Professional emergence and boundary work in the Italian wine industry: ‘Nella botte piccola c’è il vino buono’

Marco Bottura, Raffaele Corrado, Bernard Forgues, and Vincenza Odorici focus on the issue of field-level change by discussing the transformation of the Italian wine industry. Conceptually, apart from different strands of institutional thought, they make particular use of the sociology of professions and the concept of boundary objects in the social studies of science and technology. By applying network analysis, they show the emergence of a new field structure where experts, consultants, ratings and rankings increasingly shape the field. Professional winemakers are of outstanding importance here, as they spread their expert knowledge throughout the network and connect wineries and, ultimately, their products in a hitherto unknown way.