Supermarkets and private standards: unintended consequences of the audit ritual

Stephen Davey () and Carol Richards

Agriculture and Human Values, 2013, vol. 30, issue 2, 281 pages

Abstract: Recent scholarship has considered the implications of the rise of voluntary private standards in food and the role of private actors in a rapidly evolving, de-facto ‘mandatory’ sphere of governance. Standards are an important element of this globalising private sphere, but are an element that has been relatively peripheral in analyses of power in agri-food systems. Sociological thought has countered orthodox views of standards as simple tools of measurement, instead understanding their function as a governance mechanism that transforms many things, and people, during processes of standardisation. In a case study of the Australian retail supermarket duopoly and the proprietary standards required for market access this paper foregrounds retailers as standard owners and their role in third-party auditing and certification. Interview data from primary research into Australia’s food standards captures the multifaceted role supermarkets play as standard-owners, who are found to impinge on the independence of third-party certification while enforcing rigorous audit practices. We show how standard owners, in attempting to standardize the audit process, generate tensions within certification practices in a unique example of ritualism around audit. In examining standards to understand power in contemporary food governance, it is shown that retailers are drawn beyond standard-setting into certification and enforcement, that is characterized by a web of institutions and actors whose power to influence outcomes is uneven. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Keywords: Audit; Governance; Private standards; Retailers; Third-party certification (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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DOI: 10.1007/s10460-012-9414-6

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