ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sustain. Food Syst.
Sec. Agricultural and Food Economics
Volume 9 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsufs.2025.1615223
Research on Leading Agricultural Enterprises Guiding Farmers' Participation in Pre-Production Quality and Safety Control: Evidence from the Yangtze River Delta Region of China
Provisionally accepted
- 1School of Management, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang, China
- 2School of Agricultural Equipment Engineering, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang, Jiangsu Province, China
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The leadership of agricultural enterprises in guiding farmers to participate in pre-production quality and safety control not only helps promote high-quality agricultural development and drives the industrialization process of agriculture, but also provides important support for achieving the goal of building a strong agricultural nation. This paper focuses on agricultural leading enterprises and farmers in the Yangtze River Delta region of China. The study does not limit itself to exploring the independent influence of enterprise-led actions in guiding farmers' participation in pre-production quality and safety control, but rather investigates how multiple factors work together to lead farmers' participation under various interacting elements. The re-search employs a grounded theory approach to conduct a multi-case study, following the general logic of " Motivations-Behaviors-Outcomes." Relevant data from case companies were extracted, analyzed, and coded to construct a theoretical interpretation, revealing the intrinsic mechanisms of agricultural leading enterprises in pre-production quality and safety control and identifying key influencing factors. Additionally, using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, the study explores how five enterprise control behaviors-villageenterprise cooperation, integration of primary, secondary, and tertiary industries, agricultural mechanization, agricultural digitalization, and agricultural technology promotion-collaborate to guide farmers' involvement in pre-production quality and safety control from a configurational perspective. The results indicate that agricultural leading enterprises guide farmers' participation in pre-production quality and safety control through organizational linkage mechanisms and new quality productive forces elements linkage mechanism, and based on this, six configurational paths are summarized, leading to the identification of three constructs: Industry Integration-driven, Digital Intelligence-driven, and Land Trusteeship-driven.
Keywords: Agricultural leading enterprises, Farmers, Agricultural product quality, grounded theory, Qualitative Comparative Analysis
Received: 20 Apr 2025; Accepted: 05 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Liu, Li, You, Yang and Li. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Wen Li, School of Management, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang, China
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