austrian and evolutionary economics, supply-chain management, and much more. Randy describes himself as someone who “switches from econ to management and back and forth” and “studies such peculiar things as agent-based modeling, cooperative member commitment, the foodie culture, and biotechnology supply chains.” In explaining his diverse set of interests, Randy quotes this passage from Ralph Waldo Emerson (”Self-Reliance,” from Essays: First Series, 1841):

There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so they be each honest and natural in their hour. For of one will, the actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem. These varieties are lost sight of at a little distance, at a little height of thought. One tendency unites them all. The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions.

Randy has been one of our regular readers, and frequent commentators, from the beginning, showing that he is also a discriminating consumer of blogiana. Welcome, Randy!