Tad Mutersbaugh

Fighting standards with standards: harmonization, rents, and social accountability in certified agrofood networks

In this paper I explore the remaking of globalized standards through harmonization, and its impact upon certified-organic and fair-trade agrofood networks. I focus on certification standards and discuss four shifts associated with globalized standards (an increased importance of multilateral institutions, changes to standards language, displacement of network-specific standards, and a shift away from relational standards). It is then argued, with reference to value-chain rent theory, that the shift to globalized standards has transformed rent relations in ways that benefit certain actors (that is, retailers) and imperil the earnings of others. In brief, globalized standards increase the costs of standards compliance, the full burden of which falls upon immiserated producers, to the point at which farmers see little economic advantage to certified-organic and fair-trade production. I then examine social-accountability standards that seek to ‘fight standards with standards’ by championing the consolidation of strong labor and environmental protections under a single label. The study suggests that a single-label strategy can be successful, yet must struggle to overcome a Polanyian double bind, for, in order to build broad coalitions necessary to extend the reach of protective standards, the coalitions must include corporate interests that prefer weaker, contract-based standards.

Migration, common property, and communal labor: cultural politics and agency in a Mexican village

Abstract This article examines the politics of migration in an indigenous Oaxacan village (Mexico), and finds that the village acts, with measured success, to shape the timing and rhythm of migration. Villagers regard migration as necessary yet problematic. Migration provides income for village families yet undercuts traditions of community service and disrupts the integrity of local development networks that link the community to NGOs, state bureaucracies, and product markets. As a consequence, villagers engage in a cultural politics of negotiation and contestation that moulds both the meanings of migration, and the village social practices that regulate migration. Regulation operates via the setting of norms for village communal labor participation: those who do not undertake assigned tasks (cargos and tequios) face loss of usufruct of communal lands. This finding of strong sending community agency is contrasted with recent migration studies that emphasize the agency of migrant networks and transnational spaces. The paper presents a case study of migration that examines the exercise of community agency via collective labor participation, and the study concludes by calling for a greater analytical focus on the cultural politics of sending communities.

Serve and Certify: Paradoxes of Service Work in Organic-Coffee Certification

In this paper I argue that certified-organic inspection agents play a key role in reworking transnational organic-product certification standards to the unique conditions found within Mexican (Oaxacan) organic-coffee producer villages. First, I document the steps through which transnational product-certification norms, under the International Organization for Standardization guide 65 rubric, are codified as practical standards by organic-product certifying agencies. These standards are found to embed contradictions between inclusiveness and transparency that lead to difficulties in field-level implementation: in essence, practices required to make organic production legible to transnational certifiers often have the opposite effect of making certification unintelligible at the village level. Second, I show how field-level certification inspectors, working under contract to certifying agencies, cooperate with village organic extension agents to make certification legible both to villagers and to transnational certifiers (thereby helping to ensure its success). A corollary methodological argument is made to the effect that the importance of field-level work becomes evident when inspectors are viewed—through the optic of labor-process ethnography—as ‘interactive service employees’. This work thus points to a need to understand with greater clarity how standards are enacted in local contexts and support the efforts of field-level workers with the often-difficult task of making standards legible.

Building Co‐ops, Constructing Cooperation: Spatial Strategies and Development Politics in a Mexican Village

Cooperative rural development has been the subject of much scholarship, yet little attention has been paid to the importance of cooperative spatial strategies. In this study, the efforts of an Oaxacan (Mexican) rural producer cooperative to construct a co-op building appear to far exceed the structures potential contribution to commodity production. This research argues that the outsized investment into co-op infrastructure is explicable when the cultural and political economy of cooperation is analyzed. It is found that (1) well-defined co-op spaces are necessary if co-op members are to meet market-driven quality standards, yet these autonomous production spaces exclude nonmember villagers upon whom the co-op depends. Given this sentiment, (2) the co-op building plays an important political role in persuading villagers to provide social support and access to communal resources by (3) demonstrating that production cooperation presents a reasonable development alternative and that co-op members have the managerial capacity to achieve it. The article finishes by calling for a greater attention to co-op member development visions and spatial strategies, and to the contributions that geographic and ethnographic research may make to the analysis of co-op formation and survival.

Women's Work, Men's Work: Gender, Labor Organization, and Technology Acquisition in a Oaxacan Village

Research undertaken in the Oaxacan (Mexican) indigenous community of Santa Cruz indicates that gender differences in technology acquisition derive in part from locally unique gendered patterns of labor participation. Previous studies have identified constraints on womens adoption of technology which stem from womens relative resource poverty and mode of insertion into the labor process. In the present comparative gender analysis labor-process theory is extended to argue that Santa Cruz mens engagement with communal labor (from which women are spatially and socially excluded) provides men with: (1) gender-specific sociocultural tools transferable to value-added-commodity production, and (2) a social space for discourse on labor-organization technology. Santa Cruz womens (socially constructed) involvement with household production, by contrast, isolates women, fragmenting the social space necessary for reworking labor-organization technologies. Women, however, contest mens advantages: the social organization of production which excludes women also empowers. Over the eight-year course of a mens cooperative production project, women creatively and successfully utilized their control over key steps in the household labor process to exact concessions collectively from men and to create a separate space for a womens production co-op. Nevertheless, women continued to confront workplace-organizational problems as a result of their village-structured experience. Initiatives designed to promote womens technology acquisition must not depend on the assumption of workplace-organizational tools in either men or women, but must identify and address gender disparities in workplace-organizational technology.

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