Regulating Globally, Acting ‘Territorially’: The rise and fall of a ‘Scottish Scotch Whisky Act’ Andy Smith SPIRIT-Sciences Po Bordeaux [email protected]Paper presented to ECPR workshop Regions as ‘spaces’ for politics’: Analyzing change through new paradigms, Rennes, April 11-16 th , 2008. NB. Research in progress. Do not cite without permission. Introduction As a plethora of research has shown, at least since devolution, Scotland is undoubtedly a space for politics (Bulmer et al., 2002; Keating, 2005). However, it is much less clear what, if anything, this means for the private, collective and public actors who are engaged on a daily basis in the regulation of their respective industries. Have their repertoires of action and standard operating modes been modified? Has this resulted in shifts in the distribution of power? In short, what has changed, how and why? Using ongoing research from a case study of one such industry –Scotch whisky- this paper attempts to shed light on these questions by examining how a territory becomes, or remains, a genuine space for politics when its actors not only create networks ‘at home’, but also foster durable connections with external sites of regulatory decision-making. Moreover, I seek to discover whether, within these sites, representations of territory are vital resources which determine not only policy choices, but also durable ‘assignments’ of the authority to even be involved in such processes (Carter and Smith, 2008). In short, I set out to show that, at least within manufacturing industries, regulating globally is inseparable from ‘acting territorially’. In order to expand upon and substantiate this claim, the paper proceeds in two stages. First, it develops an approach to the regulation of industries which obliges research to take into account the role of territory. Building upon institutionalist premises and concepts drawn from 1
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Regulating Globally, Acting ‘Territorially’:
The rise and fall of a ‘Scottish Scotch Whisky Act’
More precisely, social representations of territory and their political instrumentalization play the
following three roles in the political work entailed in the regulation of any industry.
First, and most obviously, territory can provide formal legitimacy to public and collective actors.
Institutionalized Relationships (IRs), Institutional Orders (IOs) and Trans-Industry regulation
(TIR) all have boundaries which in part are defined in relation to geographically limited areas.
These territories are therefore part and parcel of the formal legitimacy of actors to take political
action, be this to legislate (eg. Scottish ministers), to take final decisions (eg. the Council of the
Scotch Whisky Association), or simply to represent. As will be highlighted in our case study,
formal legitimacies are not necessarily always activated. Nevertheless, they certainly provide latent
political resources and, conversely, constraints which analysis clearly must take into account.
Second, territory is a constant consideration whenever an actor’s interests are being defined and
their preferences established. Here social science, and International Relations in particular, has
tended to focus principally upon usages of territory in the interest and preference formation of
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states or regional authorities (Moravscik, 1998; Burch and Gomez, 2002). In the case of industries
such as whisky or wine (Smith, de Maillard, Costa, 2007), however, our research strongly suggests
that well before public actors become involved, territory is already a crucial variable for
understanding how and why firms and collective action bodies define their ‘interests’ and
‘preferences’. Territory plays an initial role here in the ‘decoding’ of an industry’s difficulties and
challenges. But it is also just as important to the ‘recoding’ of these issues into proposals for
collective and/or public action (Muller, 1995). In certain cases, the influence of territory may
encourage or facilitate intersubjective sharing of representations and thus constitute a ‘cultural’ or
‘proximity’-driven process. However, it is generally more likely that territory’s role in interest
formation will be played out around, and oriented by, the boundaries specific to a collective
action group such as the Scotch Whisky Association.
Finally, this point on interest and preference formation spills over into how actors seek to make
these representations of reality ‘shared’ by others so as to win out within the political spaces
concerned. During this process of interest aggregation and articulation, territory once again plays
a central role. This is because within any space for politics, be it an IR an IO or its articulations
with TIR, acting for or speaking in the name of ‘the general interest’, and therefore of a territory,
constitutes a powerful weapon for legitimizing one’s point of view. The power of this rhetoric
stems from how territory can ‘condense’ symbols (Braud, 1996; Abélès, 1989) into a form of
argumentation with which to counter other arguments couched either in the technocratic register
of ‘efficiency’ or the professional register of ‘the sector’. As many studies have shown, the
political impact of ‘efficiency’ based legitimizations is generally only temporary because they lack
social depth and resonance (Lagroye, 1985; Radaelli, 1999). Moreover, at least in industries,
‘efficiency’ is constantly contested (Jullien and Smith, 2008a). Legitimizations in terms of ‘the
sectoral interest’, or that of a profession, can have longer lasting effects but always run the risk of
being inverted into the stigma of ‘corporatist interests’. The ‘general interest’, however,
particularly when allied to territory, provides a wide variety of legitimizations which, for cognitive
and emotive reasons, can often be used to ‘trump’ other forms of argumentation. Indeed,
politicization is very often undertaken primarily around evocations of ‘the general interest’
(Dulong, 1997).
In summary, when combined these three reasons provide a solid basis from which to theorize
about the crucial importance of territory within the legitimization, and therefore the
institutionalisation, of an industry’s regulation. Territory is thus a resource for maintaining or
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changing representations of industrial ‘reality’ and, consequently, reproducing or
reinstitutionalizing spaces for politics
Research design and hypotheses
The next challenge for research is to translate this conceptualization of the role of territory in the
politics of industry into an operationalizable research design capable of elucidating political work.
In order to capture and unpack the processes of problematization and politicisation which
structure this phenomena, two stages of research need to be undertaken (Jullien and Smith,
2008b).
Essentially structuralist in character, the first entails identification of what representatives of the
industry itself present as its ‘parameters’ and ‘issues’. Statistics, official documentation, public
speeches and the specialized press provide information on these points. The objective of this
stage is twofold. First, to begin to map the industry in turns of its IRs, its IO and any evidence of
TIR. Second, to identify changes, debates or conflicts around which political work has appeared
to take place. During both these investigations, usages of territory must obviously be noted and
reflected upon.
Fundamentally constructivist and sourced heavily by interviews prepared by the above, the
second stage of research entails process tracing the combination of argumentation and alliance-
building through which problematisation and politicisation transit. More precisely the aim of
research here is to elucidate the spaces for politics observed, and the role played by territory
therein, by simultaneously:
- reconstituting the objectives of each actor over time, their values, their theories of action,
their logic of action and the symbols which, explicitly or implicitly, accompany their
argumentation;
- mapping actor interaction, interdependence and hierarchy.
To ensure these research questions are integrated, two generic hypotheses need testing:
- in order for a territory to become (or remain) a genuine space for politics, its actors must
not only create networks ‘at home’, but also foster durable connections with external sites
of regulatory decision-making within institutionalized arrangements such as the EU or the
WTO;
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- within these sites, representations of territory are vital resources which determine not
only policy choices, but also durable ‘assignments’ of the authority to even be involved in
such processes (Carter and Smith, 2008).
2. Industry-Territory Relations in Action: The case of Scotch Whisky
In order to demonstrate the heuristic value of the approach presented above, I have chosen to
analyse in some depth one particular set of issues that my ongoing research on the Scotch Whisky
industry has come across1. More precisely, the process this section endeavours to trace concerns
the preparation and adoption of legislation which will codify or recodify in law a number of the
industry’s key institutions. As will be shown, plans for this legislation first emerged in 2003 from
conflict between rival distillers. In the short term, this dispute was settled through collective
agreement within the Scotch Whisky Association (SWA). However, part of its resolution entailed
problematizing the labelling issue as a public problem which needed to be clarified as part of the
implementation of EU and WTO legislation. For the next four years, many actors considered
that the best site for providing institutionalized regulation of this problem was the Scottish
Parliament. However, since the election of a Scottish Nationalist Party-led government in May
2007, plans for a symbolically charged ‘Scottish Scotch Whisky Act’ have, ironically, been
dropped in favour of a technicized UK statutory instrument. Through, unpacking successively
the three parts to this story, our framework will be refined and interpretations of the spaces for
politics and causal processes involved will be highlighted.
Act 1: From an inter-distiller conflict to a collective problem
From its institutionalized beginnings in the mid-19th century, Scotch Whisky has always been a
highly competitive industry within which firms have sought to increase their profitability through
judicious mixtures of production, marketing and capitalization strategies (Daiches, 1995; Mclean,
2003). In an industry where stocks need to be ‘laid down’ to mature for at least 3 years, and
sometimes for as long as 25, its Finance Institutionalized Relationship (IR) takes on particular
importance. Indeed, at least when compared to many other spirit drinks, Scotch’s relatively high 1 Apart from documentary analysis, to date this research has entailed a series of semi-structured interviews conducted with staff of the Scotch Whisky Association and the Confédération européenne des producteurs de spiritueux (CEPS), officials from the Scottish Executive and the European Commission and representatives of three whisky producers. The research has been financed by the Aquitaine Regional Council within the framework of the programme ‘Délibération et gouvernance’ run by Sciences Po Bordeaux.
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costs of production, distilling, blending, ageing and marketing fuelled a major shift in the
ownership and capitalization of the industry in the 1970s and 1980s. Although many small
distilleries still remain within an industry that encompasses 100 distillers in total, the legacy of
takeovers and mergers from this recent past is that today two major conglomerates quantitatively
dominate the industry: Diageo (34% of world market share and 29 distilleries) and Pernod Ricard
(23% and 15) – a development which has had considerably effects upon the competitive
dimension of the industry’s Employment IR. Banks, particularly those based in Scotland,
participate strongly in the regulation of the industry’s Finance IR. In terms of its reglementation,
however, this IR depends heavily upon Trans-Industry regulation which, like that of the
Employment IR, clearly extends way beyond both Scotch and Scotland. Indeed, most of the
institutions which structure the Finance IR apply on scales which range from the global, to the
EU and the UK.
Notwithstanding the importance of capital, not even the largest firms in the Scotch Whisky
industry are free to produce and market their products without additional constraints. On the
contrary, supply of this product is regulated firstly by the rules set within its Purchase IR which
concern how one can produce a drink that is entitled to bear the name ‘Scotch’. First codified in
UK law in 1909, and most recently by the 1989 EU drinks regulation and the UK’s Scotch
whisky Order of the previous year, these rules concern this product’s content (water, malted
barley, whole grains), ageing (at least three years), alcoholic strength (40%) and place of
manufacture (Scotland). These rules are supplemented by others set and implemented through
the Commercial IR which concern taxation, labelling and intellectual property rights. In short,
both individually and in combination, all these rules are part of institutionalized policy
instruments which feature territorial boundaries, determine the eligibility of competitors and
stakeholders and also influence the institutionalized meaning of the product, together with the
professional identities to which it is associated (Stanziani, 2005). Consequently, these rules have
had structuring effects throughout Scotch’s Institutional Order (IO).
Despite the upheavals experienced in the Financial IR over the last four decades, and the knock-
on effects upon the Employment IR, until five years ago the industry’s Purchase and Commercial
IRs had remained remarkably stable. Rules regarding production were virtually untouched,
taxation levels changed in degree but not in principle and labelling requirements had been subject
to only minor modification. As will be shown subsequently, the deepening of the EU, the
creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and, more specifically, the adoption of its
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Trade Related Intellectual Property and Services (TRIPS) agreement in 1994, all led the industry’s
protagonists to adjust their political work, but not to change it radically. However, the relative
serenity of Scotch’s IO disappeared virtually overnight because of a dispute sparked in 2003 by its
biggest player: Diageo. This dispute began because of a decision taken within this company
regarding Cardhu, one of its leading brands of malt whisky. Until then, Diageo had complied with
industry convention which required that a ‘single malt whisky’ should be entirely produced in one
distillery. Lacking stocks to be able to supply a then rapidly growing Spanish market, managers of
Diageo decided to produce more Cardhu by blending it with other malts, altering the labelling
from ‘single malt’ to ‘pure malt’, but otherwise not drawing the consumer’s attention to this
change in production method. This provoked an immediate reaction within the industry
described on interview by one Scottish Executive official as follows:
‘Other producers felt this was unclear – it didn’t necessarily give the consumer the message that they were buying a blend of different whiskies. Because the packaging was to stay largely the same and ‘single’ and ‘pure’ were simply substituted for each other, it was not clear that there was a shift in what the product actually was. Other producers felt that this was not going to be clear and would undermine the cachet of single malt whisky which is regarded as the premium end of the market’ (October, 2006).
However, more typical of reactions witnessed by the press in 2003, the director of a medium-
sized distilling company used more politicized terms when stressing that the issue concerned the
‘stealing’ of ‘the value attached to single malt’:
‘It’s about defining the marketing boundaries more clearly. I feel very strongly about this. We spend millions of pounds on our brands. This is about the fundamental values of our industry. Diageo were trying to push the boundaries too far’ (November, 2007).
Back in 2003, similarly incensed by this strategy and the values behind it, representatives of other
malt producers, in particular William Grant & Sons, brought Diageo’s new practice to the
attention of the media2 and, framing it as a collective problem, placed it firmly on the agenda of
the Scotch Whisky Association (SWA). Through a combination of the expertise of this
organization’s permanent staff and politicized argumentation made within its governing Council,
a resolution of the precise issue raised by the Cardhu affair was found relatively rapidly3. Within
Diageo, a decision was taken to revert to Cardhu’s original production and labelling strategies and
2 ‘Grants step up pressure on Cardhu’, The Scotsman, 16th November, 2003. The specialized press, eg. Drinks International, made even more of this story which was even raised in the UK Parliament during Prime Minister’s question time. 3 ‘Cardhu malt mix taken off market’, The Scotsman, 10th March, 2004.
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thus to drop the category ‘pure malt’4. The significance of this conciliation of interests should not
be understated. As one distillery manager said on interview, ‘the SWA managed this with a lot of
discretion. Dealing with our dirty laundry in public would have been disastrous for the whole industry. Cardhu
could have been a flashpoint’ (November, 2007).
However, the issue had much wider ramifications because its resolution also entailed the setting
up of an internal SWA working group charged with revising a wider range of the industry’s rules.
The report of this group was made to the SWA Council in 2004, allowed to circulate within the
industry and then proposed as the basis not just for a revised set of industry conventions, but for
new legislation. Indeed, during this process, it was decided within the SWA that proposals to
codify five categories of Scotch Whisky5 were now to be accompanied by plans to legislate over:
- authorized use of five regional names as Geographical Indications (GIs) on product
labelling (Highland, Lowland, Speyside, Campbeltown and Islay);
- a requirement that all Scotch be wholly matured in Scotland;
- prohibition of exporting Single Malts until bottled and labelled.
During this process of problem shaping and extension, it is important to grasp that debates had
been influenced by two ongoing streams of political work within which actors from the SWA
were already heavily involved. The first concerned a then forthcoming revision of the EU drinks
regulation. Planned for legislation in 2006, consultations were well under way in 2004. In
particular, SWA officials were keen to use the revised regulation as a means of introducing legally
binding GIs into their industry. This proposal spilled over into a second series of ongoing
political work concerning the WTO and its TRIPS agreement. In an industry frequently troubled
by counterfeit and the ‘passing off’ of spirits as Scotch, representatives of the SWA were keen to
be able to use the TRIPS agreement in order to facilitate legal prosecution of fraud throughout
the world. Obtaining legal definitions of regional names was seen as an important means of
achieving this aim.
In summary, during the transformation of what had initially been an inter-company dispute first
into a collective problem, and thereafter towards being a public one, connections between issues
regulated within the industry’s Purchase and Commercial IRs were made, argumentations
developed and alliances built or rebuilt. As we have just seen, even at this stage, the political work 4 Gaining access to this process is difficult to say the least. However, the speculative analysis of a competitor at least provides a tenable hypothesis: ‘I think some manager came in from Proctor or Gamble or somewhere like that, wanted to put notches on their belt from a marketing point of view. They were having their three years as brand manager for Cardhu…’ (November, 2007). 5 Single Malt, Single Grain, Blended, Blended Malt, Blended Grain.
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undertaken was both local and global whilst encompassing mutiple usages of references to
territory. However, one major element of uncertainty remained concerning the political
assignment to make decisions, and consequently law, in this area: which public authorities should
prepare and adopt the new legislation?
Act 2: Problematizing Scotch Whisky as a Scottish problem
From the viewpoint of formal legitimacy, legality and observation of past practice, the most
obvious ‘venue’ for developing this legislation was the UK, ie. Whitehall and Westminster. First,
previous whisky acts had been set within and through these organizations. A revision of this
legislation therefore ought to have been legally straightforward because it involved a direct
precedent. Second, in accordance with the devolution settlement (Bulmer et. al., 2002), actors
representing the UK would be heading that country’s delegation in the negotiations over the new
EU spirit drinks regulation. Negotiating a UK whisky act at about the same time could be seen as
more likely to efficiently produce coherent national-EU policy solutions. Finally, and again
according to the horizontal institutions of devolution, representatives of the UK were solely
responsible for defining and defending British industries over issues of bi-lateral and multi-lateral
trade, both through UK trade diplomacy and through its involvement in the EU’s intervention in
this area. Despite all these reasons for concentrating political work ‘in London’, however, a
decision was taken within the SWA to attempt to legislate ‘in Edinburgh’ through the Scottish
Executive and the Scottish Parliament. More precisely, moves towards what was to have become
a ‘Scottish Scotch Whisky Act’ involved new and original attempts to problematize and politicize
the regulation of this industry by deliberately invoking references to the territory of Scotland.
Interviews with SWA and SE officials provide sources for retracing these processes. During an
initial interview in April 2006, an SWA official first stressed that this preference reflected ‘the need
for a consolidated Scotch whisky law’, implicitly highlighting how legislating in Scotland would provide
an opportunity to efficiently introduce or update an all-encompassing set of policy instruments
that would have worldwide impacts:
‘This is a domestic piece of legislation that will have international implications. As we fight cases around the world, courts ask ‘what’s the law on Scotch?’ There’s the Scotch Whisky Act but there’s also labelling laws in different pieces of legislation, there’s the EU regulation. With a consolidated law that has been accepted at EU level, with a technical dossier, the Scottish Executive and Parliament will pass legislation that will have an impact in courts around the
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world. It will make our lawyers’ jobs easier. Because countries often say they have their own labelling rules – but if we say there is one piece of legislation, this will be very useful’.
Whilst highlighting the ‘efficiency’ of legislating in this way, this official also revealed a preference
for the political assignment of authority to Scotland using more value-laden language: ‘the Scottish
Parliament is a natural home for this’. Interpreting the social construction of this ‘naturalness’,
however, entails both a risk and a fruitful avenue for analysis of the political usages of territory.
The temptation is to make assumptions about the perceptions and preferences of actors within
the SWA, as well as what caused them. A culturalist, for example, might well conclude that actors
of Scottish nationality would spontaneously represent Scotch as a Scottish problem and therefore
seek to legislate through Scotland’s recently established arenas. On the other hand, an exponent
of rational choice theory would probably conclude that Scottish legislation would fit with the
marketing strategies of firms and of their desire for ‘efficient’ legislation. However, always
analytically dangerous, this type of assumption is particularly unhelpful to understanding the case
studied here. Founded instead upon sociological theory and methods, our research set out to
understand the construction of the Scottish Parliament as ‘a natural home’ for this legislation by
retracing how this statement fitted with institutionalized representations of reality, logics of
action and patterns of interaction that had developed within the SWA over a number of years.
Before devolution, the SWA had always kept Scottish Office (SO) officials informed of their
dealings with Whitehall and Westminster. Indeed, interviewees from today’s Scottish Executive
who had previously worked for the SO emphasized how they had always had some input into the
policy process. Nevertheless, they consider that devolution has been a watershed for them:
‘I worked in the agriculture department and basically policy was dictated by Europe and Whitehall knew the ropes. I always saw my role as making sure that Scotland got the best possible deal within the rules that Brussels and Whitehall were making, that we get the biggest share of the cake we could possibly get – whereas now we are actually making policy’ (May, 2006).
More generally, since devolution, this framing of the legitimacy of the Scottish Executive to
engage in the regulation of the whisky industry has been reflected in at least three developments.
The first concerns the publication of two partnership documents, one in 2000, the other in
20056, which formally ‘sealed’ and mediatized a strong interdependent relationship between the
Executive and the SWA. The second has been a steady increase in the number of ‘diplomatic’
visits by Scottish ministers to third countries and the organized raising of trade issues which 6 A Toast to the Future (2000) and Scotland’s Enterprising Spirit (2005).
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concern the SWA during these encounters (eg. ‘discriminatory’ tax rates in India). Finally, the
least visible, but probably most important, post-devolution development for the regulation of this
industry has been the willingness of the Executive to commit human resources to it. Since mid-
2006 this has taken the form of a high-ranking ‘fast-track’ civil servant being assigned uniquely to
preparing both a new Scotch whisky act and participating in the UK’s delegation to the EU
negotiation on spirit drinks.
Between devolution in 1999 and 2004-6, the Scottish Executive had therefore consistently
undertaken political work in order not only to involve itself in the regulation of the whisky
industry, but to attempt to take a lead within negotiating arenas charged with shaping problems
and taking decisions which would have UK, EU or even global-scale effects. This strategy clearly
pleased actors within the SWA who responded by giving all possible assistance and
encouragement to what amounted to a shift in alliances within Scotch’s industrial community. As
we have seen, references to the territory of Scotland were repeatedly used to problematize and
legitimize this framing.
Notwithstanding this level of mutual understanding and interdependence, however, from mid-
2006 to early 2007, negotiations with Whitehall about proposed legislation became bogged down
and eventually ground to a halt. One frequently mentioned reason for this were the then
oncoming Scottish elections of May 2007. Just as significantly, however, during this period, high
levels of uncertainty emerged regarding the political assignment to legislate over this issue and,
implicitly, the legitimacy of actors within the industry’s Purchase and Commercial IRs. Scotland’s
then Labour-dominated ministers chose not to override this uncertainty and demand the right to
legislate by politicizing what, for two years, had been widely framed as a ‘Scottish problem’. But
how would a newly elected Scottish Executive and Parliament -led since May 2007 by politicians
from a Scottish National Party (SNP) committed to ‘independence for Scotland’- interpret this
situation?
Act 3: Depoliticization in the UK
Although one might have expected the SNP to politicize whisky legislation and press publicly for
a Scottish Scotch whisky act, in fact quite the contrary has transpired. Indeed, as early as October
2007, the UK secretary of State in charge of the Department of Environment, Food and Rural
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Affairs (DEFRA) ‘announced the steps Government is taking to enhance the protection of Scotch whisky’7.
These steps have thus far included the launch of a formal consultation procedure, an impact
assessment and plans to legislate using a UK Statutory Order by the end of June 19988. How can
what appears to be a significant climb down for the Scottish Executive and Parliament that
constitutes nothing less than the abandonment of a Scottish Scotch Whisky Act be explained?
More specifically still, why has an Executive led by an SNP that has renamed this body ‘the
Scottish Government’, chosen not to politicize this issue, and this during a period where it has
repeatedly mediatized and provoked value-laden debate over many other aspects of policy-
making under devolution?9 As one official underlined to us, ‘the SNP leadership could have played
politics with this but they have not’ (November, 2007). Why not?
Returning to our analytical framework provides a means of answering these questions which, by
uncovering the ongoing and deep-seated politics of this industry, highlights four major
uncertainties that remained in the framing of today’s Scotch Whisky as a Scottish problem.
The first of these uncertainties concerned the breadth of the proposed legislation and how this
should be framed. The issue of whisky categories was initially presented by the SWA as a food
and drink issue, and therefore within the devolved competence of the Scottish Parliament.
Similarly, the institutionalization of regional names as GIs, or the requirement that all malts be
matured solely in Scotland, could have been presented in this way too. However, aided and
abetted by colleagues in the UK’s Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), officials from
DEFRA were quick to highlight aspects of these proposals which they framed instead in terms of
trade and the European single market: both competences that had been ‘reserved’ to the UK
government. In short, this uncertainty over framing reveals an unsettled ordering of the
assignment to make law within Scotch whisky’s Purchase and Commercial IRs. Indeed, if
continued increases in trade of this product and the hightened salience of the WTO have directly
modified the Commercial IR through what Sassen (2007) calls the ‘self-evident globalization’ of
this industry, the consequence has not been regulation of this IR on a uniquely worldwide scale.
Rather not only has the pluri-site dimension of this regulation been reinforced, but it has also
‘contaminated’ the Purchase IR and, in so doing, changed the frontiers of its institutions and the
locus of its principle negotiating arenas.
7 DEFRA press release, 8th October, 2007. 8 All these documents can be consulted at www.defra.gov.uk 9 See the websites of newspapers such as ‘The Scotsman’ or ‘The Scottish Herald’.
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This first uncertainty spilled over onto a second concerning the scope of new legislation: should
it apply only to whisky or be mixed in with a more horizontal law that concerned all spirits
drinks? Given the temporal overlap with implementation of the EU’s new spirit drinks
regulation, some actors argued for a UK statutory instrument of the second type. Representatives
of the SWA, however, were very keen to preserve the specificity of legislation for Scotch alone.
The reasons publicly stated for this have been ones of expediency, efficiency and clarity. But one
also needs to take into account the effects of the professional identity of actors in the Scotch
whisky industry who frequently represent the rest of alcohol producers as a less noble ‘other’
(Augé, 1994).
A third uncertainty concerned the fit between new legislation and the UK and EU drive for
‘better regulation’. As one Scottish Executive official put it when explaining why his organization
could not just implement the SWA’s ‘package’:
‘We may consider that some things could be achieved by other means (…). It may be that other parts of the food and drinks industry have no desire for legislation and would prefer codes of practice. There is a debate about better regulation – whether imposing additional legislation in an industry is a good thing’ (October, 2006).
In short, uncertainties about the articulation between legislation on Scotch and the ‘interest’ of a
much wider set of industries remained.
Finally, and more pervasively, framing new legislation for Scotch as a Scottish problem of course
raised the issue of whether the devolution settlement of the late 1990s could and should be
reopened to discussion and, possibly, change. Here, officials in the Scottish Executive have
consistently represented this uncertainty as a reason for hesitation and caution:
‘It’s difficult. The SWA would say that if it can all be achieved in Scotland then one should secure some kind of transfer of functions. But it is not as simple as that. Government would not want to devolve a matter that would have unforeseen consequences and open the gate’ (October, 2006). ‘Before, neither this administration or the UK administration was willing to concede that they did not have competence on this so they just sat there in a stalemate. It didn’t get to the point where either side said ‘we’ll just do it and risk a challenge to the devolution settlement’ (November, 2007).
In summary, the deepening and accumulation of these four sets of uncertainties led to a
transformation in the commonly held representation of a Scottish Scotch Whisky Act from being
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an opportunity to being a risk. In order to understand how this change in framing took root
within the industry’s Institutional order then spread throughout its actors, three hypotheses about
the linkage between argumentation and alliance-building will be tested during the remainder of
our research.
The first of these concerns interaction and interdependence within the Scottish Government.
Ministers have changed since May 2007 but officials have done so too. In the case of the latter,
however, continuity in the provision of cautious advice to ministers appears to have been
assured. Indeed, interviews carried out to date suggest that these officials have decided amongst
themselves that leaving legislation to Whitehall and Westminster ‘makes sense’:
‘There is so much in the press about fights between Scotland and the UK. But in fact ministers here are taking a very pragmatic approach. So when we put it to them, ‘let’s take a pragmatic line so that we can do it along with the Spirit drinks regulation using the European Communities act where no-one needs to concede competence –even though this was letting the UK government do something that was seen as economically Scottish- actually they put the needs of the industry first. Which is fantastic. You don’t always see that! The SWA are pleased and it certainly makes our lives easier’. (November, 2007).
Although highly technocratic and depoliticizing, this discourse also reveals a second site for shifts
in arguments and alliances which needs deeper study: the SWA. How and why has an
organization who’s representatives publicly proclaimed the need and social meaning of a Scottish
Scotch Whisky Act come to ‘warmly welcome UK Government plans to introduce new
legislation’10? Has pressure from distillers only concerned with achieving an efficient and quick
solution to their regulatory issues led to the abandon of a politicized use of territory? Or have
representatives of these companies and SWA officials been chiefly concerned to avoid the SNP
using whisky as a ‘political football’ within a broader ‘game’ of devolution which, ultimately, may
concern them for reasons which, at least for some of these actors, have been more personal than
professional?
Finally, a third set of alliances which merits greater study concerns the links between the SWA
and various representatives of Whitehall and Westminster. Historically, these relations have been
very close and highly interdependent and taken the form of a UK-scale industrial community. As
we have seen, this scaling has been destabilized incrementally by a number of developments. But
was Scottish legislation eventually seen as a step-level change that risked durably undermining the
community? Moreover, what role has a relatively new extra-industry body –the UK government’s 10 SWA news release, 8th October, 2007.
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Scotland Office- played in mediating between the politicians, officials and representatives of
private companies concerned?11
Conclusions
Although further research needs to be undertaken on these and other points, this case study,
together with the analytical framework which has structured it, has nevertheless generated three
conclusions which will hopefully be of interest to our workshop.
The first concerns how one studies changes in the scale of government that appear to be linked
to ‘constitutional’ processes such as Scottish devolution. As we have underlined in greater detail
elsewhere (Carter and Smith, 2007; Smith, 2008), social science generates little knowledge about
this process, its cause and its effects if it concentrates excessively and in a general fashion upon
modifications of formal legislative or executive competence. On the other hand, a great deal of
new information can and should be developed by undertaking in-depth sector by sector studies
of the interplay between change in formal rules and the reinstitutionalization of institutional
orders such as that of the Scotch Whisky industry. To use the language of the workshop, one
cannot analyze fully the effects of constitutional change without grasping how such ‘spaces for
politics’ were configured at T1, discovering their ordering at T2, then conducting causally
oriented process tracing to analyze how change occurred, or stasis was reproduced, between
these moments in time.
This paper’s second conclusion concerns how one studies the impact of territory upon the
regulation of industries. We have attempted to show the heuristic value of a generic approach to
the politics of industry built around four concepts: industry, institutionalized relationships,
institutional orders and trans-industry regulation. This analytical framework allows one to grasp
the interpenetration of logics of action that are too often studied separately as ‘economic’ or
‘political’. But this paper also goes further to suggest that including a line of questioning on the
usages of territory provides conceptual tools with which to better understand the political
struggles that lie at the heart of the institutionalization and legitimization of each industry.
Indeed, by examining our case study of Scotch whisky from this perspective, we have been able
11 Interestingly, DEFRA’s press release in October 2007 announcing UK government action quotes at some length the Secretary of State for Scotland rather than DEFRA’s own minister.
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to unpack and highlight how territory is constantly at issue within, rather than alongside, its
regulation.
This point leads into a third and final conclusion concerning the scaling of contemporary spaces
for politics. The case of Scotch highlights how today the regulation of industry takes place
through sets of overlapping sites for negotiation which, for the sake of analysis, can be
characterized as ‘Scottish’, ‘UK’, ‘EU’ and ‘global’. However, this development has not resulted in
a homogenous institutional order for the industry that is ‘multi-level’. Instead, actors find
themselves striving to be omnipresent in all the negotiating sites and to conciliate institutions
who’s scale of impact vary considerably. Studying these ‘spaces for politics’ constitutes not only a
challenge for empirical research. More fundamentally still, conceptualizing these spaces, and
building appropriate research designs represents a major and exciting challenge. This paper has
attempted to show how institutionalist political and economic sociology now possesses the tools
with which this challenge can, and should, be addressed.
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