The moral economy of grades and standards
TL;DR: In this article, it is argued that grades and standards are part of the moral economy of the modern world, and that they both set norms for behavior and standardize (create uniformity).
About: This article is published in Journal of Rural Studies.The article was published on 2000-07-01. It has received 313 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Generally Accepted Auditing Standards & Standardization.
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TL;DR: The authors argue that the dominant food system within which food-safety governance is designed to makes food safe is itself a structural and systemic sources of food un-safety, poor health and a future of food insecurity for many.
Abstract: This paper argues that discussion of new food-safety governance should be framed by the realization that the dominant food system within which food-safety governance is designed to makes food safe is itself a structural and systemic sources of food un-safety, poor health and a future of food insecurity for many. For some, an appropriate policy response lies in addressing the connections between the food system and diseases such as heart disease, obesity and diabetes. For others it means subsuming food-safety governance within food security governance. For yet others, safe food implies food sovereignty governance and the primacy of a climate change resilient food system. Conventional approaches to food-safety governance are typically framed within a liability model of responsibility that has limited usefulness for addressing institutional, structural or systemic sources of harm such as those critics increasingly attribute to the dominant food system and which are not amenable to remedy by food-safety governance as it is widely understood. One cannot identify critical hazard points where risk is to be managed. These are food-system safety challenges. Because food-safety governance is so deeply political there needs to be greater attention to issues of governance rather than the more usual focus on the technologies of food-safety. Feminist political theorists have much to contribute to re-thinking food-safety governance in the context of diversity and the complexities of power. One could usefully start with the simple questions, “what food is to be kept-safe, for whom and who is the subject of food-safety governance in a post-Westphalian political economic order?” These questions can help unpack both the narrow parochialism and the misleading universalism of food-safety talk. This paper answers that neither the citizens of a particular state (or network of states) nor the falsely universalizing identity of ‘the consumer’ are adequate answers to these questions about ‘who’ and ‘what’. Answering these questions about who and what with respect to food-safety governance brings issues of justice, ecology, public health and the legitimacy and nature of governance itself into the heart of food-safety discussions.
28 citations
Cites background from "The moral economy of grades and sta..."
...Governance through standards allows social actors to ‘act at a distance’ [57,60], reorganizing and re-ordering relations and power in the food system across time and space [28,57–59,61]....
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Journal Article•
TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose to update the prevailing Spanish geographical research about differentiated food (due to its nature, to its process or to its geographical provenance) by means of a research agenda focused on their conceptualization and contextualization, the inventory and classification and their role as geographical actors able to shape their own spatial actors.
Abstract: The article proposes to update the prevailing Spanish geographical research about differentiated food (due to its nature, to its process or to its geographical provenance). Its integration in the alternative food networks literature is suggested by means of a research agenda focused on their conceptualization and contextualization, the inventory and classification and, specially, their role as geographical actors able to shape their own spatial
27 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigate the becoming of the salmon louse as a regulatory instrument, and how this is perceived among relevant stakeholders, drawing on results from both interviews and an analysis of responses to a consultation round for a governmental white paper proposing new means for regulating the growth of the aquaculture industry.
27 citations
Cites background from "The moral economy of grades and sta..."
...Standardised measures and indicators are mobile across contexts, facilitate commensurability (Espeland and Stevens, 1998) and reduce transaction costs in a global economy (Busch, 2000, 2011)....
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors compare the institutional manifestations of two distinct societal obligations placed on California fruit and vegetable farmers: to practice sustainable agriculture and to ensure food safety, and they define and utilize a framework for comparison comprising five types of institutions that shape farm management decisions.
Abstract: Aspirations to farm ‘better’ may fall short in practice due to constraints outside of farmers’ control. Yet farmers face proliferating pressures to adopt practices that align with various societal visions of better agriculture. What happens when the accumulation of external pressures overwhelms farm management capacity? Or, worse, when different visions of better agriculture pull farmers toward conflicting management paradigms? This article addresses these questions by comparing the institutional manifestations of two distinct societal obligations placed on California fruit and vegetable farmers: to practice sustainable agriculture and to ensure food safety. Drawing on the concept of constrained choice, I define and utilize a framework for comparison comprising five types of institutions that shape farm management decisions: rules and standards, market and supply chain forces, legal liability, social networks and norms, and scientific knowledge and available technologies. Several insights emerge. One, farmers are expected to meet multiple societal obligations concurrently; when facing a “right-versus-right” choice, farmers are likely to favor the more feasible course within structural constraints. Second, many institutions are designed to pursue narrow or siloed objectives; policy interventions that aim to shift farming practice should thus anticipate and address potential conflicts among institutions with diverging aspirations. Third, farms operating at different scales may face distinct institutional drivers in some cases, but not others, due to differential preferences for universal versus place-specific policies. These insights suggest that policy interventions should engage not just farmers, but also the intersecting institutions that drive or constrain their farm management choices. As my framework demonstrates, complementing the concept of constrained choice with insights from institutional theory can more precisely reveal the dimensions and mechanisms that bound farmer agency and shape farm management paradigms. Improved understanding of these structures, I suggest, may lead to novel opportunities to transform agriculture through institutional designs that empower, rather than constrain, farmer choice.
27 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a case study of Tanzanian tea value chains takes a closer look at how sustainability, in the form of SustainabiliTea, is done by actors who did not participate in defining and standardizing the forms of sustainability with which they are meant to comply.
Abstract: Standards that codify sustainability, such as Ethical Trade, Fairtrade, Organic and Rainforest Alliance, have become a common means for value chain actors in the Global North to make statements about the values of their products and the practices of producers in the Global South. This case study of Tanzanian tea value chains takes a closer look at how sustainability, in the form of SustainabiliTea, is done by actors who did not participate in defining and standardizing the form of sustainability with which they are meant to comply. Based on data collected during a multisited ethnography, I explore the performative nature of sustainability standards. The analysis reveals sustainable projects, sustainable markets, sustainable farm management, and sustainable qualities. These multiple SustainabiliTeas work together to construct a single vision of SustainabiliTea, which is a means to sustain the enterprise. I argue that the use of standards to guide performances makes some technical and political stakes visible while rendering others invisible. By paying attention to the residual categories, the tensions between knowledge and materiality, and listening to those voices at the margins, we see what is at stake in the maintenance of SustainabiliTea: survival in the tea market.
26 citations
Cites background from "The moral economy of grades and sta..."
...Earlier, Busch (2000) argued that standards perform moral economies, such as supply chain management (Busch 2007), flexible feminized labor markets (Bain 2010), or rituals of food safety (Ponte 2007)....
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References
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present La Volonté de Savoir, the methodological introduction of a projected five-volume history of sexuality, which seems to have a special fascination for Foucault: the gradual emergence of medicine as an institution, the birth of political economy, demography and linguistics as human sciences, the invention of incarceration and confinement for the control of the "other" in society (the mad, the libertine, the criminal) and that special violence that lurks beneath the power to control discourse.
Abstract: This writer who has warned us of the “ideological” function of both the oeuvre and the author as unquestioned forms of discursive organization has gone quite far in constituting for both these “fictitious unities” the name (with all the problems of such a designation) Michel Foucault. One text under review, La Volonté de Savoir, is the methodological introduction of a projected five-volume history of sexuality. It will apparently circle back over that material which seems to have a special fascination for Foucault: the gradual emergence of medicine as an institution, the birth of political economy, demography and linguistics as “human sciences,” the invention of incarceration and confinement for the control of the “other” in society (the mad, the libertine, the criminal) and that special violence that lurks beneath the power to control discourse.
15,794 citations
"The moral economy of grades and sta..." refers background in this paper
...As Foucault (1977) has suggested, some, perhaps most, of these relations of power are benign....
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Book•
01 Jan 1991
TL;DR: This article argued that we are modern as long as we split our political process in two - between politics proper, and science and technology, which allowed the formidable expansion of the Western empires.
Abstract: What makes us modern? This is a classic question in philosophy as well as in political science. However it is often raised without including science and technology in its definition. The argument of this book is that we are modern as long as we split our political process in two - between politics proper, and science and technology. This division allows the formidable expansion of the Western empires. However it has become more and more difficult to maintain this distance between science and politics. Hence the postmodern predicament - the feeling that the modern stance is no longer acceptable but that there is no alternative. The solution, advances one of France's leading sociologists of science, is to realize that we have never been modern to begin with. The comparative anthropology this text provides reintroduces science to the fabric of daily life and aims to make us compatible both with our past and with other cultures wrongly called pre-modern.
8,858 citations
"The moral economy of grades and sta..." refers background in this paper
...On the one hand, the social studies of science has been much in#uenced through the Actor Network Theory developed by Latour (1987, 1993) and Callon (Callon, 1991; Callon and Latour, 1992; Callon et al., 1986) among others (e.g., Law, 1994)....
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Book•
01 Jan 1987
TL;DR: In this article, the quandary of the fact-builder is explored in the context of science and technology in a laboratory setting, and the model of diffusion versus translation is discussed.
Abstract: Acknowledgements Introduction Opening Pandora's Black Box PART I FROM WEARER TO STRONGER RHETORIC Chapter I Literature Part A: Controversies Part B: When controversies flare up the literature becomes technical Part C: Writing texts that withstand the assaults of a hostile environment Conclusion: Numbers, more numbers Chapter 2 Laboratories Part A: From texts to things: A showdown Part B: Building up counter-laboratories Part C: Appealing (to) nature PART II FROM WEAR POINTS TO STRONGHOLDS Chapter 3 Machines Introduction: The quandary of the fact-builder Part A: Translating interests Part B: Keeping the interested groups in line Part C: The model of diffusion versus the model of translation Chapter 4 Insiders Out Part A: Interesting others in the laboratories Part B: Counting allies and resources PART III FROM SHORT TO LONGER NETWORKS Chapter 5 Tribunals of Reason Part A: The trials of rationality Part B: Sociologics Part C: Who needs hard facts? Chapter 6 Centres of calculation Prologue: The domestication of the savage mind Part A: Action at a distance Part B: Centres of calculation Part C: Metrologies Appendix 1
8,173 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1962
TL;DR: In the classic bestseller, Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman presents his view of the proper role of competitive capitalism as both a device for achieving economic freedom and a necessary condition for political freedom as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: In the classic bestseller, Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman presents his view of the proper role of competitive capitalism--the organization of economic activity through private enterprise operating in a free market--as both a device for achieving economic freedom and a necessary condition for political freedom. Beginning with a discussion of principles of a liberal society, Friedman applies them to such constantly pressing problems as monetary policy, discrimination, education, income distribution, welfare, and poverty. "Milton Friedman is one of the nation's outstanding economists, distinguished for remarkable analytical powers and technical virtuosity. He is unfailingly enlightening, independent, courageous, penetrating, and above all, stimulating."-Henry Hazlitt, Newsweek "It is a rare professor who greatly alters the thinking of his professional colleagues. It's an even rarer one who helps transform the world. Friedman has done both."-Stephen Chapman, Chicago Tribune
7,026 citations
6,926 citations
"The moral economy of grades and sta..." refers background in this paper
...On the one hand, the social studies of science has been much in#uenced through the Actor Network Theory developed by Latour (1987, 1993) and Callon (Callon, 1991; Callon and Latour, 1992; Callon et al., 1986) among others (e.g., Law, 1994)....
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...…of Edmund Stone: Mathematical Instruments are the means by which those noble sciences, geometry and philosophy, are render'd 8As both Rouse (1987) and Latour (1987) have noted, the illusion of universality is constructed by a set of speci"c events and actions that are always local in character....
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