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Purpose: Limiting the use of antibiotics in food animals is a cornerstone of contemporary EU policy. Despite that marketing of antibiotics for growth promotion and nutrition has been banned since 2006, the use is still high and varied. This paper aims to investigate the forces behind the different usage patterns in Italy, with one of the EU's most extensive use of antibiotics in animals, versus Sweden, with the union's most restricted use, including how these usage patterns are related to EU and national policies.

Design/methodology/approach: The industrial network approach/the 4R resources interaction model is adopted to investigate the major forces behind the different antibiotic usage patterns. Furthermore, the study relies on the notion of three main characteristics related to the use of a resource activated in several user settings (H & aring;kansson and Waluszewski, 2008, pp. 20-22). The paper investigates the Swedish and the Italian using settings, with a minimised, respectively, extensive usage of antibiotics. The study is exploratory in nature and based on qualitative data collected through a combination of primary and secondary sources.

Findings: The paper underlines the importance of integrating forces for policy to succeed in attempts to reduce the use of a particular resource. It reveals that Sweden's radically reduced use was based on great awareness, close interactions between animal-based food producers and policy - and that integrating forces were supported by an era of state-protected food production, with promising ability to distribute the cost of change. The Italian characteristics hindering the integration of forces mounting for reduced use were restricted awareness, top-down business and policy interactions - and a great awareness about the difficulties of distributing the cost of change.

Originality/value: The study deals with the analysis of forces affecting the different usage of antibiotics within two EU settings. The investigation, based on the industrial network approach's notion of connectivity of economic resources, that is, of exchange having a content and substance beyond discrete transactions, reveals how indirect related contextual forces, neglected by policy, have an important influence on the ability to achieve change, in this case of antibiotics usage patterns.

For people interested in high-quality food, Italy has long been acknowledged for its production of Parma ham, salami and similar pig meat-based products. For researchers in the field of antibiotic resistance, they are known as products of a highly antibiotic-dependent production system. Italy has one of the highest consumptions of antibiotics by animals in the EU, estimated to be 244mg/PCU. By contrast, Sweden has the lowest consumption of antibiotics by animals in the EU, estimated to be 12.5mg/PCU. Thus, the Italian level is about 20 times higher than the Swedish one. The aim of this paper is to pinpoint the role of antibiotics in the Swedish and Italian production systems. What are the underlying forces and the key features of the Swedish production system-a system that can actually compensate for routine group treatment with antibiotics through precautionary health and biosecurity? What aspects are behind the different antibiotic consumption patterns in the Italian setting? We argue that the Swedish ability to compensate for routine prophylactic antibiotic group treatment was the outcome of an extensive interaction process: 'outsiders' increased the general awareness of routine antibiotic use by debating it in the media, and 'insiders' took the debate seriously and consequently acted to develop a production system that was able to compensate for routine use of antibiotics. Based on both the Swedish and Italian experiences, we argue that a legal ban on routine group treatment does not in itself guarantee a change. Those who are supposed to adopt must first share the ideas the legislation rests on; second, they must be prepared to invest in a change of material structures; third, they must foresee a 'fair' distribution of costs and benefits among producers and users-that is, an economic context in which all players are incentivised to follow the same route.

The prestigious policy advisor, World Economic Forum (WEF), underlines that "governments, businesses and civil society organisations" must find "new ways of tackling the systemic risks that affect us all". Paradoxically, policy's and politicians' great trust in the basic forces of the business world is accompanied with a disinterest in how they are captured in analytical approaches. The purpose of this paper is to discuss what consequences different approaches to interaction present for policy attempts to use business forces to achieve change.

Design/methodology/approach

The discussion of theoretical approaches available for policy aiming to use the basic forces of business exchange for efficiency, innovation and industrial/societal renewal in specific directions is designed as follows: The authors identify two main choices of dimensions in the conceptualisation of business exchange, based on the acknowledgement of thin or thick interactions. The authors discuss how these are related to how interaction patterns appear in empirical studies of exchange. Based on the identification of conceptualisations and empirical findings, the authors discuss the ability for the public sphere to use the basic characteristics of business exchange to cope with societal challenges. 

The aim of this paper is to outline what the intended benefits the smart specialization strategy (S3) is meant to create, and through what policy measures; that is, to shed light over what underpinnings S3 is based on, and if the measures based on these can affect the relations between "academia, businesses, and local authorities" - where the public and the private actors might have partly overlapping interests, but with different needs and rationales.

Design/methodology/approach

The research design of this paper is based on the industrial marketing and purchasing network approach, that is, the empirical observation that business exchange has a content, which affects and gives imprints on the actors engaged in the exchange. To determine whether the S3 strategy in general, and in the two investigated regions in particular, can affect the embedding of innovations in using, producing and developing settings, and if so how, this study applied the actors-resources-activities model. In addition to investigation of the S3 strategy in general, two case studies were conducted, one each in two European Union regions with rather different business and academic research characteristics: the Marche region in Italy and the Uppsala region in Sweden.

Findings

The S3 measures rest on the judgement of which "domains" to support can be made by policy actors without deeper analysis of how the assumed firms representing these domains are related in terms of how resources are combined and activated. Instead, the S3 policy analysis is based on local policy organizations desk table investigations of what appears as innovative. Hence, in practice, the key S3 measure is still to transfer knowledge from the public to the private sector. This entails that support in terms of how to create change in established resources interfaces, which is a main source of innovation to which both established and emerging localized firms are related, remains out of policy sight.

Originality/value

The ambition with this paper is to discuss what changes S3 - with the ambition to develop and match academic research to business needs - implies and what underpinnings it is resting on. Hence, the focus is directed to what new types of policy arrangements are supposed to result in what types of benefits - and last but not least, the ability for these to interfere with businesses which are interconnected across spatial borders.

Om vi skall kunna stoppa den globala spridningen av bakterier med antibiotikaresistenta gener – då måste den antibiotikaberoende produktionen av djur fasas ut. Den svenska erfarenheten säger att det går, skriver professor Alexandra Waluszewski.