The Emergence of an Organic Food Market in Australia: An Economic Sociological Approach Lee Glezos BA Hons Swinburne University of Technology This thesis is submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Business and Law, Swinburne University of Technology 2016
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The Emergence of an Organic Food Market in Australia:
An Economic Sociological Approach
Lee Glezos
BA Hons Swinburne University of Technology
This thesis is submitted in fulfillment of the requirements
for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Business and Law,
Swinburne University of Technology
2016
ii
ABSTRACT
Drawing on economic sociology, this thesis adopts Fligstein and McAdam’s A
Theory of Fields framework in order to understand how social movements, or
social movement-like groups, contribute towards the creation of new markets.
Specifically, it examines the interplay of competition and cooperation between
institutional entrepreneurs from sustainable agriculture, the consumer movement,
the conventional food industry and the State in the creation of a market for
organic produce in Australia. In particular, the thesis addresses how Australian
organic food graduated from a state of informal trade, strongly guided by the
values of the sustainable agriculture movement, to become a formal market. This
includes consideration of how structures such as production standards and
certification, a coordinated supply chain and a sense of membership to the organic
industry initially came into being.
The thesis draws upon a variety of texts, often generated by social movements and
industry groups, including newsletters, journals and conference proceedings.
These texts are supplemented through 11 targeted in-depth interviews with
pioneering organic food retailers, wholesalers and certification body actors.
The research offers two main contributions. Firstly it provides novel detail on the
origins of the Australian organic food market. Key market-building projects are
identified across three distinct temporal brackets. They roughly equate to periods
of planning and theorising (1982-1986), execution and expansion (1987-1989),
and crisis and contraction (1990-1995). The findings suggest that the sustainable
agriculture movement aimed to transform mainstream food production by
delegitimising the conventional chemical-based model, and proposing an
alternative that focused on maintaining the health of farming soils, farmers and
consumers. Ultimately this project gained enough legitimacy with key
stakeholders to establish the market, but the extent of success was significantly
limited. Entrenched incumbents with interests in continuing conventional
agriculture deployed extensive resources to secure state and industry support and
reaffirm the status quo, albeit one that accommodated organic food as a marginal
member.
iii
The second contribution is theoretical. The research confirms the fundamental
argument in A Theory of Fields that new institutional space is often forged in an
inherently political process, which can be entangled in periods of fluctuating
conflict between challengers and incumbents. I also argue that this framework can
be given extra explanatory power by integrating the concept of judgment devices
from the sociology of valuation. Judgment devices are observed as technologies
that influence how key stakeholders such as producers, consumers and the State
evaluate particular products or broader market models. Judgment devices should
then be understood as vital tools available to both challengers and incumbents,
used to spearhead their market building projects while simultaneously curbing the
legitimacy and power of those wielding oppositional interests.
iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Much like marathon runners, PhD candidates cannot get by without support
crews. I’d like to briefly acknowledge my crew. First and foremost I want to
thank my primary supervisor Professor Michael Gilding. At the many junctures
when I felt challenged and overwhelmed, your guidance, advice and tolerance
always brought things back into perspective. I simply could not have completed
this thesis without your generosity.
Thank you to my secondary supervisor, Associate Professor Karen Farquharson,
for your clarity and care at the most critical times. I am honoured to have such
amazing academic mentors as you and Michael. I will forever be grateful to you
both.
On a personal note, thank you to my family for the support over my academic
journey. A most special thank you to my amazing partner Emma. Emma, there is
no way I could have done this without your unwavering support, care and faith in
me. Apologies for the PhD rollercoaster – I know you don’t like rides!
On a final note, I suspect that librarians don’t get too many mentions in theses
acknowledgements. I want to say a sincere thank you to all the dedicated
librarians who helped me source those obscure documents from the far corners of
the country.
v
DECLARATION
This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any
other degree or diploma, except where due reference is made in the text of the
thesis. To the best of my knowledge, this thesis contains no material previously
published or written by another person except where due reference is made in the
text of the thesis.
This thesis has been copyedited and proofread by Dr Jillian Graham (Articulate
Writing Solutions), whose services are consistent with those outlined in Section D
of the Australian Standards for Editing Practice (ASEP). Dr Graham’s own fields
of study encompass Social History, Women’s Studies, Musicology and
Figure 2: A common marketing tactic was pushing the chemical-free
message to consumers …………………………………………………….. 154
Figure 3: The cover of the NFA journal signals the States’ validation of
conventional food ………………………………………………………… 169
Figure 4: Incidents representing event: ‘Development of first organic standards
(1982-1986)’ ……………………………………………………………… 218
x
ORGANISATIONAL ABBREVIATIONS
ABARE Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics ACA Australian Consumers’ Association ACCC Australian Competition and Consumer Commission ACF Australian Conservation Foundation ACIC Australian Chemical Industry Council ACTU Australian Council of Trade Unions AFCO Australian Federation of Consumer Organisations AQIS Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service ASTEC Australian Science and Technology Council AUSTRADE Australian Trade Commission AVCA Agricultural and Veterinary Chemicals Association of Australia AWB Australian Wheat Board BDAAA Biodynamic Agriculture Association of Australia BFA Biological Farmers of Australia CDFE Centre for the Defense of Free Enterprise CI Consumer Interpol CSIRO Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation DARA Department of Agriculture and Rural Affairs (Victoria) DPIE Department of Primary Industries and Energy EEC European Economic Community EGOAA East Gippsland Organic Agriculture Association EPAC Economic Planning Advisory Council FAO Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations HDRA Henry Doubleday Research Association IFOAM International Federation for Organic Agriculture Movements IOCU International Organisation of Consumers Unions NASAA National Association for Sustainable Agriculture Australia NFA National Food Authority NFF National Farmers’ Federation NFSC National Food Standards Council NHMRC National Health and Medical Research Council OGFST Organic Gardening and Farming Society of Tasmania OPAC Organic Produce Advisory Committee ORGAV Organic Retailers and Growers Association of Victoria PAN Pesticides Action Network RIRDC Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation (Australia) SASA Soil Association of South Australia SMH Sydney Morning Herald TCAC Technical Committee on Agricultural Chemicals TEC Total Environment Centre WCA Wool Council of Australia
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–CHAPTER ONE–
Introduction
The adoption of non-chemical methods of agricultural production
generally involves commitment to a defined life-style. Inputs are
much higher, holdings must be smaller and there is generally an
associated group commitment to self sufficiency … Despite the fact
that this approach could not work effectively in our extensive
cropping and grazing areas, it would, in theory, involve enormous
life-style change for the community in general if pursued. It is akin
to the peasant-farming approach that exists in some less developed
agricultural economies. AVCA is doubtful whether these very basic
changes would be acceptable by the Australian community – either
urban or rural. (Agricultural and Veterinary Chemicals Association
of Australia, Senate Submission, 1989a, p. 814)
The development of organic food
The market for organic food in Australia is on a trajectory towards mainstream
acceptance. From being a $128-million industry in 2004, its growth by 2010 had
reached almost $1 billion a year, with around two out of three consumers having
purchased organic food in the past 12 months (Singer 2010a, p. 4). The industry is
now one of the best-performing sectors in the Australian economy over the last
several years, with growth being propelled by consumers wanting healthier
lifestyles, and the involvement of supermarket incumbents Coles and
Woolworths, who now handle 60 percent of all organic food sales, and are
seeking even greater quantities in the future (Tonkin 2014, p. 4-6). Moreover, a
regular succession of mainstream media stories about organic food captures this
general optimism of growth, with some citing experts who predict that ‘whole
sectors of the grocery market could eventually go chemical-free’ (Singer 2010a, p.
4). Such claims would likely have been dismissed even 10 years ago.
The genesis of the international organic food movement has its roots in the first
half of the twentieth century, as a reaction to the observed decline in soil fertility
2
and the monoculture that came with the increasing industrialisation of food
production (Geier 2007, p. 176). From the 1920s, individuals concerned about the
turn agriculture had taken began speaking out and joining together. For example,
Rudolph Steiner gave his landmark lectures on ‘Anthroposophy’ in 1924, which
critiqued industrial farming and laid the foundation for biodynamic agriculture. At
the same time, eminent scientist Robert McCarrison studied the differences
between those on traditional Indian diets and those on western diets. He found
that the former diet resulted in people experiencing lower levels of disease and
fewer negative sociological consequences. McCarrison became an advocate for
wholefoods grown on soils fertilised by organic matter. Sir Albert Howard was
also working in India in the 1920s, researching the practices of peasant farmers.
His experiments similarly led him to observe that the health of humans, animals
and plants was inseparably linked with the health of soils. The ideas of these three
pioneers directly influenced a second wave of organic agriculture advocates from
the 1940s, evident in the establishment of organisations such as the Rodale
Institute in the United States and the Soil Association in the United Kingdom
(Kristiansen et al. 2006, p. 4-5).
The market for organic food happened in parallel with this movement from the
1920s. For example, the first organic coffee farm was established in Mexico in
1928, and the first organic logo ‘Demeter’ was also established that year
(Aschemann et al. 2007, p. 123). It was not until after the Second World War that
wider consumer awareness of pesticides in food and food scares involving
chemicals began to emerge (Belasco 2007, p. 69-72). The 1960s saw concerned
individuals forming alternative food distribution networks in the form of
cooperatives and communes. In the 1970s, the environmental movement was
taking an interest in organic farming, and the first dedicated organic retailers were
established in the USA and Europe. Owners of these stores and their customers
were not only concerned about the issues of industrial agriculture, but also about
broader environmental factors such as nuclear energy and industrial pollution
(Aschemann et al. 2007, p. 124).
In reaction to the upsurge in consumer interest, previously non-market-oriented
organic farming organisations around the world began to see themselves as
3
guardians of organic integrity and principles. Their role was to carefully nurture
consumers’ notions of sound environmental stewardship and the idea that organic
farming had a social justice dimension which aimed to improve the quality of life
for those involved with it (Sligh & Cierpka 2007, p. 35-36). Groups like the UK
Soil Association became increasingly oriented around the idea of commericalising
organic food. The Soil Association graduated into the first certification body to
develop and oversee commercial production standards (Conford & Holden 2007,
p. 193-194).
By the 1980s, the available lines of organic food had expanded, and involvement
of bigger players such as the supermarkets broadened out the consumer base
(Aschemann et al. 2007, p. 128). Governments, especially those in Europe, began
to shift from being indifferent or hostile towards organic food to supporting its
development through legislated standards and subsidies to convert farmers to the
organic system (Padel & Lampkin 2007, p. 94-95).
Wynen and Fritz (2007) describe how the development of Australian organic food
fits within this international history. Unlike the cases of Europe and the United
States, Australian consumers were still largely unaware of organic food in the first
half of the 1980s. Even by the mid-1980s, there were only negligible amounts of
organic food available commercially, and it was not until the 1990s that
governmental support came in the way of ratifying standards. The Australian case
is one where a coalition of groups within the sustainable agriculture movement
cooperated from the early 1980s to form an umbrella organisation with the
purpose of transforming food production away from conventional methods. From
its inauguration in 1986, the National Association for Sustainable Agriculture
Australia (NASAA) pioneered the first commercial organic standards and
certification system in Australia; raised awareness with both the public and policy
makers about the shortcomings of conventional agriculture vis-à-vis sustainable
agriculture; increased the stock of farming knowledge by organising conferences
and seminars at a time when no agricultural institutions officially taught organic
farming; and identified export opportunities, guiding farmers on how to seize
those opportunities. In short NASAA was crucial to the initial commercialisation
4
of organic food.
There are several other studies within the social sciences that have explored the
development of the Australian organic food market. They cover a wide range of
subjects such as: consumer motivations behind organic food consumption (Lockie
et al. 2001; Lockie et al. 2002; Lawrence et al. 2003; Lockie et al. 2004; Lyons
2006); the marketing of organic food (Lockie et al. 2000); the increasing interest
in organic food by major supermarkets (Lyons 2007); large corporate food
companies using organic food to signal environmental responsibility (Lyons
1999); the degree to which the organic food industry is coming to mirror the
structures of its conventional counterpart (Lockie & Halpin 2005); the capacity of
the Australian state to foster the development of organic food (Halpin &
Daugbjerg 2008); issues with organic food labelling (Chang 2005); the discursive
construction of organic food by the media (Lockie 2006); and in the case of
Lockie et al. (2006), a landmark exploration of the entire market, from producers
through to consumers, and the role of the state.
This wealth of research is almost entirely focused on the period after 1990.
Although the market for organic food was still in its early stages and faced a
number of coordination problems, key structures such as standards and
certification, commercial supply channels, and general consumer awareness had
already been established at this point (see Hudson & RIRDC 1996). The account
by Wynen and Fritz (2007) is a harbinger in shedding some light on how organic
food graduated from a social movement to a commercial market, but limited in
that it trades off depth for breadth. For example, NASAA’s role in developing
standards is only accorded two paragraphs. The current thesis will provide the
first major analysis of how the organic food market emerged and initially
developed in Australia from the early 1980s.
An economic sociological approach
In his discussion paper ‘The Social Order of Markets’, the sociologist Jens Becket
provocatively stated that it is ‘surprising how little attention has been paid to the
study of markets in modern economic theory’ (2007, p. 5). Beckert contended that
general equilibrium theory, which propels mainstream neoclassical economics, is
5
not interested in studying the empirical operation of markets and its institutional
structures, but rather in gaining ‘mathematical proof of efficiency postulates,
conducted under a variety of simplifying assumptions’ (2007, p. 5). Similarly,
Nobel Prize-winning economist Douglass North (1993) argued in his Prize
Lecture that mainstream economics is an inappropriate tool to examine how
markets emerge and develop, because its frictionless and static worldview
dismisses how institutions and temporality matter in shaping markets.
The current study presents an alternative theoretical tradition drawn from
sociology. Since Granovetter published ‘Economic action and social structure: the
problem of embeddedness’ in 1985, economic sociology has developed a rich
literature that broadly understands markets as social structures known as fields,
networks, cultures and performances. All four camps directly or tacitly draw on
the notion that social structures are vital in influencing economic outcomes
(Fourcade 2007, p. 1016-1019).
The literature within economic sociology has traditionally attempted to understand how
shared social structures work to mitigate period to period uncertainty, and provide a
stable and predictable basis for economic exchange. A major criticism has been that by
focusing too heavily on stability-inducing mechanisms, the discipline has been left with
less theoretical development in understanding how market destabilisation and disruption
can bring about change and emergence (King & Pearce 2010, p. 250).
The recent opening of dialogue between organisational and social movement scholars
seeks to address this deficiency by studying the role of contention and disruptive politics
in markets. The broad view is that stable markets are general agreements between
bounded sets of actors about how to organise their collective social space. These interests
vie for advantage by identifying broader environmental opportunities, framing
alternative courses of action, and building or appropriating collective action vehicles to
mobilise supporters around their vision of the market (Fligstein & McAdam 2012, p. 9-
23). Markets, however, produce unequal outcomes and access points for different groups,
making settled orders the target of rolling conflict from those looking to improve their
foothold and establish alternative, fairer forms of organising vis-à-vis more powerful
actors (King & Pearce 2010, p. 250). Market challengers can either directly face
6
incumbents to push for transformation, or forge niches in line with their alternative
visions (Fligstein & McAdam 2012, p. 13).
Using this approach to study how social movements or movement-like actors affect the
emergence of new markets, market categories or industries is still in its early stages
(Weber et al. 2008, p. 529). As noted by Weber et al., few studies have explored ‘why
entrepreneurial producers begin their projects, what guides their technology and strategy
development, and how alternative logics that support a market niche are articulated in the
first place’ (2008, p. 530).
The current study joins this line of inquiry, following the novel approach by Dubuisson-
Quellier (2013), who is the first to explicitly import the economic sociology of valuation
(Karpik 2010) into this converging body of research between organisational and social
movement scholars. By adding the dimension of valuation, this work teases out the micro
details of how social movements or social movement-like actors construct judgment
devices (or knowledge operators) that imbue products with qualities consistent with a set
of moral values. By legitimising particular notions of quality, movements motivate
producers and consumers to act in ways that are consistent with their principles, while
simultaneously de-legitimising products or practices that reflect conflicting principles to
the movement. The study by Dubuisson-Quellier is focused on cases in already-
established markets. My thesis takes its cues from this approach, but applies it to
understanding market emergence.
The current study
In her 1985 book The Food Makers, Australian Financial Review journalist Sarah
Sargent offers a rare snapshot of the relationship between Australian farmers and
transnational agricultural chemical companies during the early 1980s. Sargent highlights
how farmers were overwhelmingly concerned about the role that pesticide usage played
in health and environmental hazards, but were locked into chemical usage for two main
reasons. Firstly, the cost of other farming inputs such as credit, wages and machinery
was rising, which meant that making a profit relied on the increasing replacement of
these more labour-intensive inputs with chemical applications that reduced uncertainty
about crop losses. Secondly, farmers were stuck on a pesticide treadmill, where ‘like the
medical dangers in humans of abusing antibiotics, it often leads to the evolution of
7
resistant varieties of pests which require still more pesticides to control them’ (1985, p.
94).
To keep local farmers using their products, the chemical companies used advertising and
the deployment of an extensive network of salespeople, who mimicked the role of
official agricultural extension officers, pushing newer products as solutions. Despite
Australia accounting for only a small fraction of worldwide chemical sales, Sergeant
noted a larger agenda at play for the chemical industry. The Australian climate and
agriculture enabled ‘companies whose head offices are in the northern hemisphere to test
chemicals for application elsewhere in the tropics’ (Sargent 1985, p. 88). In essence,
Australia was treated as ‘a politically inert stepping stone between the West and the
Third World countries of Asia and the Pacific’ (1985, p. 88).
Despite farmers’ recognition of the commercial imperative of chemical usage, evidence
from a 1983 poll conducted by industry newspaper the National Farmer signalled a
strong desire to get off the pesticide treadmill. The poll reported that 97 percent of all
respondents indicated their preference to use alternative methods of weed and pest
control, including biological or organic, if these techniques were proven as effective as
existing chemical methods (Sargent 1985, p. 93).
The departure point of this thesis is that the sustainable agriculture social movement
initially mobilised during the early 1980s, with the ultimate goal of transforming the way
food was produced in Australia. The movement aimed to legitimise an alternative model
of food production that re-imagined mainstream agriculture as avoiding rather than
centralising chemicals. Therefore my starting assumption is that sustainable agriculture
was a challenger to the entrenched incumbent interests within the conventional food
market. Taking a challenger-incumbent approach allows us to track the tactical actions
from sustainable agriculture and their allies, while simultaneously tracking the counter-
response from incumbent actors like the chemical industry, whose interests would be
eroded should organic food become legitimised.
This thesis focused on four research questions:
8
(1) What were the main strategic actions deployed by the sustainable
agriculture movement and its allies in trying to commercialise organic
food and similar forms of sustainable agriculture in Australia from the
early 1980s?
(2) What was the response of entrenched interests within conventional
agriculture?
(3) What does this case study tell us about the interplay between disruptive
politics and the establishment of new markets?
(4) What does this case study tell us about the role of judgment devices in the
creation of new markets?
The current study analysed thousands of pages from texts produced by key actors,
who were identified as being crucial in the development or constraint of the
Australian organic food market. Texts were mostly drawn from movement and
industry media (such as newsletters, journals and newspapers), and events (such
as conference proceedings and seminar papers). These were supplemented by 11
targeted interviews with pioneering organic retailers, intermediaries and
certification body actors. To understand market emergence, the data was analysed
with process methods, which are designed specifically to ‘address questions about
how and why things emerge, develop, grow, or terminate over time’ (Langley et
al. 2013, p. 1). Process methods capture rich qualitative descriptions of critical
incidents and events, which are assembled into their temporal order and then
constructed into a narrative of development and change (Langley 1999, p. 692-
693).
My findings suggest that the emergence and initial development of the Australian
organic food market cannot be fully understood without accounting for a broader
political process. This process draws together a wider range of actors into an
extended episode of contention (Fligstein & McAdam 2012, p. 21-22) around
issues of safe food production. From the early 1980s, public awareness and
demand for chemical-free food emerged, which destabilised the conventional
9
model of production that relied on chemical farming practices. At that time, the
sustainable agricultural movement planned and implemented structures that
facilitated the commercialisation of organic food. These structures included
production standards, a coordinated supply chain, and supporting the industry
through the establishment of dedicated media and technical conferences.
Ultimately the sustainable agriculture movement gained enough traction to create
a new market niche in organic food, but its plan to transform food production was
stalled in large part by the combined action of the state and powerful incumbents
led by the agricultural chemical industry.
Outline of chapters
Chapter Two provides the context for the research. I briefly set out the
foundational assumptions of a sociological approach to understanding markets
vis-à-vis a mainstream economic approach. I then detail the increasing
convergence between organisational and social movement research, and how
common mechanisms are being used to study the role of contention in
transforming or creating new markets. Next I offer finer detail of Fligstein and
McAdams’ A Theory of Fields framework. This state-of-the-art theoretical
development forms the major lens for the current study. Finally, I present the
economic sociology of valuation. I demonstrate how its inclusion in the
conversation between social movement and organisational scholars can provide a
much more nuanced picture of new market emergence and dynamics.
Chapter Three presents the methods, where I detail my research design. I outline
the research perspective, deciding on a research site, choosing focal actors, and
the selection, collection and analysis of textual and interview data. By adopting
process methods, my aim was to analyse data into temporal brackets (Langley
1999), which present a narrative about successive and distinct periods of a
market’s emergence and development.
The findings chapters that follow present three temporal brackets that equate to
periods of market planning, implementing and consolidating. Chapter Four covers
the period between 1982 and 1986. It focuses on three inter-related events that
were crucial to the initial planning of a commercialised organic food market in
10
Australia. The first event was the rise in political prominence of the Australian
consumer movement. The movement introduced notions of consumer safety, and
successfully oriented states and the public around the potential hazards of
conventional food production. The second event was the unfolding crisis of the
Australian chemical industry over the growing perception that its products and
practices were hazardous to society. This pushed the industry to counter-mobilise
and neutralise its critics. The third event was the mobilisation of previously-
fragmented sustainable agriculture movement groups into a federal coalition. The
role of a particularly skilled actor is highlighted as being crucial to this
mobalisation.
Chapter Five addresses the period between 1987 and 1989, and focuses on three
inter-related events that were crucial to the implementation of the Australian
organic food market. The first event was a massive food scare in 1987 regarding
Australian-produced beef. The crisis was large enough to threaten a disruption of
the broader agricultural exports market, and became the departure point for
subsequent events. The second event was that crucial actors within the agricultural
policy domain, such as Departments of Agriculture and key political parties,
began to consider the relative pros and cons between chemical and non-chemical
forms of food production. The third event was that a host of actors from the
sustainable agriculture movement worked to improve the main problem faced by
the market, being the consistency of supply.
Chapter Six covers the period between 1990 and 1995. It focuses on three key
events that were crucial to the constraint and consolidation of Australian organic
food as a market niche. The first event describes how the rapid growth of the
organic food market was stalled by a crisis on two fronts: a sharp drop in
consumer demand due to an economy-wide recession, and the surfacing of
fraudulent incidents that threatened consumer trust in the authenticity of organic
food. The second event was the Federal Government’s unprecedented
transformation of the Australian food policy field, and how this change
legitimised organic food, but simultaneously constrained the criticism towards
conventional food production. The third event tracks how key actors within the
sustainable agriculture movement worked to mitigate their field’s instability. I
11
highlight two key projects, being the fortification of the price-premium system
and extension of organic food standards. Taken together, the three findings
chapters offer a novel historical narrative of how the Australian organic food
market emerged and developed from the early 1980s.
Chapter Seven offers the conclusion. This chapter ties together and synthesises
the major findings of the current study. The main theoretical argument is that
during episodes of contention, judgment devices (Karpik 2010) are vital tools
challengers incumbents can use to legitimise products, and more broadly their
models of field organisation vis-à-vis competitor models. Securing the support of
one’s devices from key stakeholders such as consumers, producers and the state
gives great advantage during an episode of contention. In particular, having the
state officially ratify or tacitly support one’s devices simultaneously constrains the
influence of competitors, and helps one gain or maintain dominance within a
strategic action field.
12
–CHAPTER TWO–
Literature Review
With its rational actor model, its barely concealed libertarianism,
its assumption that the individual has fixed tastes and preferences
utterly uninfluenced by social relationships, its preoccupation with
the material, its inability to come to grips with non-monetary
values and its intense focus on the price mechanism, economics –
which influences the perceptions of many politicians and business
people, not just professional economists – is blind to many
important aspects of economic life, not to mention being blind to
non-material objectives. Economists simply don’t see many of the
institutions sociologists study. They often take insufficient account
of the role of formal institutions such as laws; norms of behaviour
they are usually oblivious to. And yet those norms affect the vigour
with which firms pursue profits and the choices consumers make.
(Ross Gittins, Economics Editor for the The Sydney Morning
Herald 2008)
Overview
In this chapter I present the theoretical context for the current study. The approach is
drawn from the new economic sociology. Within Australian sociology, political
economy and critical theory have dominated scholars’ approach to the economy. The re-
emergence of economic sociology has been largely ignored (Gilding 2005, p. 310), but
strong foundational statements are beginning to emerge (see Spies-Butcher et al. 2012).
This review will simultaneously counter the sparse discussion on the discipline, and
justify its adoption for understanding the emergence of the organic food market in
Australia. Firstly, I establish the basic differences between mainstream economic
understandings of markets, vis-à-vis the economic sociological approach. Secondly, I
present a major recent development within economic sociology, which is the increasing
convergence between organisational and social movement studies. In particular, I outline
the shared mechanisms adopted by these scholars, and present a small but flourishing
13
offshoot of this conversation, which studies how social movements or social movement-
like action can affect the emergence of new economic markets. Thirdly, Fligstein and
McAdam’s A Theory of Fields is explored. This framework is a state-of-the-art
development within this converging literature, and forms the main theoretical lens for the
current study. Finally, I present the economic sociology of valuation. I demonstrate how
its inclusion in the conversation between social movement and organisational scholars
offers a much more nuanced and fine-grained picture of market dynamics.
SECTION 1: ECONOMICS VIS-À-VIS ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGY
The historical divide
Around the time Adam Smith published the Wealth of Nations, there was not such a
sharp divide between social and economic topics, but rather ‘an easy mingling of the
two’ (Swedberg & Granovetter 2001, p. 3). This is particularly evident in classical
sociology, where the founding commentators were trying to understand the newly-
emergent economy and its implications for modern society (Swedberg 2003, p. 6-22).
The divide of economics and sociology was characterised by academic turf battles,
which saw sociology ultimately retreat from focusing on the economic dimensions of life
to untaken subjects such as the family (Granovetter 1990, p. 89). Between the late
nineteenth century and the 1930s, economics was engaged in what was known as the
‘battle of methods’, which split the discipline into two camps. In one camp was the then
dominant historicist school, which argued that any study of the economy must include
both historical and institutional dimensions. In the other camp was the marginalist
school, which argued for an economics fashioned on hard positivist science, striving to
develop mathematically-driven theories that held at all times in all places (Hass 2007, p.
6). The marginalists were victorious, and by the 1950s, sociology and economics had
developed into mirror images of each other, with economists only seeing rational, self-
interested individuals, while sociologists ‘tried to explain everything in terms of groups,
social structures, the force of tradition, and the like’ (Swedberg 1990, p. 35).
Economic imperialism and the new economic sociology
By the 1980s, the emergence of the neo-liberal paradigm and the rising status of
economists saw a transgressing of boundaries, where economists began taking on topics
traditionally the domain of other social sciences (Swedberg 2003, p. 32). Their
imperialistic logic largely ignored the knowledge already accumulated by other
14
disciplines, and attempted to replace it with insights from the economic approach
(Swedberg 1990, p. 36-7). A well-cited example is Nobel laureate-winning economist
Garry Becker, who claimed that economics could be used to understand any
phenomenon in society. In A Theory of Marriage for example, Becker claimed that
marriage functions like any other monetary market. Men and woman compete as they
seek out mates, and attempt to maximise their utility by finding the best mate (1974, p.
814).
In the 1980s, a new wave of sociology countered the imperialism of economics by
examining economic phenomena through a sociological lens. In 1985, an article by Mark
Granovetter entitled ‘Economic Action and Social Structure: the problem of
embeddedness’ built on the concepts of Karl Polanyi and extended an approach already
present in the work of structural sociologists such as Harrison White. This article is
recognised as being the fuse that ignited the resurgence of what came to be known as the
‘new economic sociology’ (Krippner & Alvarez 2007, p. 223), and has since become the
most cited paper in sociology during the postwar period (Fligstein & Dauter 2007, p.
106). The basic argument deployed by Granovetter (1985) was that economics is blind to
the way social structure matters in economic contexts. Actors are re-cast from atomised
utility maximisers – as understood by classical economics – to being always situated and
influenced by ongoing systems of social relations, which are constituted by varying
levels of trust, power, and cooperation. By acknowledging both social and economic
dimensions, Granovetter aimed to steer a middle course between the under-socialised
approach of economics, and the over-socialised approach of sociology.
Trigilia drew on the work of Karl Polanyi to clarify the ‘middle course’ set out by
Granovetter, by describing two contrasting definitions of the economy. The first, which
underpins mainstream economics, defines the economy as ‘activities that involve the
rational allocation of scarce resources in order to obtain the most from the means
available’ (2002, p. 3). This viewpoint emphasises ‘economizing’, which assumes that
because individuals are propelled by rational interests, the market sets the rules of
interaction through supply, demand and the price mechanism. Therefore production,
distribution and exchange are understood in terms of individuals maximising utility.
Trigilia argued that adopting this first definition has allowed for great insight into how
supply and demand operates; it has developed a theoretical model that uses mathematics
15
to achieve a high degree of generalisation; and it has produced models for the prediction
and normative prescription of actors’ economic actions. However, it runs into problems
when it needs to understand variation in economic contexts. For example, why it is that
some capitalist societies take different paths or growth rates, or why some countries deal
with particular economic crises better than others. In such cases, ‘the institutional context
must be considered to provide a convincing interpretation’ (2002, p. 3).
This brings us to the second definition of the economy, aligned with economic sociology.
The economy is defined as ‘a body of activities which are usually carried out by
members of a society in order to produce, distribute, and exchange goods and services’
(Trigilia 2002, p. 2). The economy is broadly understood as an instituted process, where
actors follow relatively stable rules in order to satisfy their needs, whether those needs
are physical, cultural, social or otherwise. When actors produce, distribute or exchange
goods in order to satisfy needs, the economy is involved. Although this definition is
more general than the first, it gives the latitude needed to account for social context. Put
another way, it assumes that society may be organised in a variety of different ways, and
therefore it expects a variation in the way actors go about satisfying their needs (Trigilia
2002, p. 2).
This latter definition allows sociology to reconnect with the historicist tradition, which
posited that any study of society or the economy could not separate the economic from
social dimensions. For example:
[Religious] ideas may support an ascetic orientation toward material life and
encourage an anticonsumption environmentalism. Religious beliefs may require
regular tithing, or encourage contributions of time and money to missionaries or
nonreligious causes. Political ideas and institutions may be organized to
redistribute income through social welfare services and progressive tax policies.
Governments typically regulate financial institutions such as banks and
securities exchanges, and establish the rules by which corporations are formed
and business contracts enforced. In developed countries, families are
experienced primarily as consumption units as they buy homes and vacations,
but they may also be economic production units when they run businesses and
farms. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine any sphere of social life that is not
16
implicated in the economy and, conversely, any part of the economy that is not
involved in noneconomic social realms. (Woolsey Biggart 2002, p. xii)
Woolsey Biggart’s example exemplifies a key assumption within economic sociology.
Topics such as religion, politics or the family are only partially understood unless their
connection to the economy is made clear.
The sociology of markets Market order as a social construction
As Fourcade (2007) noted, economic sociology has taken its departure point as
distinguishing itself from conventional economics. The sociological focus on markets
has been driven largely by the question of how market order is achieved (Fligstein 2001;
Beckert 2007). The conventional economic account goes like this: the presence of a
market implies that anonymous buyers and sellers exchange goods and services for
money. They are brought together through the forces of supply and demand. Prices are
understood to be the outcome of sellers seeking the highest amounts for their products,
and buyers looking to pay the lowest amounts, with exchange happening when both sides
agree that a particular monetary value is a mutually-optimal deal. Exchange is therefore
seen as beneficial to both parties, because any deviation from this would have resulted in
actors moving on until they found exchange partners who gave them what they wanted.
To this effect, exchange is a fleeting situation, because market actors are price-takers
uninfluenced by social relationships in the pursuit of utility maximisation (Hass 2007, p.
20-27). Maximisation can happen because individuals have ‘complete knowledge of
means-ends relationships and act on the basis to optimize their utility’ (Beckert 1996, p.
806). Market order happens because the aggregate of self-interested individuals neatly
clears the market (Beckert 2010, p. 609).
For economic sociology, this model of one-shot fleeting exchange ignores the
institutional underpinnings that contribute to market actors’ ongoing survival (Fligstein
2001, p. 30-31):
Market actors have to find one another. Money has to exist to allow market
actors to get beyond bartering nonequivalent goods. Actors have to know what
the price is. Underlying all exchange is that both buyers and sellers have faith
17
that they will not be cheated. Such faith often implies informal (i.e., personal
knowledge of the buyer or seller) and formal mechanisms (i.e., law) that govern
exchange. Furthermore, market actors are often organizations, implying that
organizational dynamics influence market structures. For sociologists, market
exchange implies a whole backdrop of social arrangements that economics does
not even begin to hint at. (Fligstein & Dauter 2007, p. 113)
These social structures work to create a predictability of human activities, thereby
reducing uncertainty around the coordination of production, consumption and
distribution of products (Aspers 2010, p. 17-18). Aspers furnishes the point by presenting
a useful thought experiment:
Imagine entering the local mall, but finding no stores. Instead, all kinds of items
are being sold here and there, by individuals whom you neither know nor
recognize. They also operate as buyers of the items. On top of all this, you do
not recognize any of the brand names of the [products], and you do not know
for how much they are being sold. In such circumstances, an actor is unable
either to predict or to calculate; there is no “market” from the buyer’s
perspective. Turning around to look at the market from the perspective of the
sellers, who do not know who their customers or competitors are, not to mention
prices, and furthermore have no access to quality standards that might provide
information on what [products] mean, the “consumer market” is in chaos, or
rather, there is no market: no “buyers” or “sellers” exist, and no principles for
evaluating the goods. Moreover, if suppliers … cannot identify retailers, or if
the retailers must organize production themselves, there is no supply market for
garments. Imagine, too, that there is no credit market, and it is soon hard to
imagine an economy at all. (Aspers 2010, p. 1)
Aspers’ example neatly illustrates how a lack of coordinated social structures would
likely result in a kind of uncertainty that hindered actors’ decision-making, and by
extension constrained the act of economic exchange.
Different facets of market order
There is a general consensus within economic sociology that the functioning of markets
18
rests on the construction and maintenance of social structures that bring stability. There
are, however, diverging approaches that focus on different types of mechanisms that lead
to market order. The new economic sociology has from its beginnings been a broad
church, encompassing several different perspectives (Swedberg 2003, p. 41), but over the
last two decades, its treatment of markets has been distilled into four main camps. These
are: markets as networks, markets as cultures, markets as performances, and markets as
consumer protection and so on. Karpik identifies five broad categories of devices. The
first device is the personal network. Actors have access to friends, family, colleagues and
other contacts, who they rely on for informal and credible information about certain
goods and services. Networks are useful, because actors get access to personal
experiences and knowledge ‘while on the whole remaining protected from the dangers of
opportunism’ (2010, p. 45). Van Zanten (2013) looked at how middle-class parents in
France use personal networks to choose the right schools for their children. Although
rankings and reputations are taken into consideration, actors are primarily interested in
accessing those with inside knowledge.
Appellations are the second judgment device, and refer to the broad range of labelling
phenomena, such as brand names, professional titles, country of origin designations,
quality labelling, or certification schemes and production standards (Karpik 2010, p. 45).
As explained by Waarden and van Dalen (2013), Halal foods are valued because they are
certified against a set of standards, which bestow a moral quality to food. Serunjogi
explained how credible musical journalists might reference an artist’s collaboration with
a high-status music producer, which bestows the producer’s brand prestige onto the new
music – even before a consumer has heard it (2013, p. 58). Serunjogi also explained how
quality labelling ascribes ‘an approval, as well as upholding a meaning containing and
maintaining a certain quality or trait connected to the label’ (2013, p. 18). This was the
goal of food giant McDonalds when they earned a series of Heart Foundation ticks on
items such as chicken McNuggets and the Fillet-O-Fish (Squires 2011, para. 1). The
45
examples presented here are about objects that are ascribed ‘signals of quality scrutinized
by independent third parties’ (Beckert 2011, p. 22).
Cicerones are the third judgment device, and refer to the soft authority held by critics,
guides and experts. In the art market, we see how gallery owners, curators, collectors or
academic commentators shape the way art is evaluated through their ‘opinions, reviews,
purchasing decisions, and exhibition policies’ (Beckert 2011, p. 20). Similarly, this is the
case with the Guide Michelin, which guides actors in choosing a fine-dining restaurant
(2011, p. 20).
Rankings are the fourth judgment device, and refer to hierarchical arrangements that
stratify product quality. Rankings can be based around expertise, referring to the
stratification of awards such as diplomas, degrees, prizes awarded by juries such as
literary prizes or scholarships, or the ranking of institutions such as schools or academic
journals (Karpik 2010, p. 46). Rankings can also be buyer generated, as in the case of the
music sales charts, bestseller lists for books, or star ratings for hotels. Because user-
generated rankings are structured by consumer action and choice, they give the
appearance of being more democratic than the technocratic appearance of expert
rankings (Serunjogi 2013, p. 19).
Confluences constitute the final judgment device, and refer to the multitude of techniques
used to channel buyers, ‘ranging from territorial location, spatial organization and
displays to selling skills’ (Karpik 2010, p. 46). Trompette (2007) found that a major
technique to channel consumers in the French funeral market is to open businesses
immediately surrounding hospitals and their high concentration of the dead. Here the
territorial proximity to consumers increases the value of their services. By being
conveniently located near the place where families are making choices about products
they had not likely considered previously, funeral companies can gain advantage by
being the first business with whom customers speak.
Devices and the market struggle
Markets are defined as arenas of ‘interaction in which rights for goods and services are
exchanged for money under conditions of competition’ (Beckert & Aspers 2011, p. 4).
Market competition is when at least two or more actors, either on the supply or demand
46
side, are vying for the same end that cannot be shared (2011, p. 5). The concept of
market or calculative devices offered by Callon et al. (2002) is generally complementary
with the concept of judgment devices. They conceive of market devices as fundamental
sites of competitive struggle between actors on the production side of the market. In their
conception, actors strategically attempt to gain advantage by creating quality differentials
between similar but competing products. This process is described as attachment and
detachment. Attached consumers have habituated a set of routines. They purchase goods
whose qualities they are familiar with and perceive them as meeting a valued desire, and
whose purchase has a certain ‘taken-for-grantedness’. For example, shopping in a
supermarket can often be done from a relatively stable list, physical or mental (2002, p.
206). Competition implies detaching consumers from their routine or ritual purchasing,
and pushing them into a reflective state about product qualities (2002, p. 205). Callon et
al. drew on Chamberlin (1946) in explaining quality differentiation:
By variation (of the product) we may be referring to a modification of the
quality of the product itself – technological changes, new model, better raw
materials; we may mean the packaging or a new recipient; or, finally, we may
mean better and more friendly service, a different way of doing business.
(Quoted in Callon et al. 2002, p. 200)
Actors then use various devices to imbue, highlight or modify product qualities. The
example recounted by the authors is a study of an orange juice producer whose sales had
plummeted. The producer decided to re-position the product in the market by changing
its taste and packaging. But the tactic chosen to detach consumers was to offer a free
Pokémon, a well-known children’s toy (Callon et al. 2002, p. 200). In another example,
Garcia-Parpet (2011, p. 145) described how wine critic Robert Parker held such
enormous influence over the wine market that the commercial success of products turned
on his assessments. A number of producers strategically ‘parkerize’ their products,
creating a woody-flavoured product, a quality they know Parker values, and by doing so,
they improve their chances of a positive review. To couch these examples in the
framework of Karpik (2010), we can observe the former as strategically manipulating a
confluence (that is, using a selling technique to create a quality differential). The latter
example is the strategic manipulation of a cicerone (that is, attempting to influence a
critic to create a quality differential).
47
The competitive struggle can also be broader, where an entire judgment device becomes
the site of contest, pushing action towards political-organisational dynamics (Rössel &
Beckert 2012, p. 8). The recent attempt to establish a nutrition-rating system for
processed foods in Australia saw industry, consumer and health groups strike a
compromise by agreeing that assessment would be via a voluntary star-rating system. A
settlement was forged (albeit a short-lived settlement) based around the idea to copy
classification systems similar to those used to assess white goods, movies and hotels
(Arnold 2014, para. 10-11).
Judgment devices might also be constructed as a direct challenge to similar devices in
the same market. Rössel and Beckert observed this in their study of two competing
German wine-rating systems. The dominant ‘quality in the glass’ system is backed by a
certified test, ranking wines on the chemical composition of the end product. The system
essentially stratifies wines in a simple way so that lay consumers can easily distinguish
quality based on price differentials (2012, p. 12-13). The dominant rating system was
established in the early 1970s and backed by legislation and state agencies. Although the
system has additional levels for evaluating higher-end wines, it became a contentious
issue amongst higher-status producers. They believed that individual vineyards’
reputations and climactic origins ought to be taken into consideration in the quality
assessment. A private association was subsequently founded by high-status vineyards,
accepting only those that complied with terroir, a system copied from France, which is
revered by connoisseurs and used to assess some of the most famous French wines. The
system evaluates quality based on soil, climate, and the craftsmanship of grape growing.
The criteria is considered complex and sometimes ambiguous, requiring consumers to
develop specialised knowledge about wine production and its players in order to make
sense of it. In short, high-end consumers consider the system more legitimate than the
mainstream system for justifying the large price premiums. Therefore terroir offers
market actors an alternative path around the conventional system (2012, p. 13-15).
Gourevitch (2011, p. 91-99) extended the discussion on the importance of consumer
perception of trust in devices that certify symbolic goods. Trust turns on the perception
that verifying actors are to some degree arms-length to producers, display
professionalism and transparency in their process of assessment, and have legitimate
48
funding sources. Therefore managing the credibility of a device is also vital for the value
it bestows on goods. In an earlier-mentioned example, Squires (2011) reported the case
of McDonalds gaining a Heart Foundation tick for items such as chicken nuggets. On the
one hand, the exercise was economically advantageous, potentially earning the
Foundation millions of dollars. But its organisation’s product seal suffered a major blow
in credibility. One well-known nutritionist went as far as saying that the public now
ignore the tick, because they associate it with lower standards of scrutiny. In short, the
lower value of the quality seal was seen as a weakening of the organisation’s credibility.
Valuation and social movement dynamics
We have established in this section that judgment devices facilitate exchange because
they equip consumers with the capacity to identify the qualities of products (thereby
reducing opacity) and evaluating them against other market offerings. More than that, the
literature also turns to the collective political-organisational dynamics whereby devices
are established or maintained. The work of Dubuisson-Quellier (2013) is the first
explicitly to demonstrate the utility of importing the valuation literature into the
converging line between organisational and social movement scholars. Dubuisson-
Quellier studied the actions of three major social movement organisations linked to the
broader environmental movement in France. The organisations all adopted contentious
tactics such as boycotts (or buycots) or supported labelling strategies (such as running
certification schemes), which were designed to empower consumers. But the
organisations also recognised that these tactics alone were insufficient to change market
dynamics and force companies to change their practices. The fear was that they might
‘de-responsibilise’ consumers and companies. Actors might well support or participate in
a project like an accreditation scheme, but could still remain generally unaware of the
environmental harm caused by other kinds of products, and think that these simple and
limited solutions were enough to resolve the entire environmental problem (2013, p.
691).
Dubuisson-Quellier (2013) identified two main tactics that were adopted in pursuit of
changing the supply line practices of commercial market actors. The first was to get
consumers to judge products for their low environmental impact. The organisations
focused on advising consumers about conditions of production, their proximity,
49
seasonality and packaging as new criteria to evaluate products. For example:
A local piece of meat, a piece of fruit in season, a low-packaging box of
cookies, a recycled sheet of paper or a piece of furniture made from sustainably
managed forests are presented as highly valuable to consumers, whereas exotic
fruits, intensively farmed beef or highly packaged children’s desserts are
presented as products that should not be bought. (Dubuisson-Quellier 2013, p.
692)
Principles such as seasonality and proximity in food production became major issues for
these organisations, due to the enormous amount of carbon emissions generated by out-
of-season produce. But because seasonality and proximity were not criteria supported by
product labelling, consumers had no guide for observing product qualities and
catagorising them for their environmental impact. Therefore judgment devices were
assembled. One device was to connect movement supporters to the variety of alternative
food networks that had developed in France from the 1990s. Consumers were
encouraged to link with farmers’ markets, organic food coops or buy direct from farmers
(2013, p. 692). Here the local network became the device mediating the principles of
proximity and seasonality. Another complementary device was the publication of two
cicerones. The first was Shopping Coach, a purse or pocket sized fold-up leaflet that
listed in-season produce. Shopping Coach was a condensed version of another device
The Small Green Book for the Earth, which was a broad guide for reducing one’s
environmental impact (2013, p. 694):
[Consumers were guided in] choosing in-season products, choosing eco-labelled
products, choosing organic food, checking for the presence of GMOs, reducing
meat consumption by consuming other sources of protein, not wasting food,
using the car as little as possible for shopping, using a basket and avoiding
plastic bags, avoiding packaged food, choosing green products, recycling
batteries, thinking about tropical forests, avoiding disposable products and
finding sustainable alternatives, checking energy labelling, and repairing and
reusing as much as possible. (Dubuisson-Quellier 2013, p. 694)
The rationale underpinning these devices was not to orient consumers to specific
50
‘products, brands or shops, but to provide them with principles of value that could help
them identify the kinds of shops, products and producers they should favour’
(Dubuisson-Quellier 2013, p. 694). For example The Small Green Book for the Earth
supplied information such as how a locally-grown piece of fruit consumes 10 times less
oil than an out-of-season import (2013, p. 692). Although the link was not made in the
article, it is easy to imagine how the two cicerones worked synergistically with the
network of local producers in creating a mingling of devices, which guided consumers
towards exchanges based on the principles of proximity and seasonality.
Dubuisson-Quellier identified a second tactic at play. In addition to constructing devices
to guide a movement of consumers, they turned their attention to the production side of
the market. In contrast to contentious tactics such as lobbying the state, threatening court
action, or promoting boycotts to constrain business behaviour, the alternative tactic is to
create business opportunities that assisted the dominant market players (2013, p. 695).
Movement organisations put ‘as much effort into disseminating information about the
shift in product valuation and consumer preferences as they do into organizing that shift
in practice at the consumer level’ (2013, p. 696). This process is a type of storytelling (or
framing) that persuaded market producers that adapting products and practices in line
with movement principles would leverage changing consumer preferences. One specific
action was for organisations to draw on consumer opinion polls in order to give their
arguments an objective appearance (2013, p. 696). For example, one organisation
launched a campaign called Challenge the Earth, which urged consumers to register
online their commitment to adopting eco-friendly consumption habits, such as eating in-
season produce. In 2011 the website registered over 900,000 people, which was used as
evidence of the re-ordering of consumer preferences. There was, of course, no way that
the organisation could verify the quality of commitments, but that was beside the point.
The tactic was to use a confluence (that is to say they drew on selling techniques) to
persuade market players that the new valuation criteria had become established and was
a business opportunity that could be leveraged (2013, p. 697).
The current study
Dubuisson-Quellier’s (2013) work extends the insights of the empirical studies presented
in section two, which observed how social movements affect markets by intentionally or
unintentionally mediating between supply and demand. But here we get a sharper picture
51
of how they do this. Judgment devices are constructed and geared towards manipulating
the evaluation criteria of goods. In this treatment, movement actors can choose to be
contentious and challenge the status quo, or they might intentionally peruse a non-
conflict tactic aimed at assisting dominant market players by creating economic
incentives to get them to change their practices. My study will follow this lead. To my
knowledge, there is no other research that integrates the valuation literature with the A
Theory of Fields framework proposed by Fligstein and McAdam (2012), and then applies
this integration to studying new market formation.
The current study aims to understand the emergence of the Australian organic food
market. Fligstein (2008, p. 15-16) understands emerging markets as fields of interaction
where two or more groups orient their action towards each other, but have yet to form a
stable collective template of action. These spaces are conceived as being largely
unorganised and rife with opportunities for actors to shape crucial relationships:
In unorganized social space, everything is up for grabs: what the purpose
of the field is, what positions exist, who occupies which position, what
the rules of the game are, and how actors come to understand what other
actors are doing. (Fligstein 2013, p. 41)
New spaces are political opportunities where actors realise the opportunity to forge new
structures; skillfully wield alternative frames on how to organise that space (convincing
others to back their conception of control); create organisational vehicles to take hold of
resources; and build coalitions with other groups to control that space (Fligstein 2008, p.
15-16).
I see judgment devices as a fundamental tactic in establishing a conception of control in
new markets. Firstly, judgments devices help define the qualities of products, and orient
stakeholders around what that market is about. In establishing a market like organic food,
we can expect that devices such as appellations, in the form of a standards and
certification, become important in differentiating what is an aesthetically-identical
product from its conventional counterpart. Much like the earlier discussion on Halal
food, organic food creates its point of distinction by signalling to consumers the
symbolic moral qualities promised by an alternative system of production. Market
52
stakeholders are therefore able to distinguish the boundaries between their market and an
established proximate market for the same type of product.
Secondly, judgment devices establish order between actors that mitigates the harsher
elements of competition (such as having to compete purely on price). As argued by
Fligstein, actors in new markets are more susceptible to failure because there is no
conception of control to guide expected action and buffer against the forces of
competition (2001, p. 78). The example given earlier of the settlement in the soft drink
market broadly described routine action between incumbents Coke and Pepsi. Here these
two incumbents settled the rules of competition around the use of confluences (selling
techniques around advertising, diversification of product and discounts). Similarly,
Rössel and Beckert (2013) described how high-end producers in the German wine
market created a niche by settling the rules of competition vis-à-vis mainstream
producers. Establishing different ranking systems meant that producers could choose
different devices that channelled their products into a high-end or mass market space.
This meant that the same type of product could be placed into mutually-exclusive spaces
within the overall wine market, but did not have to compete directly. Again, in
establishing the organic food market, we can expect devices such as standards and
certification to take a central role in attempting to shield organic food from competing
directly with its mainstream counterpart.
Conclusion
This literature review has been presented in four parts. In the first section, I contrasted
the difference between a sociological and classical economic understanding of economic
markets. I established that a major difference lies in the understanding of market order.
Economics sees the aggregate of rational exchange as creating market order. Sociology
understands order as a result of stable social structures being constructed and maintained.
In the second section, I presented a recent and major development within economic
sociology, being the increasing mingling of organisational and social movement lines of
inquiry. The converging approach focuses on the role of contention in markets. I also
presented examples from a fledging offshoot of this conversation, regarding how
collective actors influence the emergence of new markets. Here we observed skilled
social movements or movement-like actors facilitating conditions that laid the
53
foundations for new ventures.
In the third section, I presented a state-of-the-art framework from Fligstein and
McAdam, which pushes forward this converging approach. In presenting A Theory of
Fields (2012), I also drew upon previous ideas from Fligstein (2001). This framework
forms the basis of the current study’s general approach to studying the emergence of the
organic food market.
In the final section, I presented the economic sociology of valuation, which offered a
fine-grained set of ideas around how market order depends on actors being able to view
and compare the relative qualities of market offerings. I addressed the complexities of
imaginative goods, and the judgment devices that are constructed, operated or challenged
in order to stabilise product qualities. In particular, I described a pioneering study by
Dubuisson-Quellier (2013), who bridged the valuation literature with the developing
conversation between social movement and organisational scholars. The current study
follows this example. It joins the fledging line of inquiry exploring emerging markets
and social movement dynamics.
54
–CHAPTER THREE–
Methods
Any historical moment is both the result of prior process and an
index towards the direction of its future flow. (Thompson 1978, p.
239)
Overview
This chapter describes the methods adopted in the current study. A qualitative research
approach was taken. Qualitative methods are particularly useful when certain phenomena
are poorly understood or the association between actors is unclear, because they allow for
a rich, detailed, interpretive analysis (Maguire et al. 2004, p. 660). This approach accords
with the research questions, which explore the little-understood case of Australian organic
food market emergence.
Two research tools were used in this study. The first was a process analysis of historical
documents produced mainly by those actors central to key episodes of market
development. The second was semi-structured interviews with pioneering actors from the
organic food supply chain.
In the sections below, I provide detail on the research approach, site selection, and the
collection and analysis of data. To facilitate better clarity, some coding examples can be
found in Appendix 1.
Research perspective As established earlier, scholarship on the topic of Australian organic food has been
primarily focused on the post-1990s period. This means that the body of research is
weighted heavily towards the period after the organic food market was established, with
little attention on how it came into being.
Process methods specifically address questions about how organisational phenomena –
such as institutions, organisational practices or actors – emerge, develop, grow or
terminate over time. Research focuses empirically on the temporal progressions that focal
subjects experience as the crucial element for understanding and explaining change
(Langley et al. 2013, p. 1-4). While quantitative methods can be useful for setting out the
55
systemic patterns of relationships proximate to organisational phenomena, they are weak
in providing the temporally-embedded accounts that illuminate how these patterns came
to be (Langley 2007, p. 273). Where quantitative studies might explain social change in
terms of ‘more of X and more of Y produce more of Z’, process studies aim to answer
phenomena in terms of event sequence, such as ‘do A and then B to get C’ (Langley 1999,
p. 692). The aim of process studies is to present nuanced multi-level stories. They make
clear how and why a particular event sequence unfolds, by tracking a range of focal cases
as they progress from period to period (Poole et al. 2000, p. 37).
Breaking into the organic food field
Fligstein (2001, p. 15) argued that strategic action fields operate under unique local
cultures. That is to say, they operate under sets of context-specific formal and informal
rules (or structures) that guide action in a space at a particular point in time. Prior to
commencing the current study, I did not have a background in the organic food industry.
By extension, my local knowledge of this market and its historical trajectory was low.
In order to obtain a grip upon the Australian Industry, I identified two major industry
reports – ‘The market for Australian produced organic food’ (1990) and ‘The domestic
market for Australian organic produce: an update’ (1996) – which offered a thorough
analysis of market structures and dynamics from the early- to mid-1990s. As the title
suggests, the second report was an update to the first, which allowed for continuity in
observation of market development. One overarching observation was that the first report
described a market that was experiencing massive coordination issues across many facets
of the space, whereas the second report was describing a market that, notwithstanding
several problems, had become well ordered. In addition, I found a chapter in an edited
volume, Organic Farming: An International History (2007), written by Wynen and Fritz,
two of the co-founders of organic food peak body the National Association for
Sustainable Agriculture Australia (NASAA). This rare account briefly tracked the
organisation’s central role in commercialising organic food from the early 1980s.
The second tactic to obtain a broad overview of the field was to find a key informant.
Babbie (2010, p. 195) noted the importance of finding informants capable of offering the
richest information possible vis-à-vis the topic of inquiry. My criterion was to find an
individual who was involved in the sustainable agriculture movement or market during its
56
formative years, and who had a grip on the market’s historical trajectory and how it fitted
within the broader food market.
In February 2009, I approached several Melbourne-based organic food retailers for advice
on potential candidates. Retailers were approached because they were the easiest access
point to the market. Retailer Paul Simmons from Fork to Fork Organics in Thornbury, an
inner Melbourne suburb, was an appropriate informant. Paul graduated in horticulture
from Hawkesbury Agriculture College during the mid-1980s. Following graduation, he
worked on a massive conventional stone fruit farm in country New South Wales, regularly
interfacing with various sales agents and other intermediaries at the Flemington
Wholesale Market in Sydney. After several months of farm work, he began to experience
certain irritations due to chemical exposure. This led to a deep questioning of the
conventional food production system, and his interest in the nascent sustainable
agriculture industry. In the early 1990s, he joined Willing Workers on Organic Farms, and
over the next twelve months worked on 16 different sustainable agriculture farms.
Eventually he settled in Melbourne, having recognised that a critical mass had formed in
the Victorian organic food market. For the next two years, he worked for an intermediary
at the Footscray Wholesale Market, and then for a large retailer as the chief produce
buyer. This involved responsibility for maintaining product lines and supplier
relationships. By the mid-1990s, he had established his own organic produce home
delivery service in Melbourne’s western suburbs, which eventually graduated into a
‘bricks and mortar’ store. At the time of our discussion, he was also growing produce on
certified organic land in country Victoria, with the aim of eventually supplying farmers’
markets. Paul had the scope to offer great detail on a wide set of topics pertinent to
organic food market development. Two exploratory in-depth interviews were conducted,
accounting for over four hours of discussion.
The data accumulated in this early stage was worked into lists of the key actors,
descriptions on their role in the fledgling market, and a basic chronology of key
occurrences. Although partial, the process enabled me to make further vital decisions
about the research design.
Choosing the research site
Fligstein and McAdam suggested that when adopting field analysis, researchers ought to
be clear about membership in a particular space. Taking a broad definition, they advised
57
focusing on actors ‘who routinely take each other into account in their actions’ (2012, p.
167-168, emphasis in the original) and share a stake in a common space. By doing so, the
analyst can simplify the complexity of the social world by: orienting around the key
players and their crucial relationships; tracking the strategic jockeying of those players;
and identifying the key rationales for action (2012, p. 168).
The current study focused on two main fields. These spaces shared proximity, mutually
influenced each other, and consisted of actors who had a stake in the development of the
Australian organic food market (whether supporting or opposing). The first was what I
call the sustainable agriculture field: that is, the collection of actors who shared an
interest in the commercialisation and mainstreaming of organic food in Australia from the
early 1980s. Actors included the sustainable agriculture social movement, constituted by
regional groups like the Henry Doubleday Research Association and Soil Association of
South Australia, and the federation of those groups that made up NASAA. The field also
included the chain of farmer-intermediary-retailers who produced and distributed organic
food throughout the country. The early 1980s was a clear departure point for this field,
because actors were creating and orienting around new structures, such as production
standards and certification, industry conferences, industry peak bodies, and supply and
demand.
Fligstein and McAdam further argued that the long-term trajectory and dynamics of any
one field can be just as affected by threats and opportunities from external fields as they
are by their internal strategic actions. Failing to take account of external linkages can
leave analysis incomplete, because crucial influencing factors are placed outside the scope
of observation (2012, p.168-169). Locating the role of the state is particularly important,
because state action – purposive or unintended – can potentially affect the workings of all
non-state fields. Equally, groups in non-state fields often take their grievances directly to
state actors as a tactic to ‘control the agenda that will regulate relations in their fields’
(2012, p. 173).
The second field is what I call the agri-food policy field: that is, the collection of actors
who shared an interest in the regulation of food production, and were particularly oriented
around the issues of sustainable agriculture and the growth of agricultural chemical
hazards from the early 1980s. This period was a clear departure point for this field in
terms of increasing turbulence over issues of food quality and safety, and the question of
58
which methods of production held greater utility. Prominent state actors included the
(state and federal) Departments of Agriculture, the Australian Quarantine Inspection
Service, the National Food Authority, the National Health and Medical Research Council,
and the balance-of-power party in the Australian Parliament, the Australian Democrats.
These actors were jockeying to balance the maximisation of Australian food exports,
while maintaining the country’s reputation as a quality food producer.
Three main non-state groups were particularly important players in this field. First were
the consumer movement represented by the Australian Federation of Consumer
Organisations (AFCO) and the Australian Consumers Association (ACA). These actors
were jockeying to have states implement better consumer safety structures. They
perceived the hazards caused by agricultural chemicals as a major issue for their
movement. Second was conventional agriculture, represented by a coalition between the
Agricultural and Veterinary Chemicals Association (AVCA) and the National Farmers’
Federation (NFF). These actors were navigating to quell the growing societal criticism
around agricultural chemicals. Finally was the sustainable agriculture movement,
represented by actors like NASAA. A number of actors from the sustainable agriculture
field were simultaneously operating in the agri-food policy field, jockeying to have their
private standards ratified and the organic food market better supported by various state
actors.
Documentary data sources
Unlike quantitative studies that seek to draw representative samples, qualitative research
draws on sources that augment understandings around the process of social life within a
particular context (Neuman 2006, p. 219-220). Esterberg (2002, p. 93) argued that
purposive sampling is an appropriate choice when the researcher understands that
particular sources could maximise insight into a topic.
My preliminary investigations had oriented me towards a particular population of actors
who were active in the development or constraint of the organic food market in Australia.
Although this list evolved and became sharper over the course of the research, an initial
large-scale search of the TROVE database assessed the available data around these actors.
Between June and December 2009, I physically assessed documents held in libraries
across the nation. It was observed that many actors were prolific producers and subjects of
a wide range of documents. Three main types were chosen due to their ability to offer a
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superior continuity in observing actions. I briefly describe them next.
Field media
The first document type I identified was field media, such as journals, newsletters and
newspapers, which reported on the sustainable agriculture and agri-policy fields. A
particular strength of using media accounts is that they often have long-term continuity in
their publication, making ‘them especially useful for looking at changes over time'
(Esterberg 2002, p. 124). A key criticism is that such accounts can display a description
bias, pushing the particular point of view of its publisher (2002, p. 124). Like Hoffman
(1999, p. 356), the current study embraces this bias as a vital tool for identifying strategic
action. These texts offered a historical record, but also displayed the motivations and
rationales behind particular actions from these actors. Their biased interpretation of events
and issues was taken to be reflective of the interests and beliefs of their organisation’s
readership.
Within sustainable agriculture, most organisations had their own publications. These were
particularly useful in observing action during the early 1980s, when initial moves were
made to commercialise organic food. For example, Tasmanian group the Organic
Gardening & Farming Society (OGFS) produced Organic Growing, which reported
frequently on NASAA during its establishment stage. From the late 1980s, a flush of
industry newspapers emerged where key actors were contributors and often subjects of
reports. Publications such as ACRES Australia and Eco-Ag: The Future For Farming
were useful because they were commercially oriented, and detailed the obstacles and
successes of the emerging organic food market.
The key actors within the agri-food policy field also had publications that were useful in
observing the unfolding turbulence over food issues. The chemical industry peak body
AVCA published Farm Chemicals Today, and the consumer movement published titles
like Consuming Interest. Official government agencies were also important publishers.
AQIS produced the AQIS Bulletin, and the National Food Authority produced The Food
Standard.
Conference proceedings
The second document type I identified was conference proceedings geared towards either
issues pertinent to the emerging organic food market, or the hazards around conventional
60
agriculture production. Conferences are recognised as being field-configuring events
(FCEs). FCEs are defined as fleeting and temporally-bound social organisations that
‘allow disparate constituents to become aware of their common concerns, join together,
share information, coordinate their actions, shape or subvert agendas, and mutually
influence field structuration’ (Anand & Jones 2008, p. 1037). Conferences are particularly
useful in observing emerging social spaces. As demonstrated by Möllering (2010), they
can offset the uncertainty of nascent ventures by forging new knowledge and collective
practices.
The sustainable agriculture field was prolific in organising and participating in organic
food conferences from the early 1980s. The main goal of these conferences was to create
a context for knowledge accumulation for the nascent market. I identified 12 relevant
FCEs between 1984 and 1994. The content of these events generally took three main
forms: technical scientific knowledge, market-related knowledge and political issues.
Actors from within the agri-food policy field were also organisers and participants in a
number of conferences. Given the many events in this domain, I limited my choice to
those that maximised insight into actors’ positions and actions towards the emerging
market for organic agriculture, or the turbulence over mainstream food hazards. Six were
identified. One was a 1989 food industry conference Pure Food: The challenge to
Agribusiness. The other five were the annual conferences of the chemical industry held by
AVCA between 1984 and 1988. These featured presenters mainly from the chemical
industry, related industries, and relevant government and bureaucratic actors. Topics were
similar to the three themes found in the sustainable agriculture field conferences, with
political topics featuring heavily. These often covered the relationship of the chemical
industry with governments and anti-chemical groups (such as those from sustainable
agriculture), and discussion on how their critics might be constrained.
Official texts
The final document type I identified was public records documents. Public records refer to
materials produced for official purposes by a variety of social institutions (Esterberg 2002,
p. 121). I identified a range of documents discussing relevant food policy issues from a
number of state actors from the early 1980s. Assembling these texts together was
particularly useful in gaining a richer insight into conflict or agreement between powerful
state actors. One example was a 1988 discussion paper published by the Australian
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Quarantine Inspection Service (AQIS) entitled ‘Implications of Increasing World Demand
for Organically Grown Food’. This paper made clear that AQIS supported government
involvement in the development of the organic food market, and offered
recommendations on how this might be achieved.
Interview sources
As the coding of documents progressed, it became clear that within the sustainable
agriculture field, the pre-1990s data was skewed towards the political maneuverings of the
movement, or internal projects associated with the development of NASAA. In terms of
describing market dynamics and the challenges faced when coordinating the supply chain,
information was inconsistent. In particular, the accounts from intermediaries and retailers
were thin. In order to bring balance, I conducted targeted interviews. Individuals listed in
two industry directories were approached, being ‘Organics: A directory of businesses and
services’ (Morgan & DARA 1989) and the ‘Organic Industry Membership Directory’
(ORGAA 1997). I set the criteria that wholesalers and retailers ought to have entered the
organic food industry no later than the early-1990s, assuming that latecomers would not
have experienced an emerging market, but one already established. From over 30 entries,
18 were not contactable due to being out of business. Of the remainder, 10 individuals
agreed to face-to-face interviews, which were conducted between September 2009 and
November 2010. Five were conducted in Melbourne, three in Sydney, and one in New
York, USA. Eight were organic retailers, three were intermediaries (two of whom had
graduated from being retailers), and one was the former chief produce buyer for a well-
known health food chain. All retailers were owner-operators of outlets that sold a range of
fresh and dry foods.
Almost all interviewees identified becoming involved in the organic food market because
of an association with the sustainable agriculture movement. For example, most were
active members of groups such as NASAA and ORGAV. Of particular importance to the
study were the intermediaries. Although they represented a small sample, these particular
actors were responsible for establishing and developing the two biggest wholesale
operations in Melbourne and Sydney. Moreover, the retailers talked extensively about the
massive influence these intermediaries wielded in shaping market dynamics. Table 1
summarises the key attributes of participants.
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Table 1: Key attributes of interviewees representing the organic food supply chain Name Role Organisational affiliation Period of entry John Williams Retailer then intermediary Montrose Organics,
The Organic Wholesaler (Melbourne)
Early 1980s
Ian Diamond Retailer then intermediary Upwey Health Foods, The Organic Wholesaler (Melbourne)
Early 1980s
Phillip Rougon Intermediary Eco Farms (Sydney)
Late 1980s
Bruce Standish Retailer Natural Health Supply (Melbourne)
Mid 1970s
Dennis Alexander Retailer Eastfield Natural Foods (Melbourne)
Early 1980s
Ian Nixon Farmer and then retailer
Vic Market Organics (Melbourne)
Late 1980s
Heather Wilson-Steel Chief produce buyer Russells Natural Food Market (Sydney)
Early 1980s
Michael Thornton Home delivery service then retailer
Go Vita Caringbah (Sydney)
Late 1980s
Scott Kinnear Retailer Organic Wholefoods (Melbourne)
Late 1980s
Sam Staley Retailer Dynamic Veggies (Melbourne)
Early 1990s
Total: 10
Each interview ran over two hours in length, with a follow-up conducted with one retailer.
In total the interviews amounted to almost 30 hours of discussion. Interviews were semi-
structured, beginning with a question as to how they got involved in trading organic food.
This broke the ice, and allowed me to gauge ‘on the fly’ how to weight certain lines of
questioning. For example, questions about how retailers sourced supply prior to the entry
of wholesalers were not directed to those who entered the market in the early 1990s.
Questions were structured around five main topics: motivations for trading in organic
food; the relationship dynamics between intermediaries and farmers; the relationship
dynamics between intermediaries and retailers; the relationship dynamics between
retailers and consumers; and broader political events and influences. Spot checking
interviewees for clarity on certain points or confirmation of particular occurrences was
deployed regularly.
Data Analysis Qualitative data analysis is a process in which the researcher actively constructs meanings
from raw data such as documents and interview transcripts. Two researchers facing the
same data might analyse it in vastly different ways. The aim of a qualitative study is then
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to achieve plausibility in approach rather than allowing for rigid replication (Esterberg
2002, p. 152). My analysis involved several stages, which are described below.
Organising the data
Following the approach taken by Maguire and Hardy (2009, p. 153), I chronologically
ordered the data into a document database, which represented the flow of who did what
and when, and who said what and when. As noted by Poole et al. (2000, p. 91-92),
temporally ordering the data enables the researcher to systematically evaluate action as it
unfolds, and inductively construct a narrative of social change. At the time of coding,
there were no available instructional guides on setting up an event sequence study in
NVivo. My tactic was to digitise all collected texts, including interview transcripts and
researcher notes. Texts were imported into relational database software NVivo as
‘internals’, where a tree-type folder structure was developed to keep the document data in
order of year and month of publication. This brought order to the data, and enabled quick
access for editing, analysis and reporting.
Familiarisation with the data
The next step was to engage in the process of immersion. Each data source was read
systematically, focusing on one actor at a time. This allowed continuity in observing the
unfolding of action from each actor’s angle. It also enabled me to get a sense of the levels
of contribution by particular actors, and to start to form a picture of the trajectory and
dynamics of the two fields of focus.
Throughout the process, memos were generated by constantly asking the data a set of
sensitising questions drawn from Fligstein and McAdam (2012, p. 165). These included:
Who were the key actors that vied for control of the emerging field? What alternative
conceptions or models did these actors bring to the field? What resources – whether
material, political, ideological – did key competing actors bring to the founding struggle?
Who triumphed and why? What role did external actors – especially state actors – play in
the outcome of the founding episode?
One major understanding from this process was the realisation that conflict between
actors from both the sustainable agriculture and agri-food policy fields was generally over
competing versions of sustainable agriculture. There was variance in opinion within both
fields over whether sustainable agriculture meant completely substituting farm chemicals
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for alternative non-chemical methods, or whether it meant using synthetic chemicals in
safer and more judicious ways.
Observing process patterns
It is useful for process studies to distinguish between incidents and events: ‘incidents are
operational empirical observations, while events are abstract concepts of bracketed or
coded sets of incidents’ (Van de Ven 2007, p. 217). On their own, incidents are just raw
materials, in that they are qualitative summaries or indicators of what happened (Poole et
al. 2000, p. 140). By contrast, events are not directly observed but rather constructed by
streams of incidents. Constructed events can vary in qualities: holding different temporal
durations, overlapping with other events, nesting in larger events, or happening in
different spatial contexts (2000, p. 131).
Following Poole (2000, p. 133), I began by turning the raw data into incidents (the basic
unit of analysis). The current study observed incidents when key actors gave a
retrospective description about: (1) the actions they or others had taken regarding the
development or constraint of some aspect of the organic food market (such as standards,
or creating peak bodies); or (2) the actions they or others had taken regarding the
development or constraint of sustainable conventional agriculture (such as creating
chemical safety accreditation systems, lobbying the state for particular food policy
outcomes); or (3) environmental factors described by key actors as having a bearing on
their goals (such as recessions or food scares).
Each incident became a separate unit in the database. Following the decision rule set by
Poole et al. (2000, p. 158), at the minimum, units needed to contain summary descriptions
about the action taken, details of the main actors involved, the outcome, the date of action,
and if possible a rationale for why the action took place. I drew over 500 individual
incidents from the data, representing occurrences between 1982 and 1995.
To identify events, the analysis took a grounded approach that circled between raw data
and incident sequences (See Langley 1999, p. 699-700). Incidents were open coded based
on the goal of action (the main focus of action), or for environmental incidents according
to their effect (the main impact). I was mindful that new information might disrupt past
coding labels and require reappraisal (Green et al. 2007, p. 548). For instance, the initial
codes relating to organic food production standards were coded as ‘developing standards’,
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but it quickly became clear that coding categories needed to discern between standards
being developed, standards being implemented, and standards being ratified.
As the database was assembled, collections of time-ordered incidents became observable.
Some of these were then identified as events. In particular, incidents were identified that
initiated, extended and brought closure to a particular type of occurrence (Poole et al.
2000, p. 141). For example, I observed that the initial proposal to federate sustainable
agriculture happened at a 1983 conference on chemical hazards in Australia. Then a
succession of incidents elaborated upon the proposal: for example the lobbying of
sustainable agriculture movement groups, the formation of a steering committee, several
committee meetings, and the drafting and passing of a constitution. The final incident was
one that described the official inauguration of the organisation and how it was poised to
implement its agenda. I judged this as a closure (or cap over the incident stream) because
the planning phase ended and a clear change had occurred. I labeled this event:
‘Establishment of NASAA (1983-1986)’.
Events can, in turn, be ‘recoded into higher-order categories’ (Poole et al. 2000, p. 145).
For example, the ‘Establishment of NASAA (1983-1986)’ was one of several events.
along with ‘Development of first organic standards (1982-1986)’, that were nested within
a higher-order event category, which I labelled as: ‘Sustainable agriculture federates
(1982-1986)’. The process of inductively nesting events laid the path for temporal
bracketing, where clusters of events were worked into distinct time-blocks marking
‘certain continuity in the activities within each period and … certain discontinuities at its
frontiers’ (Langley 1999, p. 703). Decomposing data into consecutive adjoining periods
allows the analyst to explicitly examine how the ‘actions of one period lead to changes in
the context that will affect action in the subsequent periods’ (1999, p. 703). This process
required taking a wider lens, identifying larger themes that explained the array of
accumulated events. For the sustainable agriculture field, I identified three blocks:
planning and theorising the organic food market (1982-1986), implementing the organic
food market (1987-1989), and consolidating the market niche (1990-1995). For the agri-
food policy field I also identified three blocks: increasing orientation towards food
production hazards (1982-1986), crisis and sense making over solutions to production
hazards (1987-1989), and transformation of the agri-food policy field (1990-1995).
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Observing framing patterns
According to Fligstein and McAdam (2012, p. 50-51), a basic problem key field actors
face is framing stories that convince others to cooperate, while simultaneously framing
against opponents. Specifically, framing implies that actors define problems, diagnose
causes, make moral judgments, and propose remedies (Entman 1993, p. 52).
Capturing incidents and events are about identifying retrospective action. Such accounts
might miss descriptions of actors’ intended actions, or the nuanced position stakeholders
hold on a range of topics pertinent to particular actions. In order to capture actors’ framing
tactics, I followed Beckert (2008, p. 295-297), who analysed patterns of argumentation.
Arguments were coded when key actors were identified in the data as deploying a
statement of position coupled with justification for their intended action, or their
understanding about a particular topic. For example: we ought to do X because of Y
(arguing for a course of action), or agricultural chemicals are hazardous because of Z
(arguing on a topic). I identified almost 400 arguments between 1982 and 1995.
Arguments were kept in their temporal order, and nested within the events already
identified through the process coding. For example, the event ‘Chemical industry enters a
crisis (1983-1986)’ contained a range of codes with arguments making sense of the crisis,
and what ought to be done about it. Similarly, the event ‘Establishment of NASAA (1983-
1986)’, contained a range of codes with arguments for and against the federation, and
what type of action the organisation ought to engage in.
Creating a market emergence narrative
The aim of a process narrative is to achieve an understanding ‘not through formal
propositions but by providing “vicarious experience” of a real setting in all its richness
and complexity’ (Langley 1999, p. 695). In order to turn this process data into a
meaningful narrative, I followed the tactics described by Woiceshyn (1997, p. 461), who
advocated the adoption of literary devices. I began by constructing tables in a word
document, which corresponded to the temporal blocks that had emerged from the data.
For each event within these blocks, I built up information around plot (being the
description of event progressions, connections between events, how climaxes and
conflicts unfolded); characterisation (being the actors’ goals and motivations); and theme
(being the summation of the central conflict or ‘situation’ of that story). This process
involved a constant flipping between the data in NVivo, key concepts within A Theory of
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Fields, other theoretical concepts and the word document tables. The final consideration
of style involved decisions about how the three former elements would be presented, in
terms of their weightings and what gets omitted (Woiceshyn 1997, p. 467).
Consent and Confidentiality The National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research sets the framework in
Australia for protecting research participants from harm, whether physical, emotional,
social, economic or legal (NHMRC 2015). In light of this framework, there were two key
ethical considerations around consent and confidentiality. Consent implies the researcher
has offered participants full explanations about the goals and scope of their research.
Participants ought to have enough information to know what they are getting into prior to
participation (Neuman 2006, p. 135). Confidentiality means that certain information
deemed to be harmful to participants is withheld from public presentation, or written as an
aggregate that masks the link between individuals and their information (2006, p. 139).
With this in mind, all interviews began by reading over the informed consent statement.
The statement detailed the aim of the research, the potential uses of the data, the right to
refuse participation, the right to request anonymity, and to let me know when comments
were off record. All interviewees agreed to participate under their real names, and all off-
record comments were kept in confidence. At the end of each interview, I asked
participants whether they wished to retract any comments. Each was given contact details
of my supervisor and me, and encouraged to get in touch should they develop concerns
associated with participation. I am confident that my representation of these actors is fair,
authentic and done in the spirit of no harm.
Credibility
A number of measures were taken to enhance the credibility of the current study, some of
which have been mentioned throughout this chapter. Two warrant explicit mention.
Firstly, I adopted data triangulation. This implies that multiple data sources have been
assembled that share a similar focus but ‘obtain diverse views about a topic for the
purpose of validation’ (Kimchi et al. 1991, p. 364). My tactic was to bring together
documents produced by as many as possible of the actors identified as key players in the
sustainable agriculture and agri-food policy fields. In this sense, I was striving for a
comprehensive understanding of occurrences by assembling a variety of views (whether
contested or congruent) in different settings (being sustainable agriculture and agri-food
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domain), and at different time periods (from the early 1980s through to the mid-1990s).
The adoption of interviews with key supply chain actors also bolstered the variety of data
sources.
The second tactic I used to facilitate credibility was a variation of member checking.
Member checking refers to taking the findings back to the subjects of the study – usually
interviewees – for feedback on the accuracy of conclusions or narrative accounts
(Creswell & Miller 2000, p. 127). This technique has drawn some criticism, because
subjects may not be the best judges of what counts as valid research, or their interests
might clash with the goals of the analyst (Koelsch 2013, p. 170-172).
My approach was not to take the subjects backstage, so to speak, but to conduct specially-
designed in-depth interviews to calibrate the weightings given to particular events and
issues, and also add more detail to them. Two member checks were conducted. The first
happened approximately halfway through data analysis with Scott Kinnear, retailer and
founding Chair of the Organic Federation of Australia. The second was conducted
towards the end of data analysis with Tim Marshall, the founding president of NASAA,
and one of the country’s most preeminent voices on organic growing.
I offer one brief example of how this approach was beneficial. Prior to the current study,
there was no research discussing the link between the beef residue crisis (explained in
Chapter 5) and organic food. My analysis had weighted this crisis as a major initial driver
of consumer demand for organic food, and also a departure point for tightening legislation
around agricultural chemicals. Tim Marshall confirmed this weighting, and also added
new detail on how it also propelled NASAA’s initial public profile.
Limitations
The main limitation of the current study was that some key actors’ contributions to market
emergence were not explored. A main example of this was the lack of account from the
Biological Farmers of Australia (BFA), which formed after NASAA to become the
second main organic certification body in Australia. Their initial focus was more in line
with a traditional farming association than identifying with the broad social movement
mobilised by NASAA. Unlike NASAA, the organisation left very little on the public
record prior to the 1990s. Moreover, requests to interview the organisation’s founders
were not accepted. Therefore there was little capacity to gather adequate information.
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The BFA was a competitor of NASAA, but it still shared similar interests in
commercialising organic food, and lobbying states for better market supports. In a sense
then, this organisation is represented in a more aggregate form via the coverage on
NASAA. Notwithstanding this limitation, the research presents a first-cut narrative that is
broad enough for future information on associated market-building projects, or the role of
actors whose actions were not adequately accounted for.
Summary This chapter has described the methods used in the current study. The case of Australian
organic food market emergence has not been a topic of focus by social science scholars or
other commentators. An exploratory qualitative approach was justified, because it better
captures rich temporal detail of actors’ actions in context than could quantitative
approaches. Two main fields were chosen as the research setting, and key focal actors
were identified as being crucial to the case of market emergence. A range of historical
documents and targeted interviews was assembled and analysed. Key events were drawn
from the data, temporally ordered, worked into bracketed events, and then graduated into
a narrative of market emergence.
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–CHAPTER FOUR–
From movement to market: the initial plan to commercialise organic food in Australia, 1982-1986
Public opinion is moving in our favour, presenting a golden
opportunity to jump in with the good news that chemical-free food
is on its way. We knew this trend was growing, but perhaps we
didn’t know how far it had got. (Organic Growing 1985a, p. 1)
Here you are, devoting most of your waking life to help grow the
food and fibre needed by every [Australian]. There the anti-
chemical activists are devoting most of their waking lives to
putting you out of business. Before you can do anything about the
problem you have to realize this basic fact: anti-chemical activists
are the world’s number one crop pest … Once you recognize that,
you must treat them like a noxious weed or a pernicious disease
that attacks public opinion and public policy. They are just another
hostile organism that must be controlled … You are trained and
experienced in dealing with biological pests. Anti-chemical
activists are a social and political pest ... You cannot rely on
scientific facts alone in dealing with society and politics. (Ron
Arnold, Centre for the Defense of Free Enterprise 1985, p. 171)
Overview
In this chapter I argue that between 1982 and 1986, three events were crucial in
contributing to the initial commercialisation of Australian organic food. The first event
was the rise in political prominence of the consumer social movement. Here I track the
movement’s push to challenge the states’ capacity to protect the public from hazardous
consumer goods. A particularly prominent target of the movement’s attribution of threat
was the practices of the chemical industry, and the way its products were used and
regulated.
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The second event focused on the unfolding crisis of the Australian chemical industry.
This crisis pushed the industry to become increasingly oriented around strategies to
neutralise their political critics, and to reaffirm its dominant position within the agri-food
policy field. One key outcome of the conflict between the consumer movement and the
chemical industry was the creation of favourable conditions for the commercialisation of
organic food. The idea to curb chemicals in food production was gaining currency with
both Australian consumers and key elite within the agri-food policy field.
The third event that contributed to the commercialisation of organic food involved the
mobilisation of previously-fragmented sustainable agriculture groups into a federal
coalition.
This event marked a departure point for the emergence of a new field that was
established to develop a dedicated market in organic food, and directly address the
hazards of conventional agriculture.
EVENT 1: THE CONSUMER MOVEMENT INTRODUCES NOTIONS OF
PRODUCT SAFETY
In this section I will be offering a narrative of how the Australian consumer movement
emerged as a political force in Australia, and contributed to the new awareness around
consumer health and safety issues for both the agri-food policy domain and broader
Australian society.
The development of a consumer movement master frame
Frames function as interpretive devices that highlight the importance or unfairness of a
social condition, or re-define a situation as being unjust and immoral and worthy of
correction. They also function to attribute a sense of blame or causality to a given
situation, coupled with a ‘corresponding sense of responsibility for corrective action’
(Snow & Benford 1992, p. 137). Master frames are bigger ideas that tell larger narratives
about a particular social issue. Due to their generic nature, they ‘enable heterogeneous
groups to be allied in common political struggles and thus lend coherence to the
movement politics of an historical conjuncture, or even an era’ (Carroll & Ratner 1996,
p. 603). Below I detail how the consumer movement constructed and then modified a
master frame around consumer rights from its emergence in the 1960s, and then into a
period of radicalisation in Australia during the 1980s. Understanding this progression is
72
vital to contextualising the sentiment that propelled consumer demand for organic food
in Australia.
The initiation of the consumer movement
The intensification of organised consumer activism grew rapidly throughout the west
from the 1960s, with consumer groups from countries including Australia, the US and
the UK forming an umbrella organisation known as the International Organisation of
Consumers Unions (IOCU). Their cooperation was built on the notion that economic
markets were fraught with unacceptable power imbalances between individuals and
corporations in relation to political influence, economic resources and access to
information (Marsden et al. 1996, p. 7). In 1962, the IOCU galvanised around a core set
of values, outlined by US President Kennedy in a historical address to Congress
(Marsden et al. 1996, p. 15). In that address, Kennedy (1962) explained that since the
Second World War, the enormous growth in consumer products brought complications
for consumers in assessing whether some met minimum standards of safety, quality and
efficacy. To offset the economic shift, Kennedy outlined the need for four basic
consumer rights: to safety, to be informed, to choose and to be heard.
Underpinned by these values, the IOCU cultivated the worldwide growth of the
consumer movement during the 1960s and 1970s (Marsden et al. 1996, p. 11-13),
coordinated through collaborative product testing, a global newsletter, and regular
international conferences to share information (Consumers International 2013).
Emblematic of the IOCU’s level of credibility in voicing consumer concerns was its
being granted consultative status with the Economic and Social Council with several of
the United Nations’ specialised agencies, including UNICEF, FAO and the WHO
(Halpin 1984, p. 31).
In Australia there were two main consumer organisations linked in the IOCU network.
The first was the Australian Consumers’ Association (ACA), which was established in
1959 as a small volunteer-led, independent and non-political organisation, which
undertook consumer research, product testing, and published its findings in its magazine
Choice. By the mid 1980s it had become a potent force, employing almost 100 staff, and
deriving its annual budget of over $5 million dollars from more than 200,000 magazine
subscribers. The second key organisation was the Australian Federation of Consumer
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Organizations (AFCO), which was established in 1974 as an umbrella organisation that
developed consumer movement policy. AFCO drew its annual funding from the
Commonwealth, initially supported by the Whitlam-Labor government to build and
coordinate consensus within the consumer movement (Kelly 1984, p. 1270). The
Government had established grants for voluntary community groups who acted as
community watchdogs, but lacked the resources available to governments and the private
sector. The rationale at the time was that democracy worked efficiently when competing
interests had a level of equality in their access to resources (Cohen 1985, p. 3598). By
the mid-1980s, AFCO represented over 50 member organisations, ranging from
agriculture groups like the Country Woman’s Association, a host of workers’ unions, and
other groups with narrow interests such as Action for Public Transport and the Allergies
and Intolerant Reactions Association (AFCO & ACA 1984, p. 4).
Shifting to a radical agenda
By the early 1980s, a mood of insurgent radicalisation was growing within the
movement. The IOUC had for some time been conservative, in that it focused on
activities like product testing rather than direct political contestation (Halpin 1984, p.
28). For most of its history the organisation had been dominated by developed nations,
but then:
[Many] third world developing countries, which had set up their own
organisations, affiliated with the IOCU [and] they were more radical ... because
they were the ones feeling the whip as it were – rotten products, and hazardous
products, and being exploited ... [The] Malaysian regional director – Anwar
Fazal [began] pushing in the direction of most consumers living in the third
world needing consumer rights, basic rights to decent food and water and non-
polluted air, safe products, basic health and so on. (Halpin 1984, p. 28)
This shift pushed the consumer movement to focus on the increasing evidence of harmful
externalities caused by multi-national corporations. The products and practices of the
worldwide chemical industry were especially prominent. The classic text, Circle of
Poison: Pesticides and People in a Hungry World by Weir and Schapiro (1981),
highlighted the widespread dumping of restricted or banned pesticides from developed
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nations onto developing nations with weaker safety protections. Other reported incidents
included corporate giant CIBA-GEIGY intentionally spraying Egyptian children with a
known carcinogenic pesticide to test the chemical levels retained in their urine
(Consumer Views 1983b, p. 4), and the worst industrial chemical disaster the world had
experienced, India’s Bhopal tragedy in 1984, which killed 2,500 people, and continued
to injure many more (Consuming Interest 1985, p. 6-7).
In 1983, the IOCU international meeting in Tokyo saw 350 delegates assembled around
the theme of ‘Health and Safety and the Consumer’. The meeting unanimously passed a
declaration that drew on the consumer rights proposed by Kennedy, but highlighted the
notion that the fundamental right of the consumer was to be protected against the
marketing of goods hazardous to health and life. The declaration was rigid: ‘It doesn’t
matter whether it’s a car, drug or seemingly harmless toy; if it’s unsafe it shouldn’t have
been sold’ (Consuming Interest 1983, p. 23). Incoming IOUC President Anwar Fazal
captured the growing mood:
Like Auschwitz and Hiroshima, [these hazards are] a manifestation of
something fundamentally wrong in our stewardship of the earth … We need
actions that will go beyond mere “fire fighting” to directly confront and
fundamentally rethink the present paradigms ... We need to change the value
system of our industrial enterprises so that the health and safety of both people
and environment is paramount, superseding any technical or commercial
considerations. (Cited in Weir 1987, p. xii)
The Australian movement embraced the IOCU’s radical turn, with the ACA widening its
scope to encompass a range of activities from consumer education, advocating for
consumers to governments, and diffusing information via channels such as conferences,
seminars and the mass media (Halpin 1984, p. 3). Most emblematic of the change was
establishing an ACA Public Affairs Department to convert the ‘something ought-to-be-
done’ tone of Choice articles into coordinated action (Halpin 1984, p. 20).
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Constructing local frames
According to Benford and Snow, master frames function ‘as a kind of master algorithm
that colours and constrains the orientations and activities of other movements’ (2000, p.
618). By contrast, collective action frames are narrower in scope, ‘limited to the interests
of a particular group or to a set of related problems’ (2000, p. 618). Crucial in
negotiating shared understandings of a particular problematic condition or situation is the
attribution of blame or causality to particular sources (2000, p. 616).
Between 1982 and 1986, the Australian consumer movement had assessed in detail what
they considered to be major consumer hazards in Australia, with agricultural chemicals
featuring prominently. There were three main areas of concern: product dumping, current
legislative and regulatory arrangements, and official attitudes towards chemicals. They
warrant closer consideration.
Product dumping causes consumer hazards
The first and perhaps most prominent issue for the movement involved the issue of
product dumping. In Circle of Poison, Weir and Schapiro explained that pesticides
known to be hazards were being widely exported from developed to developing
countries. In the US, at least 25 per cent of total exported pesticides had been banned,
heavily restricted or never registered. Some were known to cause cancers, birth defects
and genetic mutations, but considered legal for export (1981, p. 4). Workers in the
developing nations were powerless to avoid hazards, facing obstacles such as general
illiteracy, repressive working conditions that gave rise to risk-taking, and governments
reluctant to scrutinise developed nations’ corporations (1981, p. 15). The overall results
were dire, with the World Trade Organization measuring rates of pesticide poisoning at
one person each minute, equating to 500,000 each year, with pesticide-related deaths
occurring every 45 minutes (1981, p. 11). These hazardous chemicals were then
imported back into the developed countries as food items, thereby closing the circle of
poison (1981, p. 28). Moreover, it was estimated that about 60 per cent of pesticides used
in developed nations would fail detection by health authorities, because chemicals
manufactured for export only were not originally required to lodge technical clearance
data with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) (Consuming Interest 1982b, p.
22).
76
Weir and Shapiro’s text demonstrated that pesticide hazards did not respect national
borders, making product dumping an issue for both developing and developed nations
(1981, p. 28). Commenting on the Australian case, David Weir labelled it an anomaly,
because it was neither a major manufacturer nor an exporter of chemicals, with the
majority of its pesticides imported. This was problematic, as Australia legally allowed
the usage of a number of chemicals that had been restricted or banned in the US –
effectively making it a developed nation that experienced pesticide dumping by other
developed nations (Consuming Interest 1982b, p. 22).
A broader assessment of the issue by AFCO identified that dumping was prevalent
across many consumer categories beyond chemicals. For example, in 1983 it discovered
that five people died due to faulty heart valves, dumped in Australia following a US
FDA ban; pacifiers that risked babies swallowing them and suffocating were dumped
into Australia when a manufacturer faced rejection by US authorities; and salmonella-
laced baby formula was sold for over 12 months after a manufacturer knew about the
problem. According to AFCO director John Braithwaite, transnational corporations had a
general awareness that their below-standard goods were being dumped, but
investigations were blocked by a type of wilful ignorance (Braithwaite 1984, p. 31-32).
Consumer laws
The second key hazard identified by the local consumer movement was that current
consumer recall and labelling laws exacerbated the threat to health and safety. Australia
in the early 1980s did not have laws for the compulsory recall of hazardous products. All
levels of government did have the power to ban unsafe products, but a ban did not
guarantee the removal of products from the market. A product banned in one state could
be freely sold in another that had not imposed the ban (Brown 1985, p. 1). The ACA’s
assessment of widely-used agricultural pesticide 2,4,5-T highlighted the problem with
the system, arguing that ‘the label states that the product is registered in New South
Wales and South Australia. Presumably this means it’s not registered in other states even
though we bought it in Victoria!’ (Consuming Interest 1982a, p. 10). More than that,
even if the Federal Government imposed a nation-wide ban under the Trades Practices
Act, no level of government had the power to force a recall after the product was offered
for sale. The only protection accorded to consumers was the integrity and resources of
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manufacturers or distributors, or if product recalls were built into voluntary industry
codes (AFCO & ACA 1984, p. 14). However, industry codes were problematic, because
they were not compulsory and ‘often seem observed more in breach than the observance’
(Consuming Interest 1982a, p. 11).
The movement also saw an inadequacy in relation to the labelling of agricultural
chemicals, which had enabled companies’ product literature to contain a dismally-low
standard of advice to users of their products (Consuming Interest 1982a, p. 10). The
ACA highlighted the hazard:
A leaflet for [a particular pesticide] boldly warns on the front panel: “Read
safety directions before opening” but the print on the reverse side is so small
you’d need a magnifying glass to read it … The leaflet’s first-aid advice reads:
“If poisoning occurs, contact a doctor or Poisons Information Centre” … But in
country areas medical facilities aren’t readily available. As well, country
telephone exchanges are often manual and close down on weekends and public
holidays. The advice also assumes that, when poisoning occurs, the consumer
will be able to recognise the symptoms. Nowhere are symptoms listed in the
leaflet … Under the heading ‘Precautions’, the ... label goes on to warn: “Do
not contaminate dams, pools, waterways or drains with the pesticide or used
container”. But what happens if the dam is accidentally contaminated? How
long should stock be kept away from the water before it is fit to drink again?
(Consuming Interest 1982a, p. 10-11).
Official attitudes
The third assessment of consumer hazards in Australia highlighted the concern over
perceived bureaucratic bias towards the chemical industry by key government bodies.
Australian authorities were perceived as taking a more lackadaisical approach to
authorising pesticides than countries such as the United States (Choice 1983, p. 30).
Chemicals were accepted as a tool that maximised agricultural production and produced
commercial stability, while largely ignoring their harmful externalities. This attitude was
difficult to challenge, primarily because the key federal and state assessment and
registration bodies did not allow independent groups to scrutinise findings and present
78
alternative arguments. The Australian system operated in such a way that in order to sell
a pesticide, manufacturers and distributors had first to gain clearance by the Technical
Committee on Agricultural Chemicals (TCAC), which operated out of the Federal
Department of Primary Industries (DPI). The Committee was chaired by the DPI, and
consisted of representatives from each of the states and territories and a representative
from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC). TCAC would refer
products to several NHMRC sub-committees for recommendations, such as setting the
maximum residue levels and poison classification. ACA concluded that the committee
system lacked diversity, and ought to have consumer and environmental representatives
rather than being dominated by a narrow group of medical professionals (Choice 1983, p.
30-31).
Mobilising resources and structuring opportunity
In addition to actors attributing threat or opportunity, collective action turns on
organisational vehicles marshalling resources sufficient enough to deploy novel lines of
contentious action (Fligstein & McAdam 2012, p. 20-21). The section below describes
how the Australian consumer movement appropriated its organisational structures to
spearhead their safety agenda. It also highlights how key political elite validated this
agenda.
Mobilising via international networks
The Australian consumer movement was sceptical over whether governments would act
on consumer hazards. ACA public affairs manager Allan Asher claimed that the
movement held little faith that governments were willing to resolve key problems, as was
evident in the state of play in 1983, when ‘not a single government has legislated for the
compulsory recall of dangerous products’ (Consuming Interest 1983, p. 22). The general
mood was that until slow-to-move governments acted, the consumer movement would
fill the vacuum by leveraging its international network − across 120 groups in 50
different countries. ACA and AFCO joined two particular IOCU networks. The first was
Consumer Interpol (CI), an investigative citizens-alert network concerned with product
dumping (BEUC News 1981, para. 3). Consumer Interpol was described as:
[A] system for notifying consumer groups and governmental authorities around
the world of hazardous products which may be sold in their markets. A network
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of consumer groups around the globe [are] sent regular Consumer Alerts by
Consumer Interpol. When a product is banned, recalled or otherwise found to
be hazardous in one country, consumer groups everywhere are alerted to watch
for this product on their home markets. Consumer Interpol is therefore a
constructive remedy to the dumping of a hazardous product from one country in
which it is banned into other unsuspecting countries. (Consumer Views 1984, p.
5)
The Australia arm of CI was officially launched by Barry Cohen, the Federal Minister
responsible for consumer affairs, as part of World Consumer Rights Day activities in
March 1984. The local CI network involved 100 geographically-dispersed Product
Safety Monitors, quickly assessing a product under international alert (Consumer Views
1984, p. 5). AFCO explained:
When a Consumer Alert is received, each of the [Australian] Product Safety
Monitors will visit five suitable retail outlets in their locality to ascertain
whether the hazardous product is on sale at any of them. In this way, the
network will cover over 500 retail outlets. If the product is found the
Commonwealth-State Consumer Product Advisory Committee will be notified
and government action requested. (Consumer Views 1984, p. 5)
The second IOCU vehicle joined by the Australian movement was the Pesticides Action
Network (PAN). The proposing of PAN in 1981 was the catalyst for IOCU and key
supporters such as OXFAM to address the proliferation of agricultural pesticide hazards
(Pesticide Monitor 2000, para. 9-15), given the perceived inability of the UN to curb
related hazards (Organic Growing 1985b, p. 20). By 1985, PAN membership had
swelled to 300 groups in almost 50 countries. While CI had a defensive agenda oriented
around filling a regulatory vacuum in consumer protection laws, PAN was an attack
vehicle pushing an aggressive public and political awareness agenda. In 1985 it launched
its first major global campaign known as the Dirty Dozen, a worldwide education effort
to present governments and citizens with 12 particularly hazardous pesticides, and
proposing their reduction or regulation. Specifically, this involved pesticides that were:
banned or significantly restricted by one or more key exporting counties; labelled
dangerous by actors such as the World Health Organisation; sold widely in significant
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quantities; highly toxic to humans, the environment, and wildlife; recognised as having
caused poisoning, injuries, environmental damage; or involved in abusive practices such
as product dumping (Organic Growing 1985b, p. 20).
PAN observed that Australia still used at least five of the dozen, which had been banned
or severely restricted in other developed countries. New Zealand had banned or heavily
restricted all 12, while Australia had banned none (Organic Growing 1985b, p. 20). The
local PAN network launched an education and media campaign to diffuse information
about pesticides such as DDT and 2,4,5-T, which were being sprayed on Australian food
crops. The campaign rationale was that Australian consumers faced great barriers in
assessing information on pesticide safety, and that these attributes needed to be made
clear (Short 1984, p. 110).
Proposing alternatives to agriculture chemicals
The consumer movement began prosecuting the case for more sustainable methods of
farming, with several PAN affiliates working with farmers and ramping up their
publicity of non-chemical alternatives to pest control (Asher 1986, p. 18). The shift saw
the Australian movement increasingly recognise that ‘many agricultural chemicals have
had detrimental side-effects, some of which have been so severe as to prompt a complete
cessation of pesticide use’ (Brown 1986, p. [6]). The local movement heavily supported
the development of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) as a reduction in pesticide usage:
[IPM] schemes involve an overall planned approach to pest problems
encountered in the agricultural industry. This includes consideration and
application of pest control alternatives which may or may not include some use
of chemicals. Fundamental to IPM schemes, however, is the aim of substantial
reduction in chemical usage. An IPM scheme may involve trap crops, stubble
burning, or ploughing under, hand or machine weeding, biological control, and
a variety of other mechanisms and activities, some of which formed the basis of
pre-chemical pest control and some of which have become available as a result
of new technology. (Brown 1986, p. [5-6])
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A favourable political context
With the election of the Hawke-Labor government in 1983, the opportunity opened for
the movement to pursue its consumer safety agenda. Following the election, key figures
– from Prime Minister Hawke to the Minister of Home Affair and Environment, Barry
Cohen – had meetings with the consumer movement to field opinions on a range of
matters of concern to consumers, and to enable the movement to foreshadow its
legislative reform intentions (Brown 1983, p. 1). Consumer movement actors were also
invited to participate in a number of official events and to join influential committees.
For example, AFCO Director John Braithwaite became the representative for consumer
and community groups on the Economic Planning Advisory Council (Brown 1984a, p.
1). The Attorney General also began to advocate for the establishment of a National
Consumer Product Safety Commission as a way of harmonising the states’ diverging
legislative frameworks around the recall of hazardous products (Brown 1985, p. 1).
In order to keep up with the increased demands of official duties, the Government’s
1984/1985 budget increased AFCO’s funding by over 40 per cent (Brown 1984b, p. 1).
Meeting with ACA’s Allan Asher, Prime Minister Hawke explained that there was no
theoretical limit to consumer movement involvement in government policy:
It’s a matter of looking at particular areas of activity [and seeing whether]
there’s an obvious link between the work of the body in question and the
consumer – a nexus which can be adequately represented ... If there’s a
possibility of having an effective input then there is no problem … There is still
much to be done to ensure that consumer concerns are addressed in a
comprehensive and adequate manner. The government looks forward to
meeting this challenge in cooperation with a strong consumer movement.
(Hawke 1984, p. 11)
The consumer movement also drew support for their health and safety agenda from two
further influential allies: the Australian Democrats and the media. The Democrats were
important, because they had held the balance of power in the Federal Senate since 1981,
and were considered the ‘vanguard of environmentalism in Australia’ (Madden 2009, p.
2). They were particularly aligned to the consumer movement on the issue of agricultural
chemicals. Democrats leader Janine Haines saw the current usage of chemicals as
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unsustainable, and also supported the development of IPM:
We don’t subscribe to the belief that increased farm profits and a more efficient
“farming sector” in the way that is often being used, are necessarily good for
the public, or for that matter the farming community itself. If I cited the
example of a farming sector which produced high yields of crops ... by over
farming the land and eventually destroying its ability to bear crops at all, I am
sure most people would agree ... that short term profit gained in this way was
not in the long term public interest ... [To] determine the efficiency of a set of
practices we have to take the long term view, asking ourselves whether the
practices are sustainable in the long run, and that in determining the
productivity of that set of practices we need to consider the environmental,
social and cultural costs as well as the benefits in dollars and cents. (Haines
1986, p. [1])
The second influential supporter was the media. From the year of the 1983 election, the
consumer movement’s media profile increased dramatically. The first four months of
that year saw several AFCO media releases graduate into news and get pushed through
major media channels (Consumer Views 1983a, p. 1). In the three months between
November 1983 and January 1984, the ACA conducted 136 radio and television
interviews, and received coverage in a range of print media (Halpin 1984, p. 21). The
media support was exemplified by ABC current affairs host Andrew Olle in his address
to the chemical industries 1986 annual conference:
Sometimes you mislead us; you have made mistakes on occasions; sometimes
you have cheated and rather more often you’ve simply avoided saying anything
… You’ve taught the public to depend on the stuff that you manufacture,
develop, distribute and use. They depend on it being effective and they depend
on it being safe. If they can’t depend on those things it has no place on the
market … The hard fact is that Australians are sometimes little better than
guinea pigs for your products (Olle 1986, p. [1-2])
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Olle ended his address with the following conclusion:
What you are up against in the end I suppose is that your critics are usually
saying something that demands attention that something nasty is going to
happen unless. You’re simply saying it won’t happen. The bottom line then is
that if [your critics] are wrong there will be far less harm than if you are wrong.
(Olle 1986, p. [5])
EVENT 2: THE CRISIS OF THE AGRI-CHEMICAL INDUSTRY
The destabilisation of a field can come from a variety of sources. A key source is the
invasion by adequately-resourced challenger groups wielding an altered conception of a
field. Destabilisation can also come from changes or crises in related or proximate fields
(Fligstein & McAdam 2012, p. 99-100). As this next section demonstrates, while the
consumer movement was gaining increasing levels of political support and successfully
changing the conception underpinning the agri-food policy field, the chemical industries’
incumbent position was being disrupted. They experienced increasing pressure and
scrutiny from organised critics, the public and the elite over their role in food production.
This pushed the industry to make sense of its situation and to counter-mobilise in order
to fortify their field status.
Making sense of the crisis Pre-1985: It’s not our fault
From the early 1980s, the Australian chemical industry faced increasing political and
public scrutiny. The publication of a House of Representatives 1982 report Hazardous
Chemicals: Second Report on the Inquiry into Hazardous Chemicals, identified a host of
problems including: widespread inadequate labelling that provided users little or no
safety guidance (Standing Committee on Environment and Conservation 1982, p. 1); key
government bodies such as the DPI and official assessment bodies downplaying hazards
rather than addressing strategies to control them (1982, p. 29); a great number of
chemicals used in Australia having been registered years earlier when little or no
toxicological assessment was required, and with no program to re-evaluate in light of
current toxicological knowledge (1982, p. 28); and that registration data on health and
safety impacts was largely generated from overseas tests, and accepted by officials with
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little or no local assessment. The Committee concluded that ‘the overall control of
hazardous chemicals in Australia is poor, particularly when compared to [other]
developed countries’ (1982, p. xi).
The election of the Hawke Labor government in 1983 signalled a period in which the
scrutiny was intensified. This was most evident in a landmark conference that same year,
which was entitled Hazardous Chemicals in the Australian Environment. Co-organised
by consumer movement organisation the ACA, the event sought to address the growing
sense of public concern on the topic of hazardous chemicals in society. The conference
brought together for the first time ‘the full spectrum of opinion from government,
industry, consumer and environmental groups, academics and concerned individuals’
(Dunphy 1984, p. 1). Its key objective was to establish a dialogue with all actors
involved in the use and control of toxic chemicals; to increase general awareness of the
serious hazards posed; and to discuss potential changes to legislation to protect the
environment from the potential overload of hazardous chemicals (Beauchamp & Hough
1984, p. [iii]). In the opening address, Minister for Home Affairs and Environment Barry
Cohen explained that ‘in Australia we need to be more informed about chemical hazards
and ways to manage them better and this will require more dialogue amongst concerned
persons’ (Cohen 1984, p. 5).
Representatives of the chemical industry assessed the 1983 conference differently,
arguing that they had been invited to participate under false pretences. Brian Flower,
communications Manager for industry peak body the Agricultural and Veterinary
Chemicals Association (AVCA), explained that the industry had expected meaningful
dialogue between concerned people interested in the truth about chemicals. Instead, the
conference had been stacked with consumer and environmental groups pushing ‘a tirade
of doom and gloom’ (Flower 1984, p. 116). The Australian Chemical Industry Council
(ACIC), the peak body for industrial chemicals, argued that the public’s negative image
of chemicals had less to do with chemical products, and more with a public’s heightened
emotions around cancer, stoked by other industries’ products – specifically cigarettes and
asbestos. The public needed to put emotions aside in a ‘risk versus cost versus benefits’
assessment:
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In weighing up the balance, bear in mind we are already at the stage that were
sunlight invented today it would be banned – it is a cause of cancer ... [Also]
bear in mind ... most vegetables if invented [now] would also be banned. They
contain benzopyrene – which is also formed when meat is barbecued or roasted.
Also bear in mind that total outlawing of suspects would close down the steel
industry and petroleum industry and hence anything that builds on them. Life as
we know it today would not be possible. (Lester 1984, p. 95)
In short, the criticism from the early 1980s around chemical hazards was met with strong
denial and opposition from local chemical industry peak bodies. The next section
illustrates how this industry held its position against critics.
Post-1985: It’s still not our fault
In 1985, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Organisation (CSIRO) published
the results of a consumer sentiments survey that registered the depth of public concern
about chemical hazards. The findings implied widespread scrutiny of chemicals in food
production, signalling support for the consumer movement’s calls for reduced use. The
results showed that:
57% of those questioned felt that sprays, even if carefully used made our food a
danger to health ... 53% felt food grown with chemical fertiliser was less
healthy than food grown with natural fertilisers, and, surprisingly, a third felt
that food could be satisfactorily produced without the use of pesticides. A hefty
56% felt it was important to eat organic food. (Organic Growing 1985a, p. 1)
The post-1985 period was one of intense introspection. The industry reflected heavily on
how its organised opponents had risen to prominence to dominate public and political
debate, and what strategies could be deployed to regain control. There were two main
assessments as to why the industry had lost its credibility. Firstly, it claimed that the
increasing emergence of globalisation had brought with it an internationalisation of
public awareness about consumer product hazards. Hermann Mani, Australian Manager
of CIBA-GEIGY, explained that prior to the 1960s, the public’s attitude towards the
chemical industry was largely neutral, but by the 1970s the industrialised world had
increasingly become preoccupied with quality of life concerns (Mani 1986, p. [2]). Mani
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characterised the public as now being:
… increasingly aware of ecology and environment. Pollution issues such as air
and water contamination intensified this awareness; increasingly concerned
about safety issues, especially in relation to chemical products; increasingly
sceptical about technological progress ... Bhopal, Chernobyl and food
irradiation are examples reflecting these intensified concerns. (Mani 1986, p.
[3])
The second assessment of why the chemical industry had lost public credibility was
pegged on its under-estimation of consumer issues and the skill of industry critics.
Hermann Mani argued that the chemical industry had ignored the depth of public
concerns and emotion chemical hazards evoked. Instead of engaging the public, it
confined discussions about products and practices exclusively to traditional
communication partners, such as industry members and a small set of outsiders including
suppliers and governments. Meanwhile, the consumer movement had developed from a
loose set of amateur groups to being highly professionalised and highly sensitive to the
public’s new concerns (Mani 1986, p. [5]). This positioned it as a real political force:
[The anti-chemical movement] not only controls a highly efficient
communications network, it also has access to quality information cases,
competent representatives, who are not just skilled in their particular field of
interest but quite often also experts in public debate and dialectics. These
groups are often dedicated, professional, closely linked together, have good
relations with the media, represent popular and newsworthy causes, are well
organised, and are increasingly well respected. And, most importantly in
comparison to industry, our industry in particular, they are gaining power to
influence not only public opinion but also governmental and semi-
governmental organisations. Their effect can be seen in legislation and
increasingly in corporate policy. (Mani 1986, p. [5])
At the annual chemical industry conference in 1985, AVCA researchers warned that the
industry was currently ill equipped to deal with the new business environment. They
87
offered a recent cautionary tale from the food processing industry. Having faced a
succession of international criticism over salt and cholesterol in their products, some
major processing companies had failed to recognise or take seriously the shift in public
sentiment and the corresponding expectation that they ought to correct the problem. The
result was a loss in both market share and profits (Hill & Luker 1985, p. 136-137). They
saw the chemical industry, like other Australian industries, as being on this same
trajectory:
Internationally, the potential destructiveness of issues has forced many leading
corporations to allocate more and more money and resources to identifying,
tracking and acting in this area. Generally this function has fallen in part or in
total, to public relations professionals, both within these organisations and
through external advice. So far only a relative handful of companies and
industry associations in Australia ... have formally made an increased
commitment in this area … [demonstrating] a failure to appreciate the depth and
commitment of the environmental lobby. (Hill & Luker 1985, p. 136)
The keynote speaker at the 1985 AVCA conference was Ron Arnold, Director of US
conservative think tank the Centre for the Defense of Free Enterprise. Arnold argued that
understanding the organisational structure of the anti-chemical movement was the first
step to neutralising its growing power. Firstly, he explained that anti-chemical critics
were segmentary, meaning that their movement involved many leaders, rather than one
single group or person speaking for the whole. This accorded them advantage, because a
single large company could be attacked by a procession of critics. A company might shut
down a particular critic via legal means, but there was an endless supply of others ready
to fill its role. Secondly, critics shared a common ideology. Although critics differed on
peripheral points, at their core, they had a synchronised notion that nature was sacred and
technology was sacrilege. Thirdly, critics were able to diffuse ideology within their
networked structures. Their networks provided the average citizen with a group to join
and to become active within, and ultimately a structure that could diffuse ideological
materials throughout a large audience. The logical extension was that recruits became
personally committed to an ideology, and developed an outlook of ‘us versus them’
(Arnold 1985, p. 168-169).
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In short, Arnold and others were describing the skill of the anti-chemical movement in
being able to frame the chemical industry as causing health and environmental hazards;
to construct collective action vehicles that mobilised valuable resources; and to engage in
innovative collective action against the industry.
Constructing new frames and mobilising vehicles
Social movements perceived to be potentially powerful are likely to trigger counter-
mobilisation from actors whose interests are threatened. This is especially the case when
states refrain from repressing the emergence or development of a particular movement
(Kolb 2007, p. 63). Both of these variables were present for the chemical industry,
spurring a simultaneous re-fashioning of the industry peak body to become more
oriented around public relations, and the forging of a new set of frames geared towards
justifying the need for chemicals in pure economic terms.
Restructuring the industry interface
From 1985, the industry prepared to communicate directly with the public for the first
time. Accepting that critics like the consumer movement were now part of their policy
field, the chemical industry set out the new rules of engagement. Hermann Mani from
CIBA-GEIGY explains:
[Past] attitudes such as “NO COMMENT” or “IT WON’T HAPPEN TO US”
are not conducive to advance the debate. They rather reflect resistance to the
new climate of the 1980s and a reluctance to stand up and be counted as a
credible participant in public discussion ... [I] understand the reluctance to
commit time and resources to the debate with the new players in the
communications game. Their demands are new and often unexpected. They fall
outside our traditional organisational structures and paths of communication.
They complicate decision-making and may involve loosing some grip on hard
earned success ... [But] unless we seek public debate and respond to the new
players, our financial success is placed at risk. Failure to do so could result in us
being regulated out of existence. But let me emphasise, public debate does not
mean – necessarily – acceptance of the new players’ point of view. They are
often single minded, dogmatic, even obstinate in the defence of their position,
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in their argument. Public debate means to discuss to argue an issue in detail
with the aim of, hopefully, an improved outcome! (Mani 1986, p. [6-7])
AVCA contracted a communications firm to assess available tactics, who urged them to
mimic the Australian mining industry’s successful campaign from the late 1970s, which
had promoted mining as being the ‘backbone of the country’ (Macnamara & Royal 1985,
p. 141). Addressing the 1985 AVCA conference, the head of peak body, the Australian
Mining Industry Council, explained that critics of mining had previously won public
support because they ‘attracted attention with their emotional appeals and intrinsically
“good” goals’ (Strong 1985, p. 126). The emergence of a more ecologically-aware
Australian public marked a significant erosion of support in mining during the 1970s.
The industry became politically vulnerable to governments who ramped up
environmental legislation and taxation. The industry countered with a range of public
affairs initiatives, the centrepiece being a national advertising campaign communicating
to the community the role mining played in Australia (1985, p. 128). The result was a
sweeping shift in positive attitudes towards their industry:
The majority of people were less suspicious of the industry now that it was
providing information about itself … More people believed that Governments
exercised too much control over the industry ... There had been an improvement
in the public’s mind in regard to the industry’s performance on the environment
… Mining was seen as an “industry” rather than by “issues” as had previously
been the case [and] the campaign received positive support from politicians.
(Strong 1985, p. 131)
Deploying new tactics
The 1986 annual AVCA conference, entitled Agvet Chemicals – Production Technology
for Modern Agriculture, saw the industry make a major play to reclaim its power within
the agri-food policy domain. As detailed in the conference pamphlet, it marked a break
with the structure of past conferences, which had been designed to offer industry
participants a competition-free environment in which they exchanged views on issues
around innovation in the application, handling and distribution of chemicals, as well as
new safety procedures. Critical views from the outside looking in had not featured – until
now. The event would allow the views of government, farmers, business, consumers, the
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media and others to voice opinions on the industry’s performance, and what future
practices and products it ought to provide for achieving safer and more effective
agricultural production (AVCA 1986, p. [ii]).
A number of organisational details, however, showed how AVCA set out to constrain its
critics by setting the agenda. AVCA had not allowed its more outspoken critics (such as
PAN) to participate. AFCO president Robin Brown noted in his presentation that it was
disappointing that no representatives of the environmental movement or the union
movement were present to discuss the impact of chemicals on the environment and on
workers. On a practical level, that left him unable to adequately deal with the broad issue
of chemical hazards in just one presentation. Secondly, AVCA had imposed presentation
titles on participants, effectively setting the range of issues they could talk about. AFCO,
for example, was given ‘Chemicals and the Food Chain – Are there any Missing Links?’,
which put Brown in the position of having to interpret the title given to him, and then
keep within the topic of pesticides and agriculture (Brown 1986, p. [i]). Finally, AVCA
set out the expected rules of engagement with delegates before the event. The
overarching aim was to put the image of ‘a cloak and dagger industry … permanently to
rest’ (Kudelka 1986b, p. [2]). But that involved stakeholders approaching the conference
without their preconceived prejudices. The President of AVCA Victoria offered an
impassioned plea:
I urge you all to ensure your deliberations reflect concern for the common good
and are not clouded by emotional antagonism, both of which fly in the face of
rationalism and constructive debate. The eyes of all Australians are on us in
Canberra over the next two days. Members of the public have a right to know
how and why decisions are made about matters affecting their health and safety
as well as that of the environment in which they live. Part of our role this week
in Canberra is to answer consumers’, farmers’ and governments’ questions and
concerns about agvet chemicals. (Kudelka 1986a, p. [i])
Presentations from the chemical industry at the 1986 conference were highly cohesive,
mimicking the mining industry’s strategy of presenting itself as the backbone of the
nation. AVCA President Robin Bligh exemplified the tone:
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Let me make no bones about it. Like any other industry worth its salt, our
members are motivated by profit and growth. But we have an additional level of
satisfaction in knowing we contribute to the productivity of rural Australia …
The farm component of our product mix is valued at around $500 million, at
factory gate values, annually. This is conservatively worth in the order of
$2,000 million a year to Australian agriculture in terms of increased production
and productivity … Recognising the rural sector’s vital role in generating export
income, our industry in fact contributes considerably more than this to the
whole of Australia in economic terms through flow-ons. It also provides
inestimable benefits to all Australians in terms of maintaining a reliable supply
of high quality, pest and disease-free food and cloth. (Bligh 1986, p. [2])
In April 1986, the chemical industry was hit with another public image crisis, when a
leaked confidential memo from within CIBA-GEIGY made the front page of The Sydney
Morning Herald. Originally sent from the company’s regulatory affairs manager to the
director of agriculture, Hermann Mani, it acknowledged they would have great difficulty
in defending some product lines if questioned about their hazardous impacts. An internal
company audit discovered a range of problems, such as: chemicals used for pineapple
and apple crops having the potential to cause reproductive issues in farm workers; a
chemical known to be carcinogenic sold several years after agreement with Australian
authorities to remove it from market; and a food crop trialling unregistered chemicals
that was accidently harvested and sold to the public. The article also claimed that some
agricultural chemicals cleared for use on the Australian market were first tested by
chemical industry-owned US laboratory Industrial Bio-Test. This laboratory had been
heavily criticised by the US Environmental Protection Agency for falsifying its
toxicological data in over 100 pesticides (Roberts & Harris 1986, p. 1).
Despite the scale of the fallout, Mani described the occurrence as a major victory for the
chemical industry. It had marked a break with the traditional blanket industry silence that
had previously allowed critics to misrepresent it. This time, right from the outset, CIBA-
GEIGY adopted an open-door policy, engaging with anybody looking for answers. By
positioning front and centre of the debate, the industry successfully curbed the usual high
profile accorded to its critics by the media. For the first time, journalists came back to
check facts and verify information. The process enabled the industry to keep abreast of
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how the issue developed, while simultaneously countering the usual scare tactics from
critics. They were able to deploy a positive message around their commitment to
improve safety (Mani 1986, p. [8-9]).
EVENT 3: COMMERCIALISING ORGANIC FOOD IN AUSTRALIA
This section tracks how the sustainable agriculture industry changed from a set of
non-commercial, loosely-connected state and regionally-based groups to a
federated organisation that planned to transform mainstream agriculture. This
process is captured in the construction of a new industry association known as the
National Association for Sustainable Agriculture Australia (NASAA), and the
assembling of resources in order to coordinate organic farmers and cultivate
consumers.
Uncoordinated: organic food before 1983
Before the mid-1980s, organic agriculture held significance for four different
groups. The first consisted of a small number of commercially-oriented farmers
who had experienced the negative effects of chemical-based agriculture, either to
their own health or that of their produce or livestock. They had originally adopted
non-chemical farming methods as a way of solving or preventing potential health
hazards. These farmers were not aware of each other, and many only realised they
were farming organically when a recognisable market later emerged (Wynen &
Fritz 2007, p. 227). Almost all organic products in Australia during the early
1980s were simply mixed in with, and sold as, conventional produce (NASAA
1989, p. 269).
The second group consisted of sustainable farming and gardening associations, which
were specific to a particular state or local region. The large distances between these
groups hindered any meaningful collective action, and saw them working largely in
isolation from each other (Wynen & Fritz 2007, p. 227). When reading journals from
these groups, it is clear that they did not have strong commercial interests in the growing
of organic food, motivated mostly by a set of broader social values. For example, the
Soil Association of South Australia was founded in 1975 with the specific aim of
promoting the interconnection between the health of the soil and the health of South
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Australian plants, animals and humans (The Living Soil 1991). Similarly, the Henry
Doubleday Research Association in New South Wales was established in 1970 with the
aim of promoting farming, gardening and research that facilitated ‘lifestyles that are in
harmony with the environment’ (Natural Growing 1984, p. 3).
The third group consisted of a small number of health-food stores and green grocers
(largely concentrated in Victoria) that were dedicated to supplying organic food. These
actors were selling produce to a range of consumers, from people with health issues such
as food sensitivities or cancers to those who had developed a general healthy eating
orientation (Diamond 2010, 3 January).
One pioneering retailer, John Williams, recalled that sourcing organic produce was
fraught with obstacles. Retailers could rely on a basic amount of produce from a small
number of organic farmers selling out of the conventional wholesale market, but
maintaining a broader range depended on forging direct supply relationships with
farmers. This led to many retailers constantly cold-calling growers to work out if they
farmed organically, and solving the problem of getting supplies farm to store. Moreover,
the whole exercise was expensive to maintain, with the phone calls alone adding
significantly to the overheads of their small businesses (Williams 2009, 7 September).
Upon finding an organic farmer, the retailers faced the major problem of how to trust
authenticity. Established relationships with farmers over time enabled retailers to build
up knowledge of individual growers’ farming practices (Williams 2009, 7 September),
but when it came to establishing new relationships, they often had to judge farmers’
claims with very little information:
In those days organic was measured by whoever you bought [from saying] ‘I
don't use any chemicals’. It was a trust thing. (Alexander 2009, 18 August)
It was one of the difficult things, and yes we were making assessments in that
regard, whether we think this is organic or not. That was the best we could do at
the time, but we were certainty not [completely] comfortable as far as viewing
it from the perspective of consumers. (Diamond 2010, 3 January)
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The final group of actors interested in organic food was the Australian branch of the
Appropriate Technology and Community Environment (APACE). APACE was a
movement founded by German economist E. F. Schumacher, whose seminal book Small
is Beautiful: a study of economics as if people mattered (1973) solidified the concept of
appropriate technology, and set the philosophical foundations for an international
network of affiliates. The basic assumption of the movement was that modern industrial
society was on a collision course with people, their environment and the world’s stock of
resources. Moreover, western technology benefited the few, because it set high cost
barriers for developing countries to acquire and use technology in a way that improved
their collective living conditions. Appropriate technology was about democratising
access to technology by designing objects that were decentralised and people-centred.
This meant building technology that was small scale, energy efficient, labour intensive,
environmentally sustainable, community controlled, and a whole host of other elements
(Hazeltine & Bull 1999, p. 3). At the 1982 APACE Schumacher Memorial Conference, a
workshop was held to discuss emerging environmental issues, and organic food was
presented as an appropriate technology in contrast to the prevailing methods of food
production. It was at this point that the local branch was first oriented around the
coordination of organic food supply (APACE Newsletter 1983, p. 3).
A stalled attempt to cultivate supply
In early 1983, an APACE task force was established to create a supply channel of
organic produce directly between local New South Wales producers and consumers. The
project leader, Sandy Fritz, took up the task of contacting buying clubs and food co-ops
in order to gauge what level of demand there might be. This involved ascertaining the
quantities and range of lines needed, and the location of these potential buyers
throughout New South Wales. On the supply side, Carl Hoipo, president of sustainable
agriculture group the Henry Doubleday Research Association, took up the task of
contacting farmers (mainly members of the HDRA), with the aim of gauging their
capacity to supply (APACE Newsletter 1983, p. 3). Once this diagnosis of supply and
demand was completed, a meeting was held between representatives of producers and
consumers to discuss standards, pricing and distribution. Fritz reported that she had
received initial interest from two food co-ops and 15 individual households wanting to be
part of the direct supply of organic produce. To broaden out the consumer base, she
flagged a plan to approach the Australian Consumers’ Association (ACA) with the hope
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of soliciting the readership of Choice. The sticking point came from the supply side.
Hoipo reported that of the many growers approached, only one, Warrah Farm, was able
to supply bulk quantities (Fritz 1983, p. 3-4). The others he approached were not
enthusiastic about a commercial prospect:
Most of the small scale homesteaders produce small amounts of surplus and are
philosophically oriented towards self-sufficiency and exchange with friends and
neighbours. The numbers of commercial farmers who consciously, deliberately
use organic methods are small. Some commercial produce is organic in an
‘accidental’ sense, as with some fruit deliberately produced for processing, but
the first reaction of some organic farmers was that they would not want to be
associated with a system which mingled their produce with ‘accidental’ organic
produce. So as you can see, even before addressing the problem of linking the
farmer with the householder, it doesn’t look very easy. (Hoipo 1982, p. 13)
The type of growers Hoipo referred to were known within the sustainable agriculture
movement as the ‘back-to-land group’, who had grown from the counter-cultural
movement of the 1960s and 1970s. They were semi-organised in that they were generally
members of the established gardening and farming associations, and also produced their
own publications, which were mostly ‘how to’ guides offering practical advice and
ideological guidance to newcomers on ways to ‘reject current societal values and change
their way of life’ (Jones 2010, p. 101). As one commentator described:
Back to landers were rebelling against an amorphous, intangible enemy dubbed
‘the system’. The system was the derisive name given to modern industrial
living and all its perceived excesses: consumerism, materialism, complicated
dehumanising technology, bureaucratic control, over-exploitation of resources,
environmental destruction and alienation from nature. (Jones 2010, p. 89)
Sandy Fritz conceded at the meeting of stakeholders that the project to establish an
organic market did not appear possible at this juncture (Fritz 1983, p. 3).
According to the economic sociologist Jens Beckert, for a market to be present there
must be elements of both exchange and competition. At the very least, markets are pre-
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supposed by three actors oriented towards each other, where there is ‘one on one side of
the market confronting at least two other actors on the other side whose offers can be
compared’ (2007, p. 7). Based on this assumption, it can be argued that there was a
market in organic food in the early 1980s, but it was haphazard and faced major
coordination problems. Retailers faced problems with verifying authenticity of organic
food, and were judging ‘organic-ness’ on a case-by-case basis. The majority of organic
food was not distinguished from its conventional counterparts at the point of sale.
Finally, the farming and gardening associations were not oriented to organic food as a
commercial object, and their farmer members rejected a commercialisation project.
Emergent mobilisation
Fligstein and McAdam used the concept of emergent mobilisation to capture the process
by which collective actors forge new paths of interaction with other actors based on
understandings of the threats and opportunities facing their collective interests. For a new
field to emerge, actors must create or appropriate organisational vehicles that have the
capacity to spearhead action and occupy a previously-unorganised space (2012, p. 91).
Wry et al. (2011) saw the process of field emergence as involving skilled actors forging
new collective identities. These actors work to supply rationales to potential targets
around the boundaries of group membership (who we are) and a set of core goals to be
carried out by the group (what we do).
Defining who belongs to the federation
In mid-1983, Sandy Fritz changed her strategy. Aside from being a driver of organic
food within APACE, Fritz was part of the organising committee of the earlier-discussed
landmark conference Hazardous Chemicals in the Australian Environment. Following
the conference, she reflected how she and other participants were both surprised and
disappointed at the general lack of awareness attendees had about organic agriculture as
an alternative to the use of hazardous chemicals. Integrated Pest Management was a
production method accorded some discussion by presenters, while organic methods rated
little mention. Fritz decided that ‘a meeting of those involved in organic agriculture in
Australia was needed to consider forming a federation [so organics] could be more
influential and more likely to be recognised by, and as a part of, mainstream agriculture’
(Fritz 1984a, p. 22). She began by approaching the different sustainable agriculture
gardening and farming groups around the country, offering a detailed proposal for a
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national organisation (Wynen & Fritz 2007, p. 228).
At the beginning of 1984, Fritz initiated a series of workshops around the country, many
of which piggybacked several local organic festivals and conferences. The first meeting
was held at the Organic ‘84 festival in Richmond Tasmania, and drew wide attendance
from groups including APACE, HDRA, Allergy Recognition and Management
Association, the Soil Association of South Australia, Willing Workers On Organic
Farms, the ABC, the Department of Agriculture, Organic Gardening and Farming
Society of Tasmania (OGFST), and individuals from organic groups in other states
(Organic Growing 1984b, p. 1). At each event, Fritz formally presented her plan for a
federation of groups, and then invited dialogue about the perceived obstacles and
opportunities for cooperation. Fritz cast a broad net in defining the boundaries of
potential members:
Although the idea originally centred on organic agriculture it is obvious that
many other agricultural practices share the same ideals: to produce food in a
way that is non-polluting, regenerative to the soil and conserves energy and
resources … So to begin with, participation in this national association would
include permaculture groups, [the] bio-dynamic agriculture association, organic
farming and gardening societies, soil associations, ecological or biological
farmers and others. (Fritz 1984b, p. 18)
The rationale for why members ought to join the federation was then framed along three
main lines. The first was to highlight the common ecological interest all groups shared
regarding modern-day Australian agriculture (Fritz 1984a, p. 22). Fritz elaborated:
The structure of many soils has broken down and they have been degraded by
salinity, acidity and wind and water erosion. The erosion has carried not only
sedimentation into the river systems causing flooding and disturbing the
ecology of the river; but agricultural chemicals runoff with soil. These
chemicals pollute the water creating a hazard for waterlife and for animals and
humans who rely on these supplies for drinking purposes. (Fritz 1984b, p. 18)
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The second rationale for federation was that the current structure of fragmentation
between the groups was the major obstacle to the wider uptake of sustainable food
production. Fritz understood that groups held a determination to keep identities localised
and regional. Even groups within the same geography that shared identical values were
concerned about their autonomy (Fritz 1984b, p. 19). Fritz countered by claiming that on
the one hand, fragmentation constrained credibility:
The current situation with many small organic gardening and farming societies
spread throughout Australia is ineffective in changing the direction of how food
is produced here. These small groups … serve to endorse the idea that organic
practices are limited to backyard gardens … An association of existing groups
would be big enough to be recognised by mainstream agriculture and the wider
community of farmers and consumers. (Fritz 1984b, p. 19)
On the other hand, Fritz argued, fragmentation hindered the efficient use of resources:
A united association is more likely to have the resources (money and people
power) to respond to enquiries from this broader sector and to communicate
with government bodies … Considering the contrast in conventional and
organic systems, one might question why more farmers don’t practice organic
agriculture. Farmers are caught on a chemical treadmill which is not easy, but
not impossible by any means, to transcend. Establishing a program that would
assist farmers in making the transition to organic agriculture and resolving
some of the problems and obstacles that hinder existing organic farmers is what
I think an association of organic societies can accomplish. (Fritz 1984b, p. 18)
In other words, Fritz argued that a federation of groups was the best placed to assist
farmers in transitioning away from chemical-based food production.
The final rationale for federation was that the structure of cooperation between groups
would function as a network rather than a bureaucratic amalgamation. A network would
value regionalism and autonomy as the pivotal mechanism to achieving the movement’s
shared goals. Each group operated in its own unique geography with varying climates,
markets, problems and people. It followed then that effective lobbying and promoting of
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organic agriculture would rely on the skill and knowledge of local people embedded
within local settings (Fritz 1984b, p. 19). In her words:
This in no way threatens the independent activities of individual societies or
their own communication systems (i.e. newsletters, meetings). It merely, but
significantly, joins them in communication amongst one another and in working
together to establish a healthier and more sustainable food system in Australia.
(Fritz 1984b, p. 19).
At the workshops, participants were asked to vote on the proposal, make suggestions on
how the new organisation ought to function, and even elect officers to begin the process
(The Living Soil 1984, p. 5). The response by the Soil Association of South Australia
reflected the common sentiment:
The proposed association will almost certainly go ahead with or without the
support of the Soil Association of SA. Our best option is to support its good
work, for the benefit of organic farmers and gardeners, the environment and the
community, making whatever contribution we feel appropriate about how it
should function, finance itself, what problems it must address, and what
affiliations it should have … There will always be a need for state and regional
organisations, because Departments of Agriculture exist at a state level, as does
labelling legislation. Also, climactic and edaphic problems require local
knowledge and solutions. A national organisation should strengthen local
groups by keeping them informed, sharing knowledge and skills ... [and]
consolidating state advances at a national level. (The Living Soil 1984, p. 5)
In short, Fritz had skilfully proposed membership boundaries, identified chemical
hazards as the common enemy, and proposed a federation that advanced collective
interests in transforming agriculture, but still kept individual group identities intact.
Consolidating the movement
By the beginning of 1985, it was widely agreed that Fritz’s proposal should be put into
practice. An interim steering committee was established with Fritz as its coordinator
(Organic Growing 1985c, p. 1). The fledgling federation was galvanised by three key
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tactics that served to mobilise organisational membership. Firstly, all groups were given
democratic access to the decision making over the structure and focus of the federation.
Following Fritz’s initial series of workshops, state councils were formed, where regular
meetings enabled geographically-similar groups to create a forum for discussion and
debate. All groups were given equal voting rights, regardless of their membership size or
status within the sustainable agriculture movement. This meant that despite HDRA
having 800 members, it only had one vote on the state council, the same as the
Hawkesbury Ecological Farming Group that had only 30 members (Fritz 1985, p. 2).
From the state councils, two members were elected as delegates to the national steering
committee, which set the task of preparing a constitution, and also the aims and
operation of the association, such as how to get funds, use funds and achieve collective
goals (Fritz 1985, p. 1). Steering committee members had two broad functions: to reflect
at the national level the opinions of state councils, which in turn carried the opinions of
grass root members; and to keep state councils in the loop on developments at the
national level (Wynen et al. 1986, p. 2).
The second tactic was that the steering committee would focus on broader topics of
agreement between groups, rather than dealing with micro disagreements that came from
identity cleavages. As described by one Tasmanian steering committee member:
Previous attempts [to bring groups together] failed because there were those
who considered that a particular name or system of representation was more
important than whether or not we had a national body. On this occasion we
have risen above those things ... Of course we are all individuals and inevitably
we can’t agree on everything. Equally, we can all agree on the need to limit the
use of dangerous chemicals or unsound ecological practices, and on the right of
consumers to a safe food supply. If we begin with those concerns we all share,
and resolve to bring about change, all will benefit. (Jordan 1985, p. 2)
The final tactic was to change Tasmania’s Organic Growing journal to accommodate the
new commercial orientation being pushed by the federation. Its print run was ramped up
from 4,000 to 13,000 to be distributed commercially throughout the country. Editorial
focus shifted from inward-looking ‘how to’ stories for small-scale growing to covering
the bigger ‘outward’ occurring issues which organic food could help combat, such as
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‘the outcry against chemicals, the threat of PVR, plus global horror stories of soil
erosion, deforestation and famine’ (Organic Growing 1985c, p. 1). The editor
contextualised the ascendency of the federation and the new role of the journal:
We are part of a huge world-wide movement working for the long term survival
of our soil, food, health and livelihood. From the smallest backyard gardener to
the large commercial organic producer, we are all part of a jigsaw which will
succeed one day (it will have to) in putting the world back on the right track. So
it should cheer us all on to learn what is happening overseas, where perhaps
things are a few jumps ahead. When we see where we fit in, we [will] no longer
feel isolated. (Organic Growing 1985c, p. 1)
By the close of 1986, the steering committee had finalised and agreed upon a
constitutional framework, with the federation formally inaugurated as the National
Association for Sustainable Agriculture (NASAA). NASAA was constituted by 30
organisations with a total of 5,600 members (Wynen & Fritz 2007, p. 229). An executive
was established with delegates from each of the states, and Sandy Fritz was elected in the
crucial coordinating role of Secretary (Fritz 1986b, p. 2).
Defining what the federation will do
While the new federation developed organisational structures that set out the appropriate
rules of interaction amongst member groups, a simultaneous discussion occurred about
its main goals. Discussion was largely oriented around issues of improving the supply of
organic food. HDRA president Carl Hoipo, for example, had reiterated in Natural
Growing that the major constraint on general supply was the philosophically-committed
back-to-land farmers, who produced very low quantities of organic food, and presented
shops and distributors with constant issues of continuity. The sentiment within the
developing federation was that securing better supply depended on recruiting
commercial conventional farmers who recognised the hazards of pesticide usage, and
were interested in learning more about sustainable agriculture (Hoipo 1985, p. 25).
NASAA identified two broad obstacles that hindered these farmers stepping off the
pesticide treadmill. The first were structural. Governments subsidised conventional
agriculture in forms such as a fertiliser subsidy and access to credit. Moreover, private
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agricultural research stayed away from organics because it was perceived as a public
good, where once the technology was available, it was available also to non-payers. By
extension, little income could be leveraged from such research. Second were issues of
viability. A conversion to organic farming meant that farmers would initially face a
reduction in yields while they and their land adjusted to the alternative methods. The
problem was that a general lack of information on alternative farming implied great
uncertainty around how organic farmers might survive during this period, or a broader
question of how their businesses would fare in the longer term. It was NASAA’s view
that farmers could not clearly judge the utility of organic methods against the established
body of knowledge on chemical methods (Wynen 1985, p. 24).
NASAA proposed two key solutions to counter the lack of alternative farming
knowledge. The first was that they would establish an information clearinghouse that
centralised knowledge on alternative agriculture. The idea was that farmers could write
to the clearinghouse for advice on any problems relating to organic growing (whether
practices or policies), and for a small fee, staff would obtain specific answers. Over time,
the clearinghouse would database a detailed understanding of the unique problems faced
in the different regions and the different practitioners in these regions. This would enable
staff to put farmers in direct contact with others in their proximity who had faced and
overcome similar issues. Also, when common problems were identified, they could be
addressed in detail by supplying information to the national journal Organic Growing
(Fritz 1984b, p. 19). In addition, the clearinghouse would collect a list of potential
farmers who could speak at functions to share their knowledge; identify areas most
needing research; identify farmers willing to participate in future research on organic
farming; gather data on growers (where they are and what they produce); gather data on
potential retail channels for farmers; and prepare fact-sheets on current issues being
debated by or lobbied on by the movement (Fritz 1986c, p. 2-3). In short, the
clearinghouse would be the information one-stop-shop for sustainable agriculture.
The second solution to offset the information asymmetry was the development of organic
production standards. A fundamental issue for those interested in growing organically
was the widespread confusion about what actually constituted organic food. One
particularly telling example was in 1984 when representatives of Tasmania’s OGFST
attended several meetings in Victoria to share farming knowledge accumulated by their
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membership. The Tasmanian delegation recalled regularly being asked for their exact
definition of organic growing. The difficulty was that some in the movement defined
organic as a ‘do nothing’ approach, where simply refraining from using chemicals
qualified food as organic. Others believed it was more than that, involving extra
processes such as recycling plant wastes and nutrients to create rich healthy soils
(Organic Growing 1984c, p. 1). Others again called themselves organic, not realising
they were applying substances to their crops considered by some in the movement as
inappropriate for organic production (Williams 2009, 7 September). Meanwhile, retailers
had to make case-by-case judgments on whether the produce they were selling was
organic (Diamond 2010, 3 January). In short, the uncoordinated definition of ‘organic’
enabled a wide scope of interpretation by different actors.
The development of production standards was seen as a solution to synchronising
expectations about what constituted ‘organic’, from the growers down the line to
consumers (Pollard 1983, p. 18). A standards development committee was established in
1984, headed by Lionel Pollard, founder of Willing Workers On Organic Farms
(WWOOF). Pollard’s Victorian-based committee set the goal of producing two
documents to be used as touchstones for organic farmers. The first would consist of a set
of basic statements ruling in and ruling out particular substances and practices, thereby
creating a basic production standard. The second would go deeper into the reasoning
behind particular decisions, and offer instructions for input usage, details of practices,
and general how-to guides for organic growing. Pollard proposed a collaboration, where
any interested movement member could attend standards development meetings or
supply farming recipes, encouraging experiences, management practices, details of
scientific experiments, or other relevant information. Then those new organic farmers
entering a standards scheme would have both formal and practical information to guide
their practice (Pollard 1984, p. 2).
A draft of the basic standard was circulated in late 1984 to every sustainable growing
group in the country, as well as to environmental and health food groups. Pollard
estimated that the draft reached approximately 200 farmers, 150 interested groups and 20
media outlets (Pollard 1985, p. 23). The standard adopted a definition from the British
Soil Association (BSA), which balanced commercial productivity with human and
environmental health and safety. ‘Organic’ was formally defined as: ‘a form of land use
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designed to produce optimum yields from crops and livestock, of the highest nutritional
values, free from anything detrimental to health and without impairing future
productivity’ (Victorian Organic Standards Committee 1985, p. 23-24). To
operationalise this definition, the standard set out approved alternatives to synthetic
chemicals. In relation to pest control for example, a list of techniques and substances was
proposed that avoided harm to the biological life in the soil. For example, farmers could
choose to control insects through methods such as the encouragement of natural
predators, setting insect traps and companion planting; fungal diseases could be treated
by choosing from a list of herbal and homeopathic sprays, seaweed extracts and the like;
and troublesome weeds could be controlled through crop rotations, mulching, timely
sowing and planting. In relation to soil fertility, synthetic fertilisers could be replaced by
list substances originating from animals (like fish meal), vegetables (like seaweed) or
minerals (like limestone). For the first time, Australian farmers were given a single clear
statement of rules that could be followed in order to produce ‘organic’ food (1985, p. 23-
24).
Following the circulation of the draft standard, initial concern surfaced from the New
South Wales and Australian Capital Territory state councils that ‘while 100% chemical-
free conditions should be compulsory for the [top] organic label, nevertheless there is a
need for more lenient grades to encourage farmers during the conversion stage’ (Fritz
1985, p. 2). The standard was further fine-tuned with the structuring of three grades by
which produce could be categorised. Grade A included produce grown to the basic
standard for over three years. Grade B included produce grown on soil in conversion to
organic methods, or where harmful spray residues still resided in the soil. Grade C
included produce where chemical sprays had been used, but only under severe economic
threat or for legal requirements (Pollard 1985, p. 23). By the third and final draft in 1986,
further specifications were added around implementation, such as how inspection and
enforcement would work (Wynen 1986, p. 2).
Ready to enter the agri-food policy domain
The idea to orient sustainable agriculture around the commercialisation of organic food
gained momentum, with a rapid fire of decisions by the NASAA executive throughout
1986. It was decided that the Federal Government would be approached to fund both the
clearinghouse and research into the development of the domestic and export market for
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Australian organic products. NASAA itself would be professionalised, creating paid
positions in administration, publicity and other special project duties. Moreover, NASAA
would enter broader debates in agriculture by developing clear policies and position
papers on important issues such as genetic modification or soil erosion. Finally, they
would end their moratorium on keeping a low profile, and communicate to the public
through a wide-reaching campaign about the importance of sustainable farming. The new
association was poised and ready to operationalise its plan to offer farmers a viable
alternative to conventional agriculture (Fritz 1986a, p. 24).
Conclusion
This chapter first tracked the onset of contention between the consumer movement and
the chemical industry. We saw both movement challengers and industry incumbents
engage in a process of appropriation of organisational structures in order to spearhead
their agendas within the agri-food policy field. One key outcome of the conflict was the
creation of favourable conditions for the commercialisation of organic food. In the
consumer movement’s push for consumer protections, support for the curbing chemical
use in food production gained currency with key state elite and consumers. Both
occurrences happened while the NASAA coalition was still in its planning stage.
The onset of this episode of contention was also the departure point for the emergence of
the sustainable agriculture field. We tracked the pivotal role of one skilled actor, Sandy
Fritz, who mobilised a previously-loose network of small sustainable agriculture groups
into the federal coalition. This mobilisation was framed around commercialising and
nationalising organic food as a technology that would reverse the hazards of
conventional agriculture
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–CHAPTER FIVE–
From talk to action: disruption in the agri-food policy field and the implementation of an organic food market, 1987–1989
Few in the community would not have seen, heard of or read of …
chemical related problems concerning a variety of agricultural
products. In the last two years in particular Australia’s farm
leaders, agriculture Ministers, consumer groups and many farmers
as individuals have called on Australia to lead the world in
producing clean, unpolluted and residue free produce. (Powell
1988, p. 1553)
Australians would not only prefer their food to be grown and
processed without the use of chemicals, but they are willing to pay
more for food produced in this way ... The national poll [for the
The Sydney Morning Herald] found 83 per cent of people said they
would prefer their food without chemicals. (Schauble 1989, p. 8)
Overview
The previous chapter covered the period of 1982 to 1986, and identified the conditions
that led to the initial orientation of the sustainable agriculture movement towards
creating a commercial national market in organic food. This chapter is set in the period
between 1987 and 1989, and describes how the idea to commercialise organic food
graduated from talk to implementation. To capture the change, I track three interrelated
events. The first event was a food crisis in 1987 involving chemical residue violations in
Australian exported beef. This crisis created a general threat to the overall agriculture
market, and became a major driver of demand for organic food. The crisis also became
the departure point for two subsequent events. The second event tracks the heightening
episode of contention within the agri-food policy field. Players were increasing their
orientation towards ‘clean agriculture’, with the debate centred on whether food ought to
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be produced by the judicious use of chemicals, or whether there should be a complete
cessation of chemical usage. This event also marked the entry of the key sustainable
agriculture actors into the agri-food policy field. The third event tracks how the massive
growth in the demand for chemical-free food pushed the sustainable agriculture field to
address the major market issue of stable consistent supply.
EVENT 1: THE BEEF CRISIS RIPPLES INTO BROADER AGRICULTURE FIELDS
As observed by Fligstein and McAdam (2012, p. 100), proximate fields can have certain
dependencies that serve to stabilise order, but these relationships also make the routine
operation of dependent fields susceptible to disruption. Much like the rippling of a stone
dropped in a pond, the onset of a crisis in one space could become the source of crisis
and disruption in a proximate space.
In May 1987, a major food production crisis ‘forced [Australian] governments, the
agricultural industry and the community at large to make adjustments to their use of
certain pesticides, and to their perception of pesticide use in general’ (Rutherford 1989,
p. 2). The crisis began when American Food Safety Inspectors from the Food and Drug
Administration discovered three shipments of Australian beef, originating in Western
Australia, Southern Queensland and Western Victoria, as containing irregular levels of
the pesticide DDT – an organochlorin pesticide that had been banned in the US for
several years. Washington officials were particularly concerned, because two of the
shipments showed chemical residues far in excess of acceptable Australian levels, the
latter being set 40 per cent higher than US limits (Fray 1987a, p. 9). Over the coming
months, a succession of incidents signalled the deepening of the crisis. By July, at least
30 separate lots of beef had tested positive for excessive residues (Fray 1987b, p. 11). In
August, the US Department of Agriculture registered their intent to ban $80 million
worth of Australian beef that had been produced before May (Fray 1987c, p. 1). Citing
the US restrictions, Australia’s largest meat exporter laid off around 500 workers and
shut down its New South Wales abattoir. The crisis then began to spread to other
countries. Japanese quarantine officials discovered that a consignment of Australian beef
had five times the residue level allowed by Australian regulations – a higher
concentration than any found in the US. The Japanese Government moved to impose
stricter safety inspections on Australian beef than any of Australia’s other trading
partners (Casey & Hartcher 1987, p. 2). Particularly worrying was the decision by two of
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Japan’s biggest retail chains to withdraw Australian beef from display, prompting the
Japanese Government to warn Australian officials of the significant domestic pressure to
clear doubts about the quality of Australian beef (Hartcher 1987, p. 2).
At the onset of the initial violation, the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service
(AQIS) immediately deployed 150 veterinary officers and 1,800 meat inspectors as part
of a program of test export abattoirs (Corrigan 1987, p. [2-3]). The process discovered
another four lots of beef bound for the US with pesticide levels similarly exceeding US
standards (Fray 1987d, p. 4). The primary concern from the agricultural peak body, the
National Farmers’ Federation, was that the situation played into the hands of US lobby
groups currently pushing to install protectionist policies and to restrict Australian access
to food markets (Fray 1987a, p. 9). Some Australian political commentators went further
in arguing that the incident had the ability to completely undermine Australia’s
competitive advantage of being known as the home of natural, pure, rural products. Since
the Chernobyl nuclear incident in the Soviet Union, some Australian rural products had
experienced an enormous jump in demand (Fray 1987b, p. 11).
Attributing responsibility for the crisis was complex. DDT was a widely-used
organochlorin in Australia, having been used for decades following World War Two,
though by the 1990s it had been phased out (Harrison 1997, p. 7-8). DDT was celebrated
for its effectiveness in controlling a wide range of pests and diseases, but since the
publication of Rachael Carson’s book Silent Spring, it had come under increased
scrutiny. Common criticisms included the increase of plant ‘resistance, secondary pests,
widespread environmental contamination, biomagnification and effects on animals
higher in the food chain (including humans)’ (Radcliffe & AATSE 2002, p. 2). The
assessment of the crisis by AQIS avoided blaming a particular group or organisation,
framing the violation scientifically as being caused by the ‘persistence of organochlorins
in soils and their illicit use or contamination of storage facilities’ (Corrigan &
Seneviratna 1990, p. 56). The export violations were caused by animals grazing
contaminated pasture, ingesting contaminated feed or held in contaminated yards over a
period, [which] bioaccumulated residues in their adipose tissues [and] eventually
exceeded maximum residue limits (1990, p. 56).
Describing the incident as a national scandal, the Australian Democrats argued that they
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had attempted to have agricultural chemical legislation tightened two years prior, but
were ridiculed by the major political parties (The Sydney Morning Herald 1987, p. 9).
The federal Minister for Primary Industries, John Kerin, conceded that many states had
not properly regulated the use of some pesticides while being fully aware of residue
hazards for almost two decades (Fray 1987e, p. 9). This position was supported by the
environmental activists the Total Environment Centre, who cited a 1975 report warning
the New South Wales State Government about the presence of pesticide bio-
accumulation, and its potential to end beef exports to the USA – a warning not passed on
to farmers, but now a prophecy potentially fulfilled (Fray 1987f, p. 2).
For the newly-federated network of organic agriculture, the timing of the crisis was
fortuitous. The first NASAA president Tim Marshall remembers:
We had basically formed NASAA and had our media releases ready to go pretty
much, and we woke up one Sunday morning … to the Sunday papers having the
huge headlines that said: DEFECTS FORCE USA BAN. Basically Els Wynen,
Sandy Fritz and myself got on the phone to each other, we said: ‘are you ready
to go’? We went to our fax machines … and faxed every media outlet that we
could find the number for across the country, and for the next year we did
massive amounts of media. And you’ll find that in all the rural papers, in the
state based [mainstream] papers, and even in the national papers. Nobody
within the organic industry could ever have prayed for the publicity we got
from that headline on one day. (Marshall 2013, 3 December)
EVENT 2: THE AGRI-FOOD POLICY FIELD ACCOMMODATES SUSTAINABLE
AGRICULTURE
Policy domains imply political fields where governmental organisations such as state and
federal departments of agriculture, quarantine bodies, and representatives of other
organised groups meet to forge rules and governance mechanisms, and to create orderly
patterns of interaction for non-state fields such as markets (Fligstein 2001, p. 39). The
states’ aversion to instability propels them to facilitate or impose routine interaction
when fields they oversee enter into crisis (Fligstein & McAdam 2012, p. 108).
This section shows the reactions from within the agri-food policy field in the wake of the
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beef crisis. The crisis forced actors to seriously assess the future usage of chemicals in
food production. Simultaneously, the field’s increasing orientation towards ‘clean
agriculture’ led to a reckoning between organic agriculture and conventional agriculture,
where stakeholders offered competing models for the future of Australian agriculture.
Governmental orientation towards ‘clean agriculture’
Reactions from state governments
In response to the beef crisis, the states began to directly address the issue of chemical
hazards. The Queensland Government banned the sale of DDT and other organochlorins
(Fray 1987d, p. 4). New South Wales implemented a suite of tougher fines on individuals
or companies illegally selling or using banned pesticides (Aubin 1987, p. 3). In other
states, the goal of reducing these hazards involved giving greater voice to stakeholders
beyond the conventional farming industry. South Australia, for example, formed a new
advisory committee on agricultural chemicals in 1988 that included environmentalists,
unionists, organic farmers, and various health advisers, including toxicologists and
allergists in particular. In order to give the issue a broader perspective, the Minister of
Agriculture, Kim Mayes, argued that the group represented the wider community. The
minister also believed that it was timely to consider alternative methods to chemical-
based food production (Powell 1988, p. 1553).
The Victorian response to the beef crisis was the boldest. The concern was that any
erosion of local and international confidence in Australian agriculture would directly
affect the states’ trade. To counter this, in 1988 the Government executed the so-called
‘Cleaner Agriculture’ strategy. One main component was instituting the annual
‘Chemical Awareness Week’, which largely aimed to communicate to farmers the
concerns of the community about chemicals in food and the environment, and the correct
way to use, store and dispose of farm chemicals (McGowan 1991, p. 4-5). The
Government targeted farming families, chemical re-sellers, the community and rural
school children. A wide variety of channels were used, including television commercials,
rural press, posters and pamphlets at chemical re-seller stores, and departmental field
days (McGowan 1991, p. 9-11).
The third focus of ‘Cleaner Agriculture’ was to research the area of ‘chemical use and
their alternatives’ (McGowan 1991, p. 4). The Department of Agriculture and Rural
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Affairs directed scientists at the Vegetable Research Station in Frankston to evaluate
ways of producing good-quality food with fewer chemicals. In 1989 the preliminary
trials showed promise, with the Department’s Minister Barry Rowe explaining that they
were ‘developing new farming techniques, using less, and in some cases, no chemicals at
all – for instance, using naturally occurring compost instead of fertilisers, using
biological control instead of pesticides’ (Eco-Ag 1989d, p. 18).
It is clear from the projects initiated by DARA that the department held a broad
definition of ‘clean agriculture’ which spanned from the use of chemicals in an informed
judicious way through to chemical-free and organic farming.
Reaction from the federal political sphere
During 1988, the Federal Government initiated a number of measures to deal with the
fallout from the beef crisis. In April, the Agricultural and Veterinary Chemicals Bill
1988 proposed a new body, the Australian Agricultural and Veterinary Chemicals
Council, to oversee the transformation of two problem areas. The first was the
inconsistency between state legislative frameworks. The Bill would establish a single
federal law around the availability, levels of use, claims, labelling and packaging of
agricultural chemicals. Through standardisation, the Federal Government foresaw ‘that
on redefining mainstream food producers’ understandings of field membership.
Specifically, the movement set out to influence producers’ judgments of organic farming
as being a viable alternative to conventional practices. Three main judgment devices
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were constructed to spearhead this goal. The first was the NASAA certification scheme.
This appellation was designed to promise farmer’s access to an alternative consumer
channel not available to producers farming conventionally. Crucially, the scheme was
designed to maximise membership by including a lower grade Level C SUSTAINABLE
that permitted the judicious use of chemicals. The idea was that producers would
eventually move towards fully-fledged organic production without destabilising their
viability in the meantime. The other two judgment devices set up to redefine membership
were face-to-face technical conferences and industry media. These cicerones were
constructed to supply mainstream producers with ongoing expert information on how to
practise sustainable farming, thereby supporting a conversion away from chemical-based
production.
Marshalling an extensive set of resources, the incumbent coalition countermobilised.
They proposed a new conception of the food market that accepted mainstream food as
‘clean food’ –produced through the safe and judicious use of chemicals. Two key
judgment devices underpinned this tactic. Firstly, AVCA constructed a national
accreditation scheme. This appellation directed all actors involved in the production,
distribution and sale of agricultural chemicals to take a health and safety course and
submit to ongoing auditing by AVCA. Secondly, AVCA positioned themselves as an
authoritative public voice in the debate over chemical hazards. To validate their role as a
cicerone, AVCA abandoned the past industry policy of not engaging in public debate to
positioning as an authoritative voice on food safety issues. One key example was when
news stories criticised chemicals or conventional food, key industry actors engaged with
journalists to provide counter arguments.
The States’ power to impose settlements
According to Fligstein and McAdam (2012, p. 71-75), the stability of non-state fields
depends to some degree on their relationship with state fields, because states wield great
power in shaping the opportunities for order and change in non-state fields. On the flip
side, states rely on the stability of non-state fields for their own survival, especially those
fields that are disproportionately important to the nation’s economy. In such cases, we
can expect states to tacitly or overtly support the reproduction of market incumbents.
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From 1992, the Australian Federal Government used its direct authority to skilfully
impose a settlement on the agri-food policy field, which had deep consequences for both
the organic and conventional food markets. It redefined the policy field as an arena that
facilitated the maximisation of Australian ‘clean food’ exports. Official bodies like the
National Food Authority and the Agri-Food Council were established to operate a cluster
of judgment devices geared around legitimising the ‘clean food’ status of conventional
food. Appellations were predominantly used: a ‘clean food’ quality seal was made
available to mass market food companies; official pesticide-testing surveys were
promoted as evidence that Australian food was safe; and the Food Standards Code
streamlined the way food production rules were set and policed.
Sustainable agriculture was given access to state resources, but only to develop its export
capacity. The organisations and devices constructed to bestow legitimacy on
conventional food were largely not accessible to sustainable agriculture. For example,
the National Food Authority was established to strengthen consumer confidence and
enhance the domestic and export marketability of Australian food. But when it came to
organic food, it refused to ratify organic standards in the Food Standards Code, and took
the position that organic food offered no extra beneficial qualities than its conventional
counterpart.
What the current case shows is the enormous power of the State to impose a wholesale
model of field organisation, especially in the shaping of relationship parameters between
challengers and incumbents in both state and proximate non-state fields. Table 4 below
offers the essential elements that characterised the settlement.
Niche settlements and value construction
The State had narrowed the political opportunities for sustainable agriculture’s project to
take organic food mainstream. Simultaneously, the fledgling organic food market was hit
with two major crises. Firstly, the broader economic downturn changed the market
dynamics, making supply significantly exceed demand. Secondly, cases of fraudulent
activity threatened the legitimacy of claims that organic food was less hazardous than its
conventional counterpart. The sustainable agriculture field was forced to shift its focus
from trying to transform agriculture towards a project of field stabilisation.
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Table 4: Installing the ‘clean food’ exports settlement 1982-1992 Elements of a conception of control
Sustainable agriculture challengers
Chemical industry and farmer groups incumbents
State actors
At stake/market definition/framing of market
Food produced that avoids chemicals and maximises the safety and health of humans and their environment.
‘Clean food’ produced safely via the judicious use of chemicals, which maximises yields and contributes to the health of the Australian economy.
‘Clean food’ produced safely through the judicious use of chemicals, focused on ramping up exports and contributing to the health of the Australian economy.
Field membership All actors involved in the commercial production of food, but they need to be certified by an organisation like NASAA.
All actors involved in the commercial production of food.
All actors involved in the commercial production of food.
Actors’ relative positions
Organic food production ought to be the mainstream because it is a viable and safer alternative. The State should assist in the transition of agriculture away from chemical dependence. The chemical industry ought to be made redundant.
Producers using chemicals are the mainstream, because only through chemicals can demand be met and stable markets maintained. Organic food is a niche, only capable of supplying fringe consumer demand.
Organic food is a growing niche that adds to the already clean and safe food produced by mainstream food producers.
Main tactics Channel producers away from mainstream production by deploying two tactics: (1) Increasing the information available to farmers on organic farming methods; (2) Offer a certification scheme that allows for the judicious usage of chemicals in its lowest grade.
Be more open about chemical usage in food production by framing chemicals in two ways: (1) Chemicals are the only viable way of producing food and maintaining the Australian economy; (2) Chemicals are safe and produce safe food when handled and used correctly.
Restructure the entire agri-food policy field to: (1) Centralise the monitoring of food production and the promotion of food safety to the newly-established National Food Authority. (2) Gear new and existing state bodies around the goal of ramping up of ‘clean food’ exports. (3) Support organic food to develop its export capacity.
Main judgment devices NASAA certification scheme; industry media; technical conferences.
AVCA accreditation scheme; the mass media; industry media; technical conferences.
Various state-sanctioned food residue tests for conventional food; NFA Food Standards Code (excluding organic food); Organic Produce Advisory Committee’s export production standards.
According to Fligstein, for challengers to survive, they must find a stable position within
the existing set of field relations (2001, p. 18). For markets this might imply the attempt
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to create a niche to buffer from the harsher forces of competition (Fligstein 1996, p.
659). One crucial institution-building project highlighted in the current study was the
positioning and fortification of organic food as a premium niche vis-à-vis conventional
food. A collective effort saw a reordering of rules and roles within the supply chain.
Market intermediaries were accepted as the dominant market coordinators, who then
imposed a number of operating rules on the rest of the supply chain. They narrowed the
quantity of their supply partners, thereby lessening the competition between farmers
accessing the marketing channel. They also only took quantities of product to the point
just before a glut formed, leaving farmers to channel excess into the conventional
market, thereby maintaining the situation of supply roughly meeting demand. Produce
was cleared to retailers by way of a pecking order, which generally rewarded retailers
who took on more supply than they needed in times of glut. These retailers were
subjected to higher prices at wholesale, but accepted that this kept farmers viable and
created a buffer for the entire market against instability.
Organic food can be categorised as an imaginative good, where value is created by
mentally connecting consumers to a ‘desired but intangible ideal’ (Beckert 2011, p. 110).
The sustainable agriculture field promised a product that physically looked like its
conventional counterpart, but promised to be healthier and more environmentally
friendly. The reorganisation of the organic food market as a premium niche was only
ever going to work if consumers at the end of the supply chain accepted the legitimacy of
a price premium vis-à-vis conventional food. Two main judgment devices were essential
in holding the model together. The first was that retailers became cicerones to their
customers – that is an authoritative point of contact, supplying information on how the
food production process worked, such as the operation of organic standards and
certification, or the more labour-intensive practices farmers took vis-à-vis their
conventional counterparts. The second device extended the field’s key appellation, being
the production certification scheme. ORGAV established a wholesaler and retailer
accreditation scheme, which meant that Victoria pioneered a model where the third party
monitoring of authenticity was extended across the entire supply chain. The scheme
bolstered the ability of the sustainable agriculture field to confidently promise consumers
that only genuine organic produce could enter the supply chain.
Taken together, these two devices, along with the role of the intermediaries, were vital in
facilitating a price differential between organic and conventional food, and by extension
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in constructing organic food as a food market niche. Table 5 below offers the essential
elements that characterised this niche settlement.
Table 5: Installing the organic niche settlement 1992-1995 Elements of a conception of control
Organic food market stakeholders
At stake/market definition/framing of market
The production of a premium food product that avoided chemicals and maximised the safety and health of humans and the environment.
Field membership A strict definition of membership: producers, wholesalers and retailers accredited by a certification body. But for producers, membership might be limited to those that have established relationships with intermediaries.
Actors’ relative positions
Intermediaries are the dominant actors in coordinating the market; they set the terms of supply with farmers and retailers.
Main tactics A raft of actors involved in sustainable agriculture cooperate to create a niche through two main tactics: (a) The supply chain keeps price premiums stable by: reducing the amount of produce being piped through; dumping excessive supply into conventional market; wholesalers maintaining a retailer pecking order; retailers taking on a more ambassadorial role by educating consumers on the production process. (b) Encouraging the entire supply chain to deal only with certified organic food.
Australian organic food There is a growing collection of research on the development of the Australian organic
food market, covering an impressive range of topics. Surprisingly, the accumulated
research is focused almost entirely on the period after 1990 when the market for organic
food had already emerged. To my knowledge, Wynen and Fritz (2007) offer the only
research that details how organic food graduated from the practices of a social movement
to being a coordinated national market. They described the role of the National
Association for Sustainable Agriculture Australia (NASAA) from the early 1980s. This
organisation was involved in pioneering actions such as: mobilising the sustainable
agriculture movement around a project to commercialise organic food; writing and
implementing the first national standards for organic food production; and forging
international trade channels for local producers. Unfortunately, this account is a chapter
within the larger edited volume. An impressive breadth of history is accounted for, but
there is limited discussion of deeper details. More than that, there is scant detail on the
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role of actors from the supply chain in contributing to the commercialisation of organic
food.
The current study has filled this gap by offering a novel narrative of Australian organic
food market emergence. This story also presents the contributions made by actors not
previously credited in the study of organic food development in Australia. For example,
the health and safety agendas of the consumer movement, as well as political party the
Australian Democrats, were crucial in opening the opportunities for organic food in the
political space and in helping facilitate consumer awareness of sustainable agriculture.
The intermediaries’ coordination of supply was crucial in broadening the range and
consistency of market offerings. The chemical industries lobbying of the State and
spearheading projects to quell societal concern about chemical hazards worked to link
conventional food to the ‘clean food’ concept. Finally, the State and its power to impose
settlements also contributed significantly to limiting organic food going mainstream.
Limitations and future research Process methods are useful in drawing out the fine-grained chronological actions taken
by focal actors, and constructing them into strings of coherent events. There were two
particular limitations this method presented in the current study. The first was that
process methods generate an enormous amount of data. A great challenge was deciding
which lines of action and events should be given primacy in presenting a clear story of
market emergence. Inevitably decisions were made to analyse and present greater detail
of one set of market-building projects, while partially or completely ignoring others. For
example, the biodynamic agriculture movement actively supported the project to
commercialise organic food, and cooperated with groups like NASAA. Biodynamics
also set out to create a separate product category vis-à-vis organic food, one that was
supported by distinctively different producers, consumers and industry bodies.
Biodynamic food is now considered the ‘Rolls Royce’ category of organic food. It was
decided that exploring how this separate niche happened was not essential to providing a
cohesive story of organic food market emergence, but it is an important trajectory that
should be explored in future research.
The second limitation was that some actors’ contributions to market emergence were not
explored, because there was little capacity to gather adequate information. For example,
191
the Biological Farmers of Australia followed NASAA to become the second main
organic certification body in Australia. Unlike NASAA, the organisation left almost
nothing on the public record prior to the 1990s. Future research that engaged these
pioneers might yield important information that enriches the market emergence narrative
presented here.
In essence, the current study functions as a first-cut narrative, one that is sufficiently
broad for future researchers to fill in associated market-building projects or add detail to
the role of actors not adequately accounted for here.
Conclusion
In this thesis I have taken a sociological approach to understanding the emergence of the
Australian organic food market. My overarching argument is that the development of this
market was forged in an inherently political process that cannot be fully understood
without understanding the linkages and mutual influence between sustainable agriculture
and the agri-food policy fields over time. I observed three distinct temporal brackets
between 1982 and 1995, where competing actors wielded alternative conceptions over
what they believed constituted safe and clean food, and by extension, how the
organisation of relationships ought to be within fields responsible for the production of
food. Judgment devices were crucial in spearheading these conceptions or in neutralising
competing conceptions. Ultimately, organic food gained enough legitimacy with key
state actors and consumers to become established, but the broader agenda of
transforming the way food was produced was significantly constrained. The episode of
contention within the agri-food policy field had created conditions that were rife with
transformative change, but key incumbents with interests in continuing chemical-based
agriculture maintained enough state support to reaffirm the previous status quo, albeit
one that accommodated organic food as a marginal field member.
192
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– APPENDICES –
Appendix 1: Examples of coded incidents, events and arguments
A meeting was held at the annual Tasmanian sustainable agriculture festival, where Sandy Fritz (HDRA) proposed her vision for a national association of organic groups. A number of groups were in attendance, including: Soil Association of Tasmania, The Organic Gardening and Farming Society of Tasmania, Willing Workers On Organic Farms, Allergy Recognition and Management Association
It was agreed that a national association was required, but that it would not change the structure or activities of individual groups, or be an amalgamation of groups. The federation would be a network to handle broader issues outside the resource reach of the individual organisations. Three main aims of the federation were approved: (1) To collect and disseminate information about alternative farming systems and practices; (2) To educate consumers about the need for sustainable agriculture and uncontaminated food; (3) To lobby government about the need for research into organic farming, and to give fairer treatment to farmers using unconventional methods (for example, extending fertiliser subsidies, offering low-interest loans).
It was agreed that two delegates from each state should be appointed to a national steering committee to work towards federation.
Key executive members of the National Association of Sustainable Agriculture Australia (Tim Marshall, Chair; Sandy Fritz, Sec.; and David Dumaresq, Treasurer) met with Minister for Primary Industries and Energy Mr Kerin and his aide at Parliament House. The meeting involved discussion about NASAA's application for funding from the Australian Special Rural Research Council (ASRRC) and the Innovative Agricultural Marketing Program. There was also a broader discussion about the methods of sustainable agriculture and their application to commercial farming in Australia. This led to a discussion about the financial arrangements needed to establish and operate an Information Clearinghouse for sustainable agriculture. The meeting was very positive and the Minister indicated interest and support for the idea of the Clearinghouse.
The CSIRO release a nationwide consumer sentiment survey, which found great levels of community fear towards the usage of farm chemicals in food production. It also indicated the concurrent ascension of potential demand for organic food.
Key results included:
- 57% felt that chemical sprays made our food a danger to our health.
- 53% felt that food grown with chemical fertiliser was less healthy than food grown with natural fertilisers.
- One third felt that food could be satisfactorily grown without the use of pesticides.
- 56% felt it was important to eat organic food.
- 14% were actually trying to eat organic.
The results were published in both mainstream farming newspapers and sustainable agriculture movement journals. Both framed the results as there being a growth of demand in Australia for organic food.
Data Source Organic Growing (Vol 9. no. 2, p. 1) Quarterly Report (Vol 3. no. 1, p. 1)
Organic Growing (Vol 10. no. 2, p. 1)
Field Context
Sustainable agriculture field Agri-food policy field External environment
Open coding category
Proposing federation of sustainable agriculture
Lobbying for government support of organic food market
Public opinion on food quality
Note: In addition to descriptions of the action taken by particular actors, each incident was given additional information in order to allow for recall, editing and coding.
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Figure 4: Incidents representing the event: ‘Development of first organic standards (1982-1986)’
Note: This is an abbreviated representation of the event, which was constituted by
18 incidents.
Table 7: Examples of coding arguments Passage of raw data Coded Argument ‘Last August the Toxic and Hazardous Chemicals Committee (of which I am a member) of the Total Environment Centre, Sydney held a conference on "Hazardous Chemicals in the Australian Environment". I and other participants were surprised and disappointed at the low level of awareness about organic agriculture as an alterative to the use of hazardous chemicals. We decided a meeting of those involved in organic agriculture in Australia was needed to consider forming a federation so we could be more influential and more likely to be recognised by, and as a part of, mainstream agriculture.’
Position There ought to be a meeting between interested organic stakeholders to discuss a federation of organic agriculture. Justification Doing so would result in more legitimacy within mainstream agriculture. Open code Sustainable agriculture ought to federate
‘Quality in produce is the result of many factors and interactions between many factors. Hours of sunshine, soil nutrient status, climate, fertilisation, management techniques and varieties grown. However, several researchers have demonstrated that if produce is grown properly under organic methods, it is of a higher quality than conventionally-grown produce. The biological value of the proteins is higher, more vitamin C, higher dry matter yield. The produce was more resistant to pest and disease problems and it kept longer.’
Position The method used to produce organic food yields better-quality produce than conventional produce. Justification Studies show higher levels of vitamin C, higher biological value of proteins, a better resistance to pests and disease, longer life and higher dry matter yield. Open code Organic food is better quality than conventional
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Appendix 2: Ethics approval
To: Prof Michael Gilding/Mr Lee Glezos, FLSS Dear Michael and Lee SUHREC Project 2009/127 Building the certification system: the social structuring of the Australian organic food market 1985-1995 Prof Michael Gilding, FLSS; Mr Lee Glezos Approved Duration: 10/07/2009 to 10/07/2011[Adjusted] I refer to the ethical review of the above project protocol carried out on behalf of Swinburne's Human Research Ethics Committee (SUHREC) by a SUHREC Subcommittee (SHESC3). Your responses to the review, as emailed on 3 July 2009, were put to a delegate of the Subcommittee for consideration. I am pleased to advise that, as submitted to date, the project may proceed in line with standard on-going ethics clearance conditions here outlined. - All human research activity undertaken under Swinburne auspices must conform to Swinburne and external regulatory standards, including the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research and with respect to secure data use, retention and disposal. - The named Swinburne Chief Investigator/Supervisor remains responsible for any personnel appointed to or associated with the project being made aware of ethics clearance conditions, including research and consent procedures or instruments approved. Any change in chief investigator/supervisor requires timely notification and SUHREC endorsement. - The above project has been approved as submitted for ethical review by or on behalf of SUHREC. Amendments to approved procedures or instruments ordinarily require prior ethical appraisal/ clearance. SUHREC must be notified immediately or as soon as possible thereafter of (a) any serious or unexpected adverse effects on participants and any redress measures; (b) proposed changes in protocols; and (c) unforeseen events which might affect continued ethical acceptability of the project. - At a minimum, an annual report on the progress of the project is required as well as at the conclusion (or abandonment) of the project. - A duly authorised external or internal audit of the project may be undertaken at any time. Please contact the Research Ethics Office if you have any queries about on-going ethics clearance, citing the SUHREC project number. A copy of this communication should be retained as part of project record-keeping. Best wishes for the project.
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Yours sincerely Keith Wilkins for Anne Cain Secretary, SHESC3 ******************************************* Keith Wilkins Research Ethics Officer Swinburne Research (H68) Swinburne University of Technology P O Box 218 HAWTHORN VIC 3122 Tel +61 3 9214 5218 Fax +61 3 9214 5267