The Quality Paradigm: Restructuring processes and social relationships in the viticulture sector of Mendoza, Argentina.

The viticulture activity in Mendoza, Argentina, has undergone important changes during the last decades. It has become a competitive and dynamic agro-industrial chain, with solid chances of gaining niches in the world market of fine wines related to new patterns of consumption among the middle- and high-income sectors in developed countries. In the context of adjustment policies and the opening-up of the economy to the international market during the eighties and nineties, as well as through some actors' interest in modifying a model of production already in crisis and creating new forms of profitability by producing high value-added wines, the wine agro-industry shifted towards production for a global market. The complexity of this restructuring process claims for a specific analysis about how a new quality paradigm is socially constructed, since the configuration of these changes includes new forms of resource mobilization, an innovative coordination of interests, and stirs up brand-new conflicts between heterogeneous actors.