Quality, Nature, and Embeddedness: Some Theoretical Considerations in the Context of the Food Sector

* We are grateful to the Development Board for Rural Wales, the Welsh Development Agency, the Welsh Office, and West Wales Training and Enterprise Council for sponsoring work set out in the article and to our colleague on the research project, Kevin Morgan. We also wish to thank the organizers and participants of the Systems and Trajectories of Innovation Conference, Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley, April 1998, which was attended by Terry Marsden (many of the ideas discussed in this paper have their provenance there) and two anonymous referees.

Abstract

In this paper we analyze a turn to “quality” in both food production and consumption. We argue that quality in the food sector, as it is being asserted at the present time, is closely linked to nature and the local embeddedness of supply chains. We thus outline the broad contours of this shift and discuss the most appropriate theoretical approaches. We consider political economy, actor-network theory, and conventions theory and argue that, whereas political economy has proved useful in the analysis of globalization, it may prove less so in the examination of quality. We concentrate, therefore, upon actor-network theory and conventions theory and show that the former allows nature to be brought to the center of analytical attention but provides few tools for the analysis of quality, especially in the context of the food sector. Conventions theory, on the other hand, links together a range of aspects found in food supply chains and allows us to consider the establishment of quality as a system of negotiation between specific qualities. We illustrate possible uses of the approach through a brief consideration of food supply chains in Wales.

• quality
• nature
• embeddedness
• conventions
• food sector

Notes

* We are grateful to the Development Board for Rural Wales, the Welsh Development Agency, the Welsh Office, and West Wales Training and Enterprise Council for sponsoring work set out in the article and to our colleague on the research project, Kevin Morgan. We also wish to thank the organizers and participants of the Systems and Trajectories of Innovation Conference, Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley, April 1998, which was attended by Terry Marsden (many of the ideas discussed in this paper have their provenance there) and two anonymous referees.