Assembled but unrehearsed: corporate food power and the ‘dance’ of supply chain sustainability

ABSTRACT

In recent years, many of the companies collectively known as ‘Big Food’ have undertaken efforts to assess and improve agricultural sustainability, both within their own supply chains and as members of multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs). Taking up Friedmann’s call for closer attention to corporate sustainability practices, this paper finds that companies are doing more than they advertise, but making slower progress than originally hoped. Up to a point, political economy perspectives on corporate power and governance help to explain both why these MSIs have taken shape, and why their corporate members’ immense market power might not guarantee quick results. Yet these perspectives do not fully capture how corporations’ sustainability efforts contend with not only other actors’ challenges to their legitimacy and authority, but also their own lack of knowledge and access to information. This paper therefore also draws on global assemblage and science and technology studies (STS) frameworks in order to analyze corporate power – and its limits – inside a set of ongoing sustainability initiatives.

KEYWORDS:

• Corporations
• assemblages
• food regime
• sustainability
• science and technology studies
• farmers

Acknowledgements

I owe thanks to Julie Guthman and other members of the Radcliffe Institute agri-food writing group for reading an early draft, and to four anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. I am also indebted to the many interviewees who shared their time and insights.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Susanne Freidberg is a professor of geography at Dartmouth College. Her research examines contemporary cultural and technoscientific changes in corporate agri-food supply chains. She is the author of French Beans and Food Scares: Culture and Commerce in an Anxious Age (Oxford, 2004) and Fresh: A Perishable History (Harvard, 2009).

Additional information

Funding

The research for this article was supported by funding from the National Science Foundation, Award #1456910.