Call for Papers: International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food

International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food - Call for Papers

Special Issue: Private Agri-food Standards

Guest Editors:

· Carmen Bain, Department of Sociology, Iowa State University, U.S.

· Elizabeth Ransom, Department of Sociology, University of Richmond, U.S.

· Vaughan Higgins, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Charles Sturt University, Australia

Until recently, government was primarily responsible for developing and ensuring compliance with standards for public goods within the food system. Public uniform standards were intended to ensure that food was safe, reassure consumers of a product’s quality and consistency, and promote fair market competition. However, the liberalization of international trade, expansion of global value chains, and intensification of neoliberal economic reforms have constrained the role of the state in setting standards and encouraged the proliferation of private standards and private standards makers. Private standards now pervade the contemporary global agrifood system.

Food retailers, business and industry associations, development organizations, and social movement organizations (SMO) now play a central role in establishing and enforcing standards. The changing global economic and political environment has created new opportunities and challenges for actors to use standards (together with labels and certification systems) strategically to accomplish various objectives. For example, food retailers and SMO may use standards to differentiate markets (e.g. for baby pineapples or Fair Trade), to provide safety and quality assurances to consumers (e.g. organic or non-GMO), or, in the case of retailers, to minimize the threat of liability and scandal by demonstrating that their products are produced in a socially and environmentally responsible manner.

Standards can no longer be dismissed as simply taken-for-granted mechanisms to facilitate markets and trade or technoscientific tools primarily of interest to specialists. Rather, private agrifood standards have emerged as powerful governance mechanisms that allow actors to ‘act at a distance’; to set rules, define the boundaries of what is good and bad, coordinate activities, and discipline the conduct of people, markets, things and nature across commodity networks. Furthermore, as a product of negotiation and strategic action, standards embody the interests, values, and asymmetrical power relations of different actors in the value chain. Within this context, social scientists have an important role to play in understanding how private standards are used to govern agrifood systems and their implications for relationships of power and inequality.

Authors are invited to submit an abstract addressing one or more of the following topics related to private agrifood standards:

· The relationship between private standards and public forms of governing.

· How consumers and SMOs are driving standards development.

· The role of labels and third-party certification in ensuring trust, transparency and legitimacy of private standards.

· The role of technoscience and experts (e.g. in creating or legitimizing private standards).

· The effect of private standards on corporate responsibility and accountability.

· What values are reflected in private standards (economic efficiency, animal welfare, worker welfare).

· How standards enhance or constrain the capacity of actors to participate in the market.

· The role of standards in transforming national markets and political institutions in developed and developing countries.

· Regional, national, or cultural influences on the operation of standards and the ways this might vary between regions, nations, or cultures.

· How standards construct particular fields of visibility: that is, who or what is made visible (child laborers) and who or what is made invisible (subcontracted workers, women).

Abstracts will be selected based on quality and whether they fit into a coherent issue.

Timeline:

1 November 2011: Submission of abstracts (300 words)

1 December 2011: Notification to authors if abstracts have been selected for special issue

1 March 2011: Submission of full papers (6000-8000 words)

1 June 2011: Reviewer comments to authors

1 August 2012: Submission of final revised papers by authors to editors

Feb/March 2013: Publication

Submission of Abstracts

Please send your abstracts by 1 November 2011 to: Carmen Bain cbain@iastate.edu

Abstracts should include a title, list of authors, contact details, a concise description of the envisioned paper, an identification of the relationship between the envisioned paper and at least one of the suggested themes, and up to five keywords. Full papers are expected by 1 March 2012 after which they will be sent out for peer review. A decision on the papers will be communicated to the authors by the editors by 1 June 2012. Publication is expected in early 2013.