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Scientific boundary work and food regime transitions: the double movement and the science of food safety regulation

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Abstract

What role do science and scientists play in the transition between food regimes? Scientific communities are integral to understanding political struggle during food regime transitions in part due to the broader scientization of politics since the late 1800s. While social movements contest the rules of the game in explicitly value-laden terms, scientific communities make claims to the truth based on boundary work, or efforts to mark some science and scientists as legitimate while marking others as illegitimate. In doing so, scientific communities attempt to establish and maintain the privileged position of science in contests over policy. In this paper, we situate scientific boundary work within its world historical context in order to ask two key questions: (1) how does scientific boundary work vary across food regimes; and, in turn, (2) what role does scientific boundary work play in the political contestation that drives transitions between food regimes? We explore these questions through the case of one scientific community—the AOAC (Association of Official Analytical Communities)—involved in food safety regulation across the British, US, and corporate food regimes. We argue that scientific boundary work is shaped by historically specific patterns of social conflict within food regimes and, in particular, the double-movement dynamics that Polanyi (The great transformation: the political and economic origins of our times. Boston: Beacon, 1957[1944]) theorizes. Moreover, as scientific communities reconstruct their internal rules, norms, and procedures to claim their own legitimacy in relation to prevailing forms of social conflict, they also reshape who sets scientific agendas and thus the knowledge available for making new rules within periods of food regime transition. To elaborate this argument in theoretical terms, we build on recent efforts to integrate a neo-Polanyian perspective into food regime analysis and link this to research on scientific boundary work by scholars in science and technology studies.

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Notes

  1. AOAC originally stood for the Association of Official Agricultural Chemists. Over time, “Agricultural” was changed to “Analytical” and “Chemists” to “Communities”. More recently, the legal name was changed to AOAC International, and the Association informally refers to itself as an association of analytical communities.

  2. While Friedmann (1992) points to the emergence of “durable” foods in the postwar period, Winson (2013) argues that this trend began much earlier, in the late 1800s, and intensified in the postwar period.

Abbreviations

AOAC:

Association of Official Analytical Communities

Codex:

Codex Alimentarius Commission

FDA:

Food and Drug Administration

OA:

Organizational Affiliate

SPS Agreement:

Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures

TBT Agreement:

Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade

WTO:

World Trade Organization

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Virginia Jenkins and Margaret Morris for research assistance and Brent Kaup, Harvey James, and two anonymous reviewers for comments on a previous draft. An earlier iteration of this manuscript was presented at the 2014 Annual Meetings of the Rural Sociological Society. This research was generously funded by a College of William & Mary Faculty Summer Grant.

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  1. Department of Sociology, The College of William & Mary, Morton Hall, Rm. 214, 100 Campus Drive, Williamsburg, VA, 23185, USA

    Amy A. Quark

  2. Public Religion Research Institute, 2027 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Floor 3, Washington, DC, 20036, USA

    Rachel Lienesch

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Quark, A.A., Lienesch, R. Scientific boundary work and food regime transitions: the double movement and the science of food safety regulation. Agric Hum Values 34, 645–661 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-016-9764-6

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