Just-in-space: Certified rural products, labor of quality, and regulatory spaces

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Journal of Rural Studies 21 (2005) 389–402 www.elsevier.com/locate/jrurstud

Just-in-space: Certified rural products, labor of quality, and regulatory spaces Tad Mutersbaugh Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, 1331 Patterson Office Tower 0027, Lexington, KY 40506, USA

Abstract Since the mid-1990s, the number and diversity of ‘quality-certified’ products has increased dramatically. This article examines labor practices and regulatory spaces within 3rd party quality certification and suggests that this distinct configuration be termed ‘just-in-space’ production. A privileging of space derives, on the one hand, from the character of qualities certified. ‘Extrinsic’ qualities, such as biodiversity conservation or fair-trade labor practices, may only be introduced into the commodity through monitoring of labor at the point of production and along the commodity chain to retailer venues. This monitoring, accomplished via inspections and document production on a track that parallels the commodity movement, occurs within a semi-public space and results in an uneasy tension between a social interest in open inspections of ecological and socially-just production and retailer interest in controlling certification information about ‘green’ products. At the same time, transnational institutional regulation of certification (e.g., ISO), together with popular support for quality certification, limits the power of retailers and activists to alter certification practices and sustains the semi-public character of this space. Using a literature review and research on certified organic coffee, this paper examines practical and theoretical implications of just-in-space production, and concludes that while this configuration facilitates public action in support of social-justice and environmental conservation, it is also susceptible to manipulation by large retail firms that chose to evade 3rd party certification by setting up private certifications. r 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction An expanding universe of certified products now ranges well beyond the rural agro-forest commodities that form the principal focus of this paper—organic, fair-trade, non-genetically modified organism, and environmentally-friendly, sustainable-yield agro-forest products—to include a diverse array of products and services including Kyoto-accord-based carbon sequestration, sustainable tourism, ‘sweat-free’ fair-trade apparel, health care, ISO 9000 and ISO 14000 (environmental management), and terroir-based ‘traditional’ foodstuffs among others. This paper will review an emerging literature on structure, origins, and spatial economy of certification as both a form of labor organization and a regulatory framework and, drawing primarily upon research on agricultural and forest E-mail address: [email protected]. 0743-0167/$ - see front matter r 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jrurstud.2005.08.003

products, advance the thesis that quality certification— particularly in the case where certified qualities are ‘extrinsic’ in the sense that their presence cannot be directly measured (e.g., coffee produced in biodiversityrich farms)—places an increased importance on a commodity’s spatial location, observability, and context relative to temporal characteristics such as rapidity of production (turnover time) or promptness of delivery. The term ‘just-in-space’ is meant to capture the relative importance of space. Like allied terms such as just-in-time or just-in-case, just-in-space refers to both a labor process, typified by a focus on the spatiality of labor, monitoring, and product location, and to a regulatory framework within which production and consumption dynamics are governed and contested (Sayer and Walker, 1992). From a labor process standpoint, I will argue that quality certification is predicated upon monitoring the inclusion of ‘quality labor’ into the commodity: quality labor within just-in-space occurs on

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two separate tracks (see Fig. 1). The first rail associates certified qualities, such as organic farming norms, to the commodity; the second rail comprises a series of monitoring tasks, such as inspections, drawing up of certification documents, adjudication of certification decisions, and accreditation of quality workers (e.g., farmers, inspectors). The two rails are linked at each point along the commodity ‘track’—like railroad ties or sleepers—by observations of product location. From a regulation standpoint, I will argue that commodity certification results in the creation of a ‘semi-public’ space that extends beyond intra- and inter-firm spaces that predominate in, respectively, just-in-case and justin-time modes to include venues shared between firms, producers, consumers, and social activist communities. Together these labor and regulation aspects join to create a mode of certified production with a unique social geometry. This certified-quality economy, however, is most relevant to a specific quality type. A key distinction made here is between ‘intrinsic’ (internal) qualities such as taste, appearance, or chemical composition integral to the product and which may be ascertained by consumers or via downstream product testing, versus ‘extrinsic’ (external) qualities such environmentallyfriendly or fair-labor production practices that cannot be verified in the final product except via a label or seal attesting to the inclusion of said qualities. The just-inspace dynamic examined here is most evident when constrained to extrinsic qualities because only these

qualities require monitoring. Additional distinctions include private certifications—also termed 1st party inspections (Gereffi et al., 2001)—versus semi-public 3rd party certifications, and product-quality versus servicequality certifications (Bartley, 2003; Sawyer, 2004; Boiral, 2003). In sum, I will argue that just-in-space dynamics are most closely connected with extrinsic qualities, with products (rather than services), and with 3rd party certifications. Turning to certified rural products (3rd party, extrinsic quality), we find that they share a focus upon the production of qualities through labor—a fixing of labor in the commodity—and a subsequent monitoring to retain these qualities as the product moves through space with fair-labor certifications (e.g., SA 8000; UK’s ethical trade initiative (ETI)—Salette et al., 1998; Barrientos et al., 2003). It is important to note that this ‘labor process’ theoretical focus owes to a contemporary rethinking of the role played by divisions of labor in development. Sayer and Walker’s (1992) treatment of the rise of service labor foregrounds the reorganization of mental/manual labor divisions within the service economy and disputes the idea that technological development is inevitably linked to Fordist assemblyline deskilling (e.g., Braverman, 1974) on farm fields and factory floor, an idea debunked for industrial and agrarian contexts (Burawoy, 1979; Goodman and Watts, 1994). Rather, technological change is better understood as encouraging a multiplicity of divergent labor arrangements integrated with social conventions

Fig. 1. Labor and regulation on the 3rd party certified commodity track.

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(Busch and Bain, 2004). Working from within this perspective, I would argue that quality certification engenders a distinctive ‘just-in-space’ mode of labor organization and governance. Certification forms a type of service work in which sophisticated management and assessment tasks are removed to agricultural fields and factories (Mutersbaugh, 2004; Seppanen and Helenius, 2004). Indeed, to make a link to other contemporary debates, just-in-space may also be understood as one of many emerging forms of neoliberal governmentality (Hart, 2004) in the sense that quality certification binds together distinct spheres of private regulation that include certifying agencies (e.g., Organic Crop Improvement Association), product standards groups (e.g., International Farm Organic Agriculture Movement, IFOAM), and buyers under the aegis of transnational regulatory institutions and norms (such Geneva-based ISO’s guide 65 and 68 certification norms). Rural agro-forestry products, however, differ in some respects from certified industrial products such as sweatfree apparel. First, the dispersion of rural production sites makes surveillance relatively costly and difficult. Second, while many industrial products, such as apparel, take a distinguishable form marked by, e.g., brand styles or specific college logos, agricultural commodities such as coffee and timber are indistinguishable from non-certified like products. Third, some products such as organic foodstuffs can lose their organic character merely by passing through nonorganic spaces where contaminants may be stored, regardless of whether the contamination becomes detectable in the product. Fourth, many rural products are produced in the context of complex household economies in which other, non-certified products are also produced, a situation that bedevils the quality certification of artisanal products. These conditions ratchet up monitoring demands, resulting in increased costs and a need for recruitment of rural-based inspectors—and hence training and professionalization (or skilling) of a rural technical/administrative corps (Mutersbaugh, 2004). For these reasons, I term this a just-in-space economy in which the ‘where’ of a commodity matters as much as its ‘when’. However, this is not to say that temporal logics are rendered inoperable. Quality-certified suppliers must meet delivery schedules, and many certified products serve as production inputs subject to turnover time considerations. Rather, for certified agriculture, the demands of inspectability become privileged over rapidity of turnover time because risk inheres more in lack of information about location and context than in rapidity of arrival. For example, in the case of qualitycertified ethical (e.g., fair trade, organic) products, a firm’s market share is based in part upon a green reputation. In this instance, control over extrinsicquality monitoring becomes crucial. Although a botched

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delivery or supply bottleneck may have a short-term negative effect upon a firm’s reputation, a monitoring or compliance failure—getting ‘caught out’—may cause irrevocable damage to firm reputation and associated brand rents (see Kaplinsky, 2004). Since extrinsic qualities may not be ‘tested-out’ (subject to postproduction quality assessment) monitoring becomes the only strategy to reduce a firm’s risk. This connection between green reputation, brand rents, and monitoring, however, brings a key tension. Particularly with respect to green-label products, a firm’s need to manage monitoring practices and information may come into contradiction with the desire of activists, consumers, and producers to inspect extrinsic properties. In addition—though beyond the scope of this study—it may be noted that a ratcheting up of certification standards (or underlying extrinsic product standards) makes obtaining green-product rents more costly (see Guthman, 2004). To build this argument, subsequent sections will address three questions. First, which activities may be properly included under the rubric of certification? The article will explore an increasing diversity in certification forms that have arisen within this semi-public regulatory space and examine the connection between labor, space, and quality management. Second, the article inquires into the dynamics that contribute to the opening of a 3rd party certified regulatory space, and hence a proliferation of certified production forms. To this end, the article reviews recent scholarship on factors such as consumer anxiety, the closure of transnational public regulation, and the interplay between social action and corporate reaction to gain insights into forces shaping and supporting quality certification. Third and finally, what are the effects of certified production on the people and places where certified items are produced and distributed? Ecological, socio-economic, and identity effects are assessed, with an emphasis on tensions and contradictions that emerge as integral to a transnational economy of inspectability. Contradictory effects include, on the one hand, an expansion in non-state forms of governance and knowledge economies amenable to public action, yet on the other hand, exclusion of certain actors from new arenas of public action as (paradoxically), expanded inspectability leads to contestation over access.

2. A constellation of certified goods: what to include in a certified economy? This analysis of spatiality begins by asking just what sorts of production activities may properly be construed as certified production and then, within this certified ambit, which of the many related production processes take a special form within the context of certified production. After constraining the analysis, I take up

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the question of the quality labor and show how it becomes a monitored space within a certified production context.

2.1. Public, private, and 3rd party forms of regulation Certified production may be characterized as production activities regulated within a semi-public sphere existing between government-regulated production on the one hand and fully private regulation on the other. Although the regulation of production finds its roots in the 19th century efforts to mitigate deleterious effects of capitalist industry (Marx, 1867a), and regulated forms of certification emerged at the turn of the century (Cooke, 2002), forms of semi-public regulation have mushroomed in recent years. On a continuum with full disclosure public regulation at one pole, and contractbased private production at the other, a variety of certified production models fall in between (Sawyer, 2004). The key elements include: (i) a set of public standards that are produced by an agency independent of producing and/or marketing agents (in organic coffee, e.g., standards are set by government agencies such as the USDA or NGOs such as the IFOAM); and (ii) 3rd party verification in which an independent certifying agency checks to see that producers and/or marketers adhere to standards. Within this context, there is a good deal of debate about what constitutes certified production and indeed how the ‘private’ sphere might best be defined. For instance, how are we to frame quasi-certifications such as Starbuck’s ‘preferred provider’ contracts? While these make use of independent certifiers (verifiers in Starbuck’s parlance), the standards themselves are not exogenously developed, and a passing grade is based upon a composite score rather than specific minimum standards (Starbucks Corporation, 2005). The present study views these as a ‘fully’ private form of certification in contrast to 3rd party certifications. But if not fully private, can 3rd party certifications be considered public? Bartley (2003), e.g., argues that 3rd party certifications are a form of private regulation emerging, as discussed below, within a transnational space vacated by forms of multilateral governmental regulation. While I agree that 3rd party certification is not public in the sense of activities, such as meat processing, that are government inspected, I would still distinguish it from Starbucks-type internal, firm-managed certifications because, as Davies and Crane (2003) note, intra-firm certifications are subject to ethical slippage. For instance, a decision to reduce standards in order to obtain expanded product supplies would not be immediately possible under 3rd party certifications (although certainly 3rd party certification standards are subject to weakening through multi-party negotiations).

In surveying literature for this paper, the theoretical project of adequately categorizing and analyzing certification has been somewhat complicated by the application of the certification term to two distinct modalities, skill certification versus product certification. In both cases, the goal of certification is to guarantee quality, or ‘‘the set of characteristics and attributes of a given material or immaterial entity (product or service) allowing to satisfy the expressed or implicit needs associated to the processes of production/delivery and use/fruition of said entity’’ (Thione et al., 2000, p. 207). For example, much discussion of certification—termed accreditation in the product certification literature—is located in nursing and education literatures, two sectors of employment in which job eligibility has long been tied to minimum skill levels attained through coursework ending in a degree certificate. In both types of work, a specific product cannot be easily ascertained, as these jobs require that workers produce certain experiences or conditions in ‘service consumers’ such as improved health or increased knowledge. For skill certification, quality monitoring is a precondition for entering the labor process and acts to homogenize, rather than differentiate, workers. In the case of product certification, the product bears a testimony of the quality of its labor process in its label, and reifies the production and inspection processes in a very different way than for services. (Although it is important to note that producers of certified goods must meet a skills certification through an accreditation process, that is to say become a certified-skilled worker, before they are deemed capable of producing a certified agricultural good!) For agricultural products, only certification and labeling will communicate the difference between otherwise identical commodities, as they are not distinguishable by taste or appearance. The corresponding inspection and monitoring practices are enmeshed in the production process, and the certified label communicates a certain type of quality to the consumer. For certified products, skills certification enters through accreditation and through what is termed ‘management practice certification’. In an interesting switch, certifying the existence of specific management practices, such as a fair-trade system for distributing returns from coffee sales, becomes a certified quality attached to the product irrespective of outcome. As with product qualities such as biodiversity enhancement, good management is veiled in the final product: thus guaranteeing management practice communicates brand or company integrity, not specific product attributes. In drawing these distinctions, I mean to sketch the broader outlines of a certification culture or social milieu within which quality assurance is expected, yet the object of quality assurance is not always clear and in which the conflation of several separate meanings of quality certification complicate analysis. As indicated above,

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this paper will focus on the somewhat more constrained field of product certification and argue that quality assurance relies on control and monitoring of labor with spaces of production. This both creates a ‘labororganizational technology’ or distinct social form of labor organization (Sayer and Walker, 1992, p. 17) and also fetishizes labor in a manner that facilitates the embedding of quality in the certified-product label (Guthman, 2004). 2.2. Belaboring quality: what is the object of certification? Fig. 1 sketches some of the complexities through which certification binds quality labor into certified commodities through an inspections process. In Fig. 1, I identify two separate commodity chains that together form a track, inspections documents culminating in a final inspections report and quality label above, and the movement of organic coffee from field to ‘quality product’ below. These are supported by a series of mutually supporting regulations that include label standards, accreditation standards, and certification standards. Thus there are two types of labor that unfold in tandem along a quality-product commodity track, each producing separate products whose value is interdependent. Working from a labor-organizational standpoint, I distinguish just-in-space from just-in-time/ just-in-case along the rubric presented in Fig. 2. Although a full discussion of post-Fordist modes of economic organization, of which just-in-time and justin-space form examples, is beyond the scope of this paper (see Harvey, 1989; Pred and Watts, 1992), I nevertheless would wish to establish a separate identity for just-in-space production in order to draw attention to a unique labor political-economy. The just-in-space labor force is divided into two separate corps. On the consumer-commodity rail, farmers produce and consumers purchase quality-certified products. On the second rail, a corps of just-in-space certification

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personnel (inspectors, accreditors) work to resolve monitoring conflicts ‘in the field’, review monitoring activities, and accredit workers who undertake both farming and monitoring. Both corps find themselves both torn between duties to firm or farm interests versus professional allegiance to uphold standards, and both find themselves in conflict with workers on the parallel rail. My aim in evoking the novel mode of production, then, is to draw attention to these social, personal, and professional tensions. Taking up the quality relation in Fig. 2, just-in-space qualities must be ‘tested-on’ because these qualities are not detectable in the commodity and hence must inspected at the point of production and audited at each point along the commodity chain. By way of contrast, (intrinsic) qualities of Fordist just-in-case commodities were subject to post-production ‘testing-out’ by discarding rejects, and just-in-time commodities were subject to a ‘testing-in’ of quality at the point of production by empowering knowledgeable workers to correct quality. This move toward knowledge-based work, and the concomitant reworking of mental versus manual labor divisions figures prominently in just-in-space. Monitoring proceeds through an array of interlinked steps, here depicted in Fig. 1, for the organic agriculture case, though the gist of this framework is generally applicable to rural products. Each inspection results in an inspections document, itself a commodity that (together with the farm dossier) is subject to subsequent inspections. For example, independent external inspectors, hired on contract by certifying agencies, conduct the first tier of inspections, and produce a report that is examined by the next higher tier. Linking to the emergent transnational institutional regulation of sitedispersed production, this particular certification labor process configuration is regulated by interlinked, harmonized transnational certification standards at international (ISO guide 65, 68) and national (e.g., USDA National Organic Program (NOP), EU 2092/91, EN 40511).

Fig. 2. Just-in-space, just-in-time, and just-in-case compared.

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This just-in-space knowledge-based framework is supported by accreditation. Governed under a separate set of transnational/national harmonized standards (e.g., ISO 61/EN 40510), accreditation ratifies the capacity of inspectors, farmers, and/or certifying agencies to engage in production, certification, and auditing of certified goods. For example, if Mexican coffee farmers are to become accredited to produce organic coffee, they must attend workshops and produce approved farm plans; in addition each producer village must have a community organic extension agent who must attend monthly meetings, take periodic workshops and pass exams, and provide training to village farmers. If local knowledge workers (farmers, village, and regional extension agents/inspectors) fail to undertake accredited training activities they are removed from organic producer rolls. In contemporary Mexican organic agriculture, certification and accreditation are handled by the same certifying agency; EU countries, however, manage certification and accreditation activities through separate regulatory-bureaucratic channels (Seppanen and Helenius, 2004). And, given the looming December 2005 deadline by which non-EU nations must conform to EU norms in order to maintain EU market access, the EU norm will likely become the model for many non-EU countries (see Martinez and Banados, 2004). Together these certification and accreditation practices, regulated under separate transnational frameworks, govern the production of a label—a separate commodity in its own right—that expresses the linkage of quality labor to certified commodities such as coffee or apparel via global monitoring. Local knowledge workers also confront the task of adapting transnational/national production standards— and often certification standards—to local social and ecological conditions. To the extent that activists within certified-commodity networks such as organic agriculture and environmentally certified forest products wish to enroll as many participants as possible and avoid penalizing new entrants for socio-historical factors beyond their control, it is necessary to negotiate the meaning of quality at the local level. In Mexican organic coffee, e.g., ecological integrity was degraded in some regions by the 1980s government programs that promoted non-shaded ‘sun’ coffee (mostly in Chiapas) or coffee-shade monocultures of Cuajiniquil (Inga spp.). Given this difference, inspectors who do not wish to penalize farmers in degraded zones focus on progress toward individually negotiated goals rather than on adherence to broad, single standards. In a Scandinavian case study, Seppanen and Helenius (2004) show how inspectors address local difference by differentiating between advice that would be prohibited under certification norms, such as information on how to meet a particular standard, and information that lies outside of the certification template, such as types of

crops that might be appropriate (see also Mutersbaugh, 2004). This formulation brings two consequences for the just-in-space thesis. The first concerns a need to control and monitoring quality labor at production sites and locations along the commodity chain. These certified spaces are of critical importance to multiple actors including firms that base their brands upon certified products, social-justice and environmental NGOs that look for certain outcomes within certified space, certifying agencies and inspectors whose reputations may be at stake, and, perhaps most importantly, certified producers who daily inhabit certified spaces and upon which their livelihoods depend. As a result of these varying and often contradictory goals, certified spaces—and the people who occupy them—are necessarily spaces of negotiation and conflict. A second consideration, taken up in the following section, regards the increasingly important role played by transnational neoliberal institutions in structuring just-in-space as a semi-public regulatory form governing certified goods. 2.3. Certified products: paradoxes of regulation? If 3rd party certification arises initially in a quasipublic space outside of governmental regulatory authority, it has since become populated with a thicket of norms and regulatory assemblages operating at national and transnational scales. A second analytic task, then, is to determine how these affect to certified-product spaces. A key distinction between certified and noncertified production is the inspections–labeling process (Seppanen and Helenius, 2004; Mutersbaugh, 2004; Boiral, 2003; Barrett et al., 2002). Inspections mobilize contractually independent inspectors (Gonza´lez and Nigh, 2005; Boiral, 2003), and then forward inspection information to labelers who determine whether the product meets minimum standards. Quality certification may be analytically and practically distinguished from quality standards: if product standards define included qualities, then certification ratifies incorporation of defined qualities. Indeed, certification has its own, independent norms codified under standards such as ISO guides 65 and 68 that dictate the conditions under which qualities may be certified. This standards-maker/certifier relation may be expanded: who, e.g., certifies the certifiers? Transnational regulatory frameworks link standards and certification to accreditation, forming a triangle of quality standards, inspections practices, and accredited workers (see Fig. 1). In organic coffee, e.g., both farmers and inspectors must be independently accredited before inspections may be performed (Martinez and Banados, 2004). Expanding the scope of analysis still further, the standards, certification, and accreditation triad is governed by a constellation of regulatory agencies

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operating at transnational, regional, and national scales. For organic agricultural products, perhaps the most fully developed of rural product certifications, transnational regulatory examples include ISO guides 65 (certification), ISO guide 61 (accreditation), and the UN-FAO Codex Alimentarius (organic standards); regional examples include EU 2092/91 (organic standards), EN 40511 (certification norms), and EN 40510 (accreditation of certification bodies); and national examples include the USDA NOP, a document that both sets out organic standards and certification norms. This multi-tiered set of regulatory frameworks is further complicated by two additional factors. First, many certified rural products such as certified harvest timber, organic food products, Kyoto-protocol carbon credits among others are traded internationally. In these instances, the products are additionally subject to regulatory approval in the consuming country and/or via international agreements (as is the case with Kyotoaccord carbon sequestration). Barrett et al. (2002), e.g., report on the difficulties of obtaining market access into the EU for non-EU countries, which (except for the few on an approved EU list) must channel their products through EU-approved certifiers and even then may only obtain access into a single EU country. Second, the international standards harmonization movement—that is to say efforts to bring regulatory texts into agreement across national contexts—has had a marked effect upon certification norms. National regulations are being brought into agreement under the ISO guide 65 process while international agencies are instituting their own harmonization efforts (Mutersbaugh, 2005). For instance, the UN FAO has implemented the International Task Force (ITF of Harmonization and Equivalence in Organic Agriculture) to standardize multilateral agency organic certification and accreditation standards (Sawyer, 2004). The powerful effects of this combination of international trade and harmonization may be seen in the rush to meet the December 2005 deadline by which nations must establish certification systems in accordance with EU norms, such as those under development in Chile and Mexico, or lose market access (Martinez and Banados, 2004).

3. The making of the certified-goods economy Certified economies, and related regulatory spaces and production networks, are expanding in reach and kind (Boiral, 2003; Bartley, 2003; Barrett et al., 2002; Martinez and Banados, 2004) due to a confluence of factors. Certified products, that is to say products certified within the semi-public regulatory space between specific firms and governmental institutions, reach back to the early 20th century, e.g., in the case of certified seeds (Cooke, 2002). Yet the rapid and ongoing

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expansion of certified production forms—characterized by use of external, 3rd party certification and accreditation based upon external standards—only begins to pick up steam in the 1990s. Although recent harmonization efforts have sought to bring these varied expressions of certified production into concordance under transnational (e.g., ISO, GATT) and regional rubrics, the institutional development of certification frameworks has been a ‘bumpy’ and uneven process (Bartley, 2003) in which certification has coalesced into forms unique to each commodity chain. These differences come as a result of divergent commodity-chain histories and product characteristics, and also due to commodityspecific differences in the contributions and importance of principal contributors to 3rd party certification. Sections below will consider varied contributing factors and actors, including consumer attention to commodity quality, the activities of social-justice and environmental activists within the commodity-chain, chain-specific differences in the development and application of transnational regulation, and activities of key firms within the chain. The aim of this portion of the paper is to contextualize contemporary 3rd party certification as a regulatory and labor-technological space with respect to social and economic dynamics that support its emergence. I argue that the existence of just-in-space as an institutional arrangement is contingent upon these political-economic factors, yet also unstable in the sense that it that may falter if these dynamics shift or if current firm-based attempts to limit 3rd party certification (covered in the last segment below) are successful. It is important to note, however, that additional economic factors within certified supply chains shape the spatial organization of just-in-space processes such as inspections, document revision, and accreditation training. Of particular importance is the governance role played by rents and value-creation along the ‘value-chain’ (Gereffi et al., 2005; Fitter and Kaplinsky, 2001; Ponte and Gibbon, 2005). Although the point of this paper is to argue that a core difference of the just-in-space case is found in the parallel constitution of value in the form of inspections reports and observations—the flow of these items itself forming a unique value-chain linked to and interdependent with the ‘consumer’ commodity (e.g., organic coffee, sweat-free apparel)—it is important to recognize that this conjoined commodity track is the site of conflict and cooperative action between actors within the value-track over how certified trade benefits will be distributed. Work within value-chain theory show a growing share of power held by supermarkets and other retail venues (see also Marsden and Wrigley, 1995) during the same period in which quality considerations have become increasingly important to firm profit strategies (Gereffi et al., 2005; Busch and Bain, 2004). Consequently, as

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quality has taken a central economic role, retailers have found it politically possible to press upstream producers to undertake quality control activities in order to reduce costs for retail and processing firms (Ponte and Gibbon, 2005; Gereffi et al., 2005), even when downstream assessment of intrinsic qualities is feasible. However, this conceptualization, broadly consonant with the JIT literature, does not explain the rise of 3rd party certification (relative to 1st party intra-firm, or 2nd party industry or trade association certifications; Gereffi et al., 2001) nor does it invite consideration of the ‘second rail’ in the just-in-space value-track that includes allied certification firms and workers required due to the extrinsic character of qualities monitored. For example, village-based organic coffee producer organizations have taken up the work of monitoring compliance among members, appointing ‘peasant inspectors’ who must become certifier-accredited and who then undertake the dual tasks of supplying technical advice to co-organizational members and providing inspections for members of other organizations. This arrangement, however, is not a consequence of retailer dictates but rather of negotiations between village organizations and 3rd-order certifying agencies. (Negotiations were contentious in that 3rd-order international certifiers resented the loss of business, yet cooperative in that international certifiers recognized both the difficult economic circumstances of smallholder coffee producers and producer capability to carry out successful certifications; Mutersbaugh, 2004.) With this in view, the following sections will assess several political-economic factors contributing to the unique character of 3rd party certification. 3.1. Neoliberal curtailment of state regulatory space The contemporary period is marked by a retrenchment of governmental regulatory authority over labor, safety, and environmental codes at the same time as global trade is expanding both in terms of new types of products (e.g., organic, environmentally friendly) and existing sweated goods (Busch and Bain, 2004). However, rather than fill this void via inter-state conventions, transnational neoliberal governance is characterized by use of private regulation in international trade and the increased importance of transnational regulatory institutions (Hart, 2004; Peck and Tickell, 2002). In broad terms, the current weakness of multilateral regulation may be tied to the political defeat, during the Uruguay round of GATT talks, of the ‘social clause’ backed by the UN’s International Labor Organization that would have inserted labor norms directly into World Trade Organization (WTO)-sponsored international trade agreements, particularly the GATT, but also TradeRelated Intellectual Property Rights and Trade-Related Investment Measures (Boiral, 2003; Haworth et al.,

2004; Wade, 2003). With this clause eliminated, it has become difficult for individual nations to legislate with the goal of protecting global environments or labor rights beyond their borders. An important test case occurred with a 1992 Australian law meant to limit imports of timber from tropical forest destruction (Bartley, 2003). Malaysia challenged the rule as a nontariff trade barrier under GATT, and Australia was forced to rescind the legislation (Bartley, 2003). These WTO-based limits to direct state intervention on behalf of environmental and labor rights established the limits to state regulation, yet are not sufficient to explain the impetus to 3rd party certification. 3.2. Food and product scares in an anxious age A second impetus to the formation of certified products has been the ‘pull’ exerted by socially concerned consumers attentive to issues of social-justice and environmental conservation. Although the idea of social-action-through-consumption is not a new phenomena—boycotts have been a tactic of organized labor since the 1930s, and used quite successfully by Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers to gain contracts in the 1970s—the increased number and affluence of social choice consumers in the 1980s, particularly in the EU, has opened the possibility for significant niche markets in ‘ethical’ products (Barrett et al., 2002). This group is also, however, quite variable with respect to specific commodity classes, with food consumers forming a diverse and powerful coalition (Freidberg, 2004), while forest product (Jensen et al., 2003; Taylor, 2005; Klooster, 2005) and apparel consumers (Bender, 2002; Cowie, 2002) have been less active. A part of the heightened concern of food product consumers may be traced to what Freidberg (2004) terms the ‘anxious age’ ignited by the potential (and fact) of pathogens hitching a ride on foodstuffs that has become expressed as a generalized consumer anxiety about the origins of products (see also Hollander, 2003 on food purity). These bodily concerns have not had the same general purchase for other ethical goods, although notions of sweated goods as a contagion (Cowie, 2002) of the consequences of wholesale environmental destruction (Gullison, 2003), or of an economic ‘race to the bottom’ that undercuts living standards (Suranovic, 2002) also figure as elements of consumer anxiety insofar as consumers must earn their wherewithal to consume in an unstable globalized economy. From the standpoint of certification practices, this food/non-food division has meant that foodstuffs have been subject to direct government regulation within consuming countries, and have been more closely scrutinized with respect to their adherence to transnational certification and accreditation norms. This is important, for although consumers exert choice over

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their selection of a product certifier (Barrett et al., 2002), this choice has more to do with the perceived rigor of standards than the character of certification practices about which consumers have little information. In this context, political attention paid to food scares has resulted in a somewhat paradoxical situation in which food produced within a nation’s borders is often exempt from WTO-imposed restrictions on national regulation for reasons of economic security, and yet internationally traded foodstuffs—perhaps as a means to limit these exemptions—are more fully subject to oversight by transnational regulatory institutions (e.g., ISO, FAO) than non-foodstuffs. 3.3. Social action: the struggle for social accountability This generalized consumer anxiety over the providence of consumption goods has found expression in the struggle by social-justice and environmental groups to construct a ‘public sphere within the private economy’ focusing upon specific certified-goods commodity networks. Although a full account of social accountability initiatives are beyond the scope of the present paper, two aspects of social activism have had an impact. First, within the context of national regulatory retrenchment, activists have both lobbied national governments to create channels for ethical goods in fair-trade agricultural products (Raynolds, 2004; Renard, 2003), sweatfree apparel (Boiral, 2003), organic agriculture (Vos, 2000; Barrett et al., 2002), biodiversity conservation (Rice, 2001; Mas and Dietsch, 2004), and certified forest products (Klooster, 2002; Taylor, 2005), and have pressed for policy changes to address concerns about the reach and focus of these norms (Barrientos et al., 2003; Freidberg, 2004). These efforts have been most successful in the case of foodstuffs for reasons noted above, but have had limited success in other areas, particularly in the EU. Second, until the mid-1990s, prior to transnational harmonization (covered below), activist organizations were the first to set up certification systems. Examples include IFOAM’s organic certification (Mutersbaugh, 2004; Gonza´lez and Nigh, 2005; Michelsen, 2001), Forest Stewardship Council’s (FSC’s) Forest Services, FLO’s fair-trade (Renard, 2003), SMBC’s Bird-Friendlys (Rice, 2001), and SA8000 sweat-free apparel (Bartley, 2003). Each of these certification types initially developed what might be termed ‘cultures of certification’— with unique visions vis-a`-vis the mechanics of 3rd party certification—that varied depending upon specifics of commodity production processes (Guthman, 1998; Bartley, 2003; Gereffi et al., 2005), ideals of quality (Mansfield, 2004), and local cultures of interaction (Seppanen and Helenius, 2004; Mutersbaugh, 2004). For example, organic agriculture developed a peer-based evaluation system organized around local chapters that

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nonetheless was very thorough with respect to yearly field surveys (Gonza´lez and Nigh, 2005), and FLO and FSC developed early forms of external, inspector-based certifications focused on, respectively, fairness in villagelevel asset production and social expenditure, and ecological forestry. The most important contemporary effect upon certification frameworks is harmonization under the aegis of transnational institutions such as ISO and the FAO. However, within this context socialmovement efforts to expand product certification continue. Notable initiatives include ‘single-label’ efforts, such as those by Social Accountability in Sustainable Agriculture, Common Code for the Coffee Community, and ETI that would integrate fair-trade, biodiversity protections, and organic certifications under a single ‘sustainable agriculture’ umbrella label (Mutersbaugh, 2005). 3.4. Expanding transnational regulatory institutions Perhaps the most paradoxical aspect of certification is that while it is driven by efforts to find an alternative means to promote social-justice and ecological conservation in the face of declining state-level regulatory authority, transnational regulation of certification practices is increasing sharply. Since the late 1990s, certification practices have been profoundly restructured through harmonization under transnational standards, most notably ISO guides 61 and 65 (Mutersbaugh, 2005). These transnational institutional initiatives are supported by WTO under Technical Barriers to Trade provisions (see Busch and Bain, 2004) and by efforts such as the FAO’s Codex Alimentarius which mirrors these provisions (Raynolds, 2004; Sawyer, 2004). In a Weberian sense, these efforts reflect the extension of revised forms of bureaucratic rationality through a national and transnational institutional matrix. In particular, the rise of a pervasive ‘audit culture’ that marshals terms such as transparency in an effort to organize global quality management under a single template such as ISO 10011-1 (Guidelines for auditing quality systems, Part I auditing) (Townsend and Townsend, 2004). In a Polyanian sense, certification standardization arises in efforts to promote global trade liberalization (Mutersbaugh, 2005), a change that entails, as Boiral (2003) notes, a substitution of trade law for labor law. In any event, global trade law initiatives have led to the thicket of intersecting transnational and national regulations partly sketched out in Fig. 1. A full accounting would include additional transnational regulations and take note of efforts underway in dozens of exporting nations to bring certification and accreditation frameworks into concordance—generally with ISO norms, and more particularly with EU norms—in a bid to ensure continued EU market access after the

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December 2005 cutoff (Barrett et al., 2002; Martinez and Banados, 2004; Thione et al., 2000; Sawyer, 2004). This institution-driven harmonization of certification templates has theoretical and practical implications. First, there does not appear to be a simple equation of increased standards with increased certification intensity. Rather, this dynamic would lend support to Barrett et al.’s (2002) suggestion that a lack of agreement in product standards is in part responsible for increasing certification intensity as firms attempt to use their compliance with transnational certification norms to challenge standards-based (technical) barriers to product entry. Second, in governance terms it appears that the transnational arena is increasingly the purview of executive authority (Cameron, 2000); adjudication is internalized within executive structures such as national standards bodies that are inaccessible to citizen action or undertaken under the auspices of the WTO which, despite its ‘greening’, continues to favor trade liberalization over social and ecological protections as the Malaysia–Australia case cited above indicates. 3.5. Anxiety redux: green branding and corporate fear A final driver of consequence for the shape of certification concerns the role of for-profit corporations that operate within certified products networks. While it is doubtless necessary to distinguish between ‘green’ businesses that have grown up within and participated in the making of certified milieus and those, such as Starbucks or Sainsbury’s, that seek to ‘greenwash’ their businesses by entering into previously developed ethical goods markets, this section will argue that, in a general sense, firms share a dependence upon a ‘green’ reputation to sustain profit margins and, with respect to the mechanics of certification, a consequent desire to manage information about quality and avoid the emergence of information that might tarnish that reputation (Guthman, 1998; Bartley, 2003; Parrott et al., 2002). The importance of a green reputation is sustained by the history of corporate efforts to acquire the trappings of ethical trade, e.g., in the cases of Sainsbury’s ETIs (Freidberg, 2004; Barrett et al., 2002), Starbuck’s limited fair-trade product sales and use of preferred supplier social and ecological standards (Goodman, 2004; Starbucks Corporation, 2005), Home Depot’s sales of certified wood products (Jensen et al., 2003), or use of SAI’s labor certification by Toys R Us (Bartley, 2003). The other side of the coin, however, is that the greening of a product brand is unstable both in the sense that news of an ethical violation can damage a brand reputation and a green reputation opens a firm to social criticism and contestation over the meaning of green and the means to ensure it, particularly in retail service (Rivera, 2004). Reputations can and have suffered significant damage, as demonstrated by Naturland’s 2002 failure to

catch use of the banned pesticide Nitrofen in organic chicken feed, and company cases such as those of Starbucks, Liz Claiborne, and Home Depot among others in which firms have found that ethical trades opens them up to negotiations over the terms of that trade by organized citizenry (Boiral, 2003). In an effort to manage green reputations—that is to say reap the benefits of a green reputation while reducing the risk of negative publicity associated with ethical and/or monitoring lapses—companies have taken varied strategies, often used in combination, that I here group into ‘standards dilution’, ‘parallel production’, ‘contractual distancing’, and ‘captive certification’. After setting out definitions below, the next and concluding section of this article will examine implications for the spatiality of quality control. The first of these strategies, standards dilution, indicates efforts by firms to either alter standards created by standardsmaking NGOs or shop around for organizations that certify to less stringent standards. Though this strategy is decreasing in importance for organic foodstuffs due to increased transnational/national regulation, it continues to be significant for fair-trade and no-sweat apparel certifications (Renard, 2005; Boiral, 2003). Parallel production forms a second strategy in which the firm certifies a portion, often a small one, of their total product sales to a high standard and uses this to ‘greenwash’ their remaining, non-certified production (Goodman, 2004). While parallel production is not permitted for producers such as small farmers who find the labor inputs necessary to full conversion burdensome (e.g., in organic coffee), retailers increasingly make use of this strategy (Renard, 2003). The third strategy, contractual distancing, involves the practice of subcontracting out some aspects of production to non-certified shops. In common with parallel production, contractual distancing allows retailers to certify only a portion of their production, it is distinguished, however, through manipulation of the social organization of production to use upstream suppliers. It is most common in apparel production, leading many scholars of sweat-free production to take up contract language as a major analytical focus (Cowie, 2002; Cameron, 2000; Goldstein et al., 1999; Hartman et al., 2003). A final strategy enrolls captive certifiers into private certification, distinguished from semi-public 3rd party certification in that the standards are not set by external agencies such as FLO, SAI, FSC, or IFOAM, but rather are defined by contract language. Starbucks’ preferred supplier contracts represent a form of this. Ostensibly, 3rd party in form due to a use of established certifiers such as OCIA, in fact it introduces a completely different standards framework based upon a comprehensive points system with no minimums. Although this is in practice a 1st party certification, it differs in that it is represented as a 3rd party certification through the use

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of a 3rd party certifier and through the clever juxtaposition of 1st and 3rd party certified products, as when Starbucks undertakes in-store product placement of genuinely 3rd party certified ‘fair-trade’ coffees next to Starbucks ‘verified’ (1st party) products. Another strategy, pursued by Sainsbury, falls in the gray area between semi-public and private. Barrett et al. (2002) report that the UK supermarket chain elected to have all of their certifications undertaken by a single certifier. This type of arrangement does not concord with transnational certification norms requiring certifier/retailer separation to ensure transparency (economic dependence presents the risk of loss of autonomous decision-making authority by the captive certifier), and may draw a WTO challenge from excluded UK certifiers. These firm-based responses to a ‘spiraling’ of certification intensity (Rosen and Sloane, 1995) represent attempts to institute a different relation between certified products and quality and reclaim control over the production of quality. The following section examines spatial implications.

4. Certification and just-in-space: discussion and conclusion Viewing the contemporary ISO-based, NGO-supported certification framework (Fig. 1) from the standpoint of supporting dynamics, its robustness is striking. The separate agencies of consumer interest, neoliberal inter-state deregulation, social- and environmental-NGO pressure, ethical product producers, transnational regulatory agencies, and ethical retailing firms have combined to bring about a sophisticated, stable (and expensive), system for creating standards, certifying their presence at the point of production, and then surveilling the product—and accrediting the surveillers—as the product travels through space. Given this confluence of factors, certification has not come under direct challenge from for-profit firms operating in the ethical products sector, yet these firms confront a risk that their brand will become at once dependent upon the success of surveillance practices and subject to contestation within the context of product standard development. Efforts by firms to evade the demands of ethical product markets have, rather than challenge certification mechanics, sought to apply ‘co-location’ strategies that associate non-certified products with certified products, setting them adjacent to or mixing them with certified products. In this way, firms maintain two separate production lines, one fully certified and subject to public assessment, another non-certified and private, and then combine them at the point of sales to greenwash a firm’s brand name. When co-location is effective, it is in the firm’s interest to maintain the existing social consensus with respect to certification

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norms, namely, the public production of commodities in open and accessible spaces, as a price to pay for the possibility of using certified goods to leverage the sales of non-certified goods. In a few recent cases, however, firms elect to challenge certification norms directly by setting up forms of captive certification. In these instances, firms challenge the public character of production space by implement a private certification that mimics public-standards-based certification yet dispenses with key aspects. Starbuck’s preferred client contracts, based upon a ‘verification’ schema, provides an example. Rather than require fairtrade certifications for the majority of their coffee, Starbucks sets up contracts that specify that producers must verify compliance with a set of production norms. This differs significantly from fair-trade certification in several respects. First, standards are internally generated by Starbucks; second, a passing grade is based upon a composite score rather than meeting minimum norms; third, verifiers work directly for Starbucks rather than maintain an autonomous contract status (see Mutersbaugh, 2004), suggesting a ‘captive’ status; fourth, the infrastructure of certification, that is to say human capital development, is retained within Starbucks rather than spread along a network of independent producers and certifiers (Mutersbaugh, 2005); fifth, and consequent to these factors, verification inhabits a space that I would term ‘fully’ private (as opposed to semi-public certification) rendering it, in stark contrast to its nomenclature, in effect un-verifiable. The ‘verified’ product is subsequently co-located with certified product in the Starbucks store in a move that further blurs the lines between ethical and non-ethical products. This set of circumstances is similar in tone to Sainsbury’s effort to limit certification to a single entity, a move that, as noted, may be challenged, ironically enough, under WTO rules by excluded certifying agencies (Barrett et al., 2002). A second aspect of certification is that it highlights what I call the ‘labor of quality’. Space and labor are, in certified production, linked in that inspections focus on labor in specific production sites. Mansfield (2004) undertakes a close reading of the implications of this equation in her inquiry on the exclusion of ocean fish from certified organics. In her examination of certified organic standards, the possibility of certifying a commodity as organic relies upon the capability of controlling the space within which the commodity is produced. Fish and their medium are not susceptible to spatial control, labor inspection cannot be performed, and the public space where quality becomes subject to politics becomes problematic. Hence, even if organic, fish cannot be certified as such under the contemporary certified organic rubric. Her analysis recalls the distinction within organic coffee over ‘active’ versus so-called ‘passive’ organic in which ‘traditional’ coffee production

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(couched as passive), though ecologically sound, is not considered an appropriate candidate for certification because although it fulfills requirements for sustainable, agrochemical-free production, it does not conform to notions of progressive betterment. By contrast, active organic, with its farm plans, erosion control structures, renovation, and pruning is considered certifiable. This relation between certification, spaces of production, and labor surveillance makes a practical contribution to the theorization of commodity fetishism. Quality certification challenges the magic of the market with respect to its ability to assign new qualities at the point of consumption. Certification underscores the fact that fetishization is a process, and one that involves conscious, corporate decisions to alienate and abstract labor power from workers—the producers of these qualities—and re-embed said labor in commodities in new guises. Fetishization is pushed into public space where it becomes a site of social struggle over how labor is abstracted. These insights are not in themselves novel, a number of researchers have noted that certification opens new windows on the ‘double fetishization’ of nature (Allen and Kovach, 2000) by ‘lifting the veil’ (Hudson, 2003). What this study suggests, however, is rather a ‘shifting’ than a ‘lifting’. Fig. 1 may be read as a map of spaces where certifiers progressively fetishize certified commodities, stripping not only the quality labor involved in enhancing biodiversity or sewing a garment at a living wage, but also the labor of monitoring, of certification itself. In essence, the second, monitoring rail of the just-in-space commodity track makes visible the processes through which labor is alienated from workers in the production of consumed qualities (fairness, biodiversity) at the same time as monitoring labor itself is veiled. As this paper shows through the examination of this ‘bumpy’ construction of just-in-space production, although many press to keep certified space public and popularize the mechanics of certification, others seek to turn this space private and reclaim control over the presentation of both product and certification standards. This paper has argued that certified forms of commodity production rest upon ‘just-in-space’ control over labor power at the point of production and subsequently during the often transnational process through which labor power is abstracted from the commodity. The semi-public character of this surveillance space—the result of a constellation of mutually reinforcing dynamics that range from citizen anxiety to social activism and transnational institutional initiatives—lends itself to political contestation not only with respect to which activities constitute ethical production on the first rail, but also with respect to how these activities are proven present through certification practices on the second. The emergence of certified spaces, however, has not received the warm embrace of

each and every ethical commodities retail vendor. Finding that certification challenges their ability to engage in what Marx (1867b) termed the ‘social hieroglyphic’ of commodity fetishism, that is to say in their ability to represent their commodities as exemplars of publicly agreed-upon ethical practice, some firms have chosen not so much to directly attack ethical standards as to seek means to reduce the reach of certification or even wholly supplant it with fully private, contract-based practices such as verification. If the still only partial clarity of semi-public certified spaces is further reduced, then a firm’s ability to represent compliance will become less easily challenged. The term just-in-space, then, is meant to call attention to the specific labor processes and persons that are engaged in the making of a semi-public certified space, and to the contradictions inherent in opening the ‘hidden abode of production’ (Marx, 1867c) to public scrutiny in the face of corporate brand anxiety.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their illuminating contributions to this manuscript. Remaining errors are my own. This research would not have been possible without the cooperation of Oaxacan coffee producers and organizations. Funding was provided by the National Science Foundation Geography and Regional Science Program Grant BCS-0456104.

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