Supermarkets and private standards: unintended consequences of the audit ritual
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Supermarkets and private standards: unintended consequences of the audit ritual Stephen S. Davey • Carol Richards
Accepted: 14 November 2012 / Published online: 4 February 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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 standardowners, 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. Keywords Audit Governance Private standards Retailers Third-party certification S. S. Davey (&) C. Richards School of Social Science, University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia e-mail: [email protected]
Introduction As corporate actors in the food supply chain retailers have attracted critical attention for the often negative impacts they have had upon suppliers and consumers. From Britain to the US, large supermarket conglomerates in pursuit of profits have been criticized for flaunting laws, economically squeezing suppliers and adversely impacting upon communities (Blythman 2004; Kjærnes et al. 2007; Richards et al. 2011; Simms 2007). In Britain, for example, a social movement known as ‘Tescopoly’ has arisen in opposition to the supermarket chain, Tesco, due to the way in which the corporation exercises its oligopolistic power (Simms 2007). Likewise, in Australia—the focus of this study—concerns have been raised regarding supermarket power enacted through the duopolistic food retail structure which controls around 70 percent of the market (ACCC 2008; Burch and Lawrence 2007; Dixon 2008; Dixon et al. forthcoming). Of recent concern is the impact of supermarkets which are discounting fresh products, including selling milk below the price of pro
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