Amy A. Quark

Social Cohesion, Neoliberalism, and the Entrepreneurial Community in Rural Saskatchewan:

Social cohesion has become a magic bullet that policy makers imagine will rescue communities from the ravages of the market. Behind the apparent cohesiveness of rural community, however, lies another reality. This article examines characteristics of social cohesion in two rural communities in Saskatchewan. Although new forms of cohesion are emerging, these communities are riven with cleavages along multiple axes. Some of these local divisions appear to be deepening with global and regional processes of socioeconomic transformation. Long-term crises lead to strategies and solutions that precipitate new problems. Ongoing practices of inclusion and exclusion affect the possibilities of development in these communities.

Scientized politics and global governance in the cotton trade: Evaluating divergent theories of scientization

ABSTRACT Science has been institutionalized as a legitimate basis for decision-making at the World Trade Organization (WTO). This raises a critical question: how does the scientization of decision-making shape the construction of new governance arrangements? Using the case of negotiations between the Chinese state and the US state over the harmonization of cotton quality classification, I consider three approaches to scientization in world politics: the world polity approach, the world-systems approach and the political sociology of science. Evidence from the case demonstrates the need to largely reject the world polity approach while integrating the world-systems approach with the finer-grained analyses of the political sociology of science. This analysis yields two key arguments regarding the implications of science-based decision-making as an institutionalized global norm. First, scientization can formalize existing power inequalities given the uneven historical terrain of research legacies. Second, as scientization channels politics through science, powerful actors are better situated to legitimate their own interests in scientific terms and to define what makes science legitimate.

Institutional Mobility and Mutation in the Global Capitalist System: A Neo-Polanyian Analysis of a Transnational Cotton Standards War, 1870–1945

This paper explores the dynamics of institutional change in periods of instability in the global capitalist system. Two recent bodies of literature—actor-centered institutionalism and the ‘policy mobilities’ approach—emphasize how contextual and historical specificities drive transformation as institutions move across space. However, scholars in both traditions give less attention to the systematic patterns of social conflict that influence how policies move and mutate. Drawing on the case of a standards war in the global cotton trade from 1870 to 1945, I build on these literatures by linking them to a neo-Polanyian theory of social conflict within periods of market-led development. From this view, we must understand institutions, their mobilities, and mutations as constituted by and constitutive of struggles over how the global capitalist system should be organized and in whose interests. This requires building on, but also deepening Polanyis analysis. While Polanyi emphasized the destructive effects of liberal market projects that generate social conflict, the ‘push-backs’ against liberal market projects are more diverse than Polanyi suggested, and social conflict can also emerge out of the creative moments of liberal market expansion.

Transnational Governance as Contested Institution-Building: China, Merchants, and Contract Rules in the Cotton Trade

We are in an era of uncertainty over whose rules will govern global economic integration. With the growing market share of Chinese firms and the power of the Chinese state it is unclear if Western firms will continue to dominate transnational governance. Exploring these dynamics through a study of contract rules in the global cotton trade, this article conceptualizes commodity chain governance as a contested process of institution-building. To this end, the global commodity chain/global value chain (GCC/GVC) framework must be revised to better account for the broader institutional context of commodity chain governance, institutional variation across space, and strategic action in the construction of legitimate governance arrangements. I provide a more dynamic model of GCC governance that stresses how strategic action, existing institutions, and dominant discourses intersect as firms and states compete for institutional power within a commodity chain. This advances our understandings of how commodity chain governance emerges and changes over time.

Interstate competition and Chinese ascendancy: The political construction of the global cotton market, 1973–2012

This article argues that interstate competition over the organization of the world economy shapes the spatial configuration of commodity chains. This departs from much of the literature that emphasizes firm- and sector-level dynamics. To illustrate this argument, we use formal network methods in conjunction with a historical analysis to examine the evolution of the global cotton trade between 1973 and 2012. Through this analysis, we demonstrate that changes in the spatial configuration of the cotton market were shaped by changes in the nature of competition among the most powerful states in the world economy. While the cotton trade was once characterized by a bipolar network reflecting the nature of interstate competition under the Cold War, by the early 2000s China’s accession to the World Trade Organization and the end of the Multi-Fiber Arrangement had dramatically reshaped the global cotton market. The result was a binodal network in which trade flows were increasingly concentrated between China and the United States.

Ratcheting up protective regulations in the shadow of the WTO: NGO strategy and food safety standard-setting in India

ABSTRACT How does the World Trade Organization (WTO) shape contests among civil society organizations, transnational firms, and states over domestic regulations that protect human health, such as food safety standards? The WTO Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Standards (SPS Agreement) aims to limit the use of non-tariff barriers like regulatory standards as protectionist measures. Yet, few attempts have been made to explore how these rules shape national policy-making processes, and particularly the ability of civil society organizations to ratchet up protective regulations. Through a study of standard-setting for pesticide residues in soft drinks in India, I argue that WTO rules are at once legal obligations backed by the coercive threat of economic sanctions and discursive standards for what constitutes ‘appropriate regulatory practice.’ As discursive standards, the rules shape the rationalities and strategies of diverse actors in domestic regulatory contests. These standards of appropriate regulatory practice are used instrumentally by transnational firms to undermine the influence of civil society in policy-making but can also offer opportunities for civil society organizations to contest and even enlarge the boundaries of appropriate regulatory practice.