Mark Harvey - From tomatoes via genomes to biofuels – by public road
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Presentation by Prof. Mark Harvey (Department of Sociology, University of Essex) March 18 2010 at the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, University of Kent "An overview of my work of the last decade, and its specific contribution to the development of the understanding of economic sociology and innovation. Covers a wide range of research, picking out the main features, rather than going into great depth."
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Mark Harvey - From tomatoes via genomes to biofuels – by public road
- 1. From tomatoes via genomes to biofuels – by public road. Developing a neo-Polanyian understanding of capitalism. Mark Harvey March 18 2010 School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research University of Kent
- 6. Instituted economies Polanyi’s two process economy Four transformational process economy Production Appropriation - exchange Distribution Consumption Qualitative characteristics Control Spatial location Functionality - use
- 9. BOYLE’S LAW AND/OR SCHWEPPES SODA WATER PUBLIC PRIVATE Differentiation and interdependence
- 12. WILL CAPITALIST POLITICAL ECONOMIES SURVIVE? LAND AND WATER USE Petro-chemical resource depletion Biomass for energy and materials Global Climate Change Increased energy and materials demand Increased and changing food demand
Notes de l'éditeur
- Attempt at an overview of my work of the last decade, and its specific contribution to the development of the understanding of economic sociology and innovation. Will be covering a wide range of research, picking out the main features, rather than going into great depth.
- Experience of these closing decades of the twentieth century made me think that it was necessary to find new ways in to understanding contemporary capitalism. The collapse of the soviet union, the triumph of Thatcher, as much as the fact that bashing one’s head against neo-classical texts, or treating classic political economy texts as bibles was leading nowhere, suggested both a political and intellectual crisis. I needed to start from somewhere different. One day, with blinding clarity, the answer presented itself in the shape of a tomato. A Damascene moment. We had to look for new ways of thinking and researching the economic. Probe and object – a fruitful tension. From the moment the tomato was first hybridised, it has undergone transformations within different societies, economies and cultures. The first European encounter led, over the course of several centuries to an uneven transformation of European cuisines. The cultural, political and legal tomato can be seen in terms of cuisines, national identities around food, the politics of regulation and use of colours and preservatives, or trading standards. The legal tomato can be seen in terms of laws of contract, health laws, and internationally Codex Alimentarius. I looked at in terms of configurations of production, distribution, exchange and consumption, so my use of the tomato was to understand the variety and historical change of capitalism through seeing how capitalism changed the tomato, but also how the tomato changed capitalism.
- The tomato was amongst the leading pioneers of mass production for mass consumption, preceding cars by decades. Increasingly urbanised populations developed new consumption habits for cooking and eating all foods, and tomatoes were symptomatic of the shift. Heinz and Campbell founded in 1867. Revolutionised production with dedicated supply chains of farmers, revolutionised distribution through the growing road and rail networks, revolutionised retailing through the use of branding, advertising and market research. The first neon advertisement, a bottle of ketchup. An economic sociology approach to innovation characteristic of CRIC emphasised the significance of innovation in consumption, by transformation of consumption habits, that are necessary to and articulated with the overall innovation process. Innovation does not stop at the point of purchase. In fact, without innovation in consumption, markets could not be created or sustained. Innovation in consumption involves the changing of lifestyles, structuring temporalities, inventing and articulating new and generalised habits. Two trivial examples. The economists talk of markets as societal coordinating institutions: they exaggerate. Buyers of mobile phones, trainers, houses, food, etc. visit separate and distinct markets. Only in consumption are these different outputs of markets brought into the coherence and articulation of lifestyles. Consumption entails a significant work of coordination, without which innovations in PDA would be unsustainable. Distinctively in the UK, and over a long historical period, there has been a displacement of this configuration headed by global brand manufacturers. Supermarkets have gained controlling power over an integrated supply chains from farm to fork. Rebranding is only the outward sign of this shift. Advertising and market research for particular products is downgraded, innovation revolutionised – 1000 per year as opposed to four, for the typical manufacturer for supermarkets. Distribution revolutionised. And of course, retailing and shopping have been transformed one-stop shop, ready-made food, new quality regime, internet and home delivery. Responsive to shifts in consumer fashions, and even immediate demand. SO all aspects of the configuration have been radically transformed, in a way revealed and analysed by an IEP configurational approach.
- This perspective leads to an analysis of how these configurations are instituted, sustained and transformed over the long term, but also how they vary deeply in different countries, and regional and socio-cultural contexts. These are notable early 20 th century institutions – surviving, expanding, transforming over a period of more than 100 years, whether in terms of firms or products. Underlying these iconic institutions, however, are the processes of production, distribution, exchange and consumption. And it is the framework of analysing these that I now turn. Interesting side comments: gigantism of the beefsteak, free from drugs, the Warhol connection.
- Arose from a paper of Karl Polanyi, but greatly extended and altered. Departure from conceptions of the economy advanced by classical political economy, neo-classical economics or indeed – although this is a more complicated argument, neo-institutionalism. There are no static or fixed generative structures, models, of which the unfolding reality of contemporary capitalism economies are the empirical and historical instantiation. There are contingent and emergent patterns with circumscribed spatio-temporal fixes. So no general laws of capitalism, no universal market mechanisms. This is not a question of abstract theory against empirical diversity, but a fundamental theory of variation and historical development. The consequence of this approach leads one to explore deep variation, both historical and societal. It is the societally varied nature of economies that underpins a synthetic economic sociological approach. One cannot understand economies apart from the spatio-temporal frames they inhabit. The next two points are strongly connected. Polanyi posed what appears to me a very reasonable challenge: what do we mean when we use the term economic, or economy? There has been a strong tendency in the new economic sociology to stress the shaping of the economy by various social processes, networks, culture, politics, fields….There is a lot of emphasis on the shaping, to the extent that sometimes it is not too clear either what is being shaped, or more particularly, what is economic once it has been shaped. This often enrols the concept of ‘embedding’, of economies embedded in social or cultural frames of one kind or another. Indeed, the Polanyi question drops out or, as in Weber, it is taken for granted as self-evident what an economy is, what makes action economic. There is also a tendency to confuse or elide the question of specificity with the question of autonomy. This often occurs in combination with the rhetorical critique of neo-classical economics, deemed to propound autonomous laws of the economy, autonomous, that is with respect to the socio-cultural frames. Equivalent to laws of nature. Demonstrating the shaping of the economy counters the autonomy proposition, but often leaves one without any sense of what is specifically economic, i.e. whether the term economic can be accorded substantive and significant meaning. I want to argue that it is important to retain the Polanyi question, and even more, to try to answer it. There do seem to me to be specifically and characteristically economic crises, for example, however much they are conditioned by, shaped, or influenced by political, social, or cultural processes. Northern Rock. The Great Depression. Market bubbles. Stock exchanges. Supermarkets. Tomato and pizza processing factories. And this also means retaining and indeed advancing some ideas of economic causality, having instituted economic explanations. The link to the next question is provided by the asking what is embedded in what? I won’t dwell long on this point here, but will pick up on it later. But I just want to mention the relation between law and the economy, and fiscality and the economy. There is one view (Swedberg, Weber, Hodgson) that laws of contract, property, corporation, etc. underpin and are preconditions for, the operation of capitalist economies. But there are some good historical studies – as well as some of my own research - that demonstrates that laws of economic transactions are constantly evolving. But laws change in radically different ways from economic change, and they change very differently in different societal legal systems. Laws do not prescribe economic behaviour, and economic behaviour, although shaped by law, can equally well be argued to shape law. As new forms of economic activity or organisation emerge, law, in its own specific institutional forms and modes of development, also changes. It becomes interesting to explore the nature of the co-evolution of the specifically economic and specifically legal. The same applies to fiscal regimes, as argued by Daunton. As economies have historically developed, they proffer different fiscal handles – exchanges of property, new forms of engagement of labour, etc., new financial instruments. Fiscal regimes, tied to the budgetary dynamics of states, and politically decided, develop and change in ways again that differ from legal change, or economic change. So, the question of what is embedded in what, and how the economy articulates with the legal and the fiscal, becomes an interesting one for economic sociology, in an attempt to understand the shifting place of economy in society. The notion of embeddedness often confuses the issue, by leaving a puzzle of what is embedded in what. Law in economy, or economy in law. So that leaves me with the challenge. Having stressed how instituted the economy is, what do I mean by economy?
- Polanyi identified two economic processes, treated only inasmuch as they were historically and societally instituted, displacements in space and exchange or appropriation. This skewed his analysis to an understanding of social integration solely in terms of how these two processes were instituted and articulated in society, so reciprocity, redistribution and market exchange were identified as different historical modes. For capitalism, this led to an undue privilege accorded to the market, especially the self-regulating market, to such an extent that he preferred the term market society to capitalism. He argued strongly however that these economic processes were present even when institutionally undifferentiated from other dimensions of society and culture. Thus, in reciprocity based kinship societies, exchange and distribution of goods and services occurred as part of cultural, religious, and indeed the organisation of sexuality and reproduction in society. The economy was invisible as the specifically economic, lacking distinct institutional manifestation. But it was there nonetheless, and can be grasped analytically: these societies were not lacking in economy. My contribution to the development of this concept of instituted economic process has been two additional economic processes, also transformational processes: transformation of qualitative characteristics of a good or a practice; and transformation of the functionality of a good or a practice, the latter especially linked to an division of labour within society, from which emerges a differentiation between qualitative transformation by one social actor and use of the results of that transformation by another. None of these four processes on their own are economic: sandcastles, taking a walk, theft and war, are examples of transformations of Q, S, and C, for example, that on their own fall short of constituting economic processes. When brought together and stabilised or reproduced over time, they become institutionalised and then become constitutive of economies, in their more recognisable language of production, distribution, appropriation, and consumption. Just one more development to highlight: the term appropriation is much more general and enlarged than appears in Polanyi, and indeed indicates a distinctive and I would argue specific form of power, economic power, relating to economic control. This concept is much broader than that of exchange, and in particular facilitates and opens up a more extensive analysis of property rights, social, collective, individual, public or private. The relationality of the four processes is important from several angles. For example, understanding consumption and the work undertaken by consumers can only be understood relationally, with processes of exchange, distribution and production – the sociology of consumption tends to detach itself from the economy by exploring consumption as activities of shopping and the use of commodities. Scale neutral, so it can explore the formation of scales, and multiple scales, interacting and interdependent economies.
- Much of economic sociology has recently been predominantly focused on the market, described by Swedberg as the central institution of capitalism. More recently, performativity theory and ANT have been almost taken the market as a autonomous theatre or arena for the enaction of the economy. The critical development of Polanyi was designed to put markets in their place, as just one phase of the constitution of economic organisation, moreover one that cannot be understood independently of overall organisational configurations of economies. So, for example, the market has been seen as a central coordinating device by mainstream economics, but also was, for Polanyi, a major underpinning of social integration, connecting buyers and sellers. Amongst other things, this has led to a major deficit in understanding of the role consumers as coordinators of economic activity. How commodities and services combine together in the forming of lifestyles entails a major co-ordinating activity undertaken by consumers: consumers put things together, whether in the household as a central consumption institution, or in spaces of leisure, the articulation of the boundaries between work and non-work activities along with the commodities that mark these boundaries. But more broadly, I would argue that the market can only be understood, firstly as but a phase in the process, secondly as radically instituted, historically and socially, varying in its key elements of quality of commodities, pricing and modes of exchange and distribution. UK supermarkets are an excellent example of this: different things are sold, with different processes of qualification, under different regimes of shopping, all of which can only be understood within the context of an organisation of supply chains, upstream, and the organisation of consumers, downstream.
- This economic sociology view of capitalism was developed further and significantly by what proved to be a difficult but fruitful challenge to the IEP approach when trying to understand the development of production and reproduction of knowledge in capitalism. What emerged was quite a bold thesis. Capitalism is about creating the divide and interdependence between public and private modes of economic organisation, and indeed the former has become a more and more significant and central feature of its dynamic growth. It is a capitalist form of the public, maybe, but public non-market economic mode nonetheless. Here some broad assertions. Often it is said that capitalism is driven towards the commodification of everything, ultimately in a global market. This is simply and significantly untrue. There are limits to commodification, one of the most important of which is the production and reproduction of knowledge. The dynamic growth of the public, even the understanding of what counts as public, has been very underdeveloped in economic sociology, in the legal understanding of public goods, and certainly the economic understanding of public goods. Because of the fixation with an idea of capitalism as a predominantly if not exclusively market economy, understanding of what constitutes public property or a public good often is almost a default category. Public is whatever has not been made private, it’s what left out of private property, this being in terms of non-exclusive rights. There is very little developed about positive and differentiated modalities of public appropriation. Example of the website and the scientific journal. YET, no industrial capitalism without the growth of public science. The argument made however, is that the public private divide, an aspect of the Great Divide of capitalism, is the outcome of a continuous process of instituting and deinstituting the divide. It is an unsettled frontier at the heart of capitalism.
- With respect to scientific knowledge the great divide began to open up with the origins of experimental science. There is this nice example of Boyle who provided his laboratory equipment for making carbonated water available as a public good to the Royal Navy, and Schweppes, founded in the 1770s, and still making soda water for the market 230 years later – another nice example of institutions and instituted processes. The cabalistic diagram in the centre illustrates graphically the process of differentiation and interdependence between public and private knowledge, and the fact that there is an ever shifting and porous frontier.
- The divide was much more fluid then, but our research looked at the economic turbulence that arose out of the new forms of biological science. New epistemic practices and forms of knowledge creating turbulence within the discipline was accompanied by economic turbulence around the shifting frontier. A new scale of knowledge production for biology, and new combinations of disciplines. Many of the projects involved multiple facilities often international collaboration. A huge question arose as to whether genomic knowledge, including the whole human genome, would be privately appropriated and traded in knowledge markets, or be appropriated as a public good. Perhaps the most striking outcome of the research and the analysis, however, was that new forms of global public knowledge, with new patterns of distribution and use were developed, notably the global databases. Genbank, the European Bioinformatics Institute, the Japanese Data Bank. Software tools rather than wet laboratory equipment, in silico experimentation. These required fundamental changes to the rules governing publication of science, quality controls, and peer review. Many new publicly developed protocols were developed specifically for different types of biological data. Further, as problems arose with the proliferation of data and its digitisation, new shared metalanguages are being developed, for instance by Gene Ontology, in order to bring order to the public domain. New regimes of funding and resourcing accompanied these developments. It is in this sense that one can talk of new public economies of knowledge, emergent configurations of production, appropriation, distribution and use. One of the key aspects of this analysis rests on the differentiation between producers and users of knowledge, and that fact that much of the new biological knowledge is polyvalent, open to multiple uses, drug discovery and diagnostics, evolutionary theory, systems biology, biotechnology, and the bioeconomy. The Great Divide, and the critical aspect of the dynamic growth of the public with new forms of public good, is thus prototypical of the multimodality of contemporary capitalism. Capitalism cannot be understood from within market dynamics.
- If the dynamism of knowledge production, as a public modal economy, has largely been underplayed by accounts of industrial revolutions, my current research is exploring the role of the state and innovation in relation to the historically unprecedented challenges of peak oil and global climate change. There have been many pollution and disease issues where the state has driven change and socio-technical transformation – clean air, CFCs and the ozone layer, lead in petrol – contagious diseases, etc. The example of roads is an interesting one, precisely because cars are so iconic of capitalist commodity consumption, whether in terms of global markets, major companies, or in innovations in production, employment and labour process. Yet, road transport is a startling example of multi-modality, and, by way of example, the Interstate Highway system is interesting because it was only created under capitalist political economy – it had no Roman past. Like genomes, there was massive turbulence and political struggle, lasting over decades, as to whether roads would be private and tolled, or public and financed by taxation. In the event, Eisenhower, a cold-war president initiated what was to be the largest engineering project in history, 41,000 miles of road, alongside the Great Wall, as the human construction most visible from space. It transformed America, economically, socially, culturally – but it was also a major innovation and growth in the public economy, a dynamism inherently multi-modal.
- Now facing historically unprecedented challenges to the continuation of capitalist political economies as we have known them. Peak oil, global climate change, and feeding the 9 billion. Complex, interlocking, challenges – at the moment only addressed in a piecemeal way, scientifically, politically, and social scientifically.
- Biofuels research has shown the innovation of new ways of politically directing a major transition in transport energy, markedly different in Brazil, USA and Europe. Market mandates, state provision of venture capital and capital guarantees, major investment in science and R&D, new sustainability regulation, special politically instituted markets – carbon offset trading. Major infrastructural change. De-politicisation and eco-moral individualism is characteristic of intra-market solutions: favoured by Tescos and Jackson.
- So now have travelled from tomatoes to biofuels, taking a diversion on some public roads. The process of theoretical development started with questioning classic political economy approaches, and rethinking the economy. First, tried to understand major transformations of capitalist economic organisation, strictly within the narrow framework of the economy understood as a capitalist market economy. Second, a shift in understanding towards multi-modality – in fact as much driven by understanding wage and welfare as by the later research in the turbulence of the biological sciences – the link was contingent, through the earlier research into the rise and fall of the GM tomato. Then, third, as an extension of the ideas of multi-modality, looking more closely at modes of instituting, and especially the significance of politically instituted economies, whether public or private. This then allows the questioning of the shifting place of economy and society, much more significant and fundamental than issues of governance and regulation, although including these. Finally, my research has been driven by the belief that we need to up our scale of research in order to address issues of major socio-political, economic and cultural transformation. To understand the dynamics of change, we need to explore processes of variation, historically and comparatively. This is as much a challenge to the funders of research as it is to us as researchers.
- This leads into a consideration of the reproduction of knowledge in capitalist economies. In the Polanyi Mark 1 vision, and indeed in the view of capitalism as a commodification of everything, the early period of industrial revolution, and indeed quite late into the 19 th and early 20 th century, child labour was commonplace, as it had been in most pre-capitalist economies, where for most of the population, children contributed to the labour force as soon as they were able. From a regulatory point of view, there were legislative attempts to restrict the extreme use of child labour in mines and factories, and this can be seen as a double-movement type of restriction of commodification. Yet, this analytical perspective completely fails to address the much more significant trend towards the development of mass education, and a progressive withdrawal of children from labour into education, to later and later ages. I am not going to go into the very important role of politics, and the emergence of universal suffrage as important forces behind this process. Instead, I want to focus on multi-modality, and the non-commodification of knowledge more directly. Going back to Marx and E-A, you will be familiar with the idea that workers, deprived of the means of production, and without any other means of subsistence, are compelled to sell their labour: they have nothing but their labour to sell. Unlike slavery, however, wage labour sells the use of labour, not the labourer as such. In Capital, there is some treatment of skilled labour, deemed to be of different levels of value, depending on the amount of labour going into its reproduction. But in Marx, the commodity circuit for the reproduction of labour is entirely one ensured by the purchase of those commodities deemed necessary for physical survival. Likewise, when talking the workers lacking means of production, it is difficult to see that anything other than physical means of production, capital goods, bought and sold as commodities are being referred. Public education was creating a collective knowledge base, not reproducing individual knowledges, owned by individuals. And the process of so doing, by virtue of wage labour, as an organisation of selling the use of labour, was essentially multi-modal. As industrial transformation developed literacy and numeracy were becoming essential and productively necessary. There was interdependence between public and private economic modes, but they grew dynamically together. And that of course meant the growth of fiscal transfers, the creation of new commodity circuits. The educational institutions, and the employees within them, as they were not producing commodities, but needed to consume them, were supported by the state and taxation. What is occurring is the emergence of new forms of multi-modality, because of course there is interdependence between commodity production and the collective knowledge base. So, the growth of public education (strangely excluded in most analyses of welfare regimes), creates a significant non-market period of the lifecourse, where a proportion of the population are not only not constrained to sell their labour, but proscribed from doing so. At the other end of the lifecourse, and at approximately the same historical period, retirement began to emerge, retracting another significant proportion of the population from a constraint to sell their labour. Now, I am not going to go into detail here into the variety of contending explanations for the emergence of retirement. I would certainly not deny the significance of political forces, in the style of a power-resource theory, as part of the account of variations between different countries. However, I do think that they are both inadequate in their explanation, and seriously mistaken in their characterisation of retirement supported by pensions. Pensions are only a means of purchasing commodities – but the recipients have ceased to be commodity producers. A circuit has been reconfigured, via various types of pension institution, again dramatically different in different capitalist economies, whereby resources are transferred from the generation producing commodities to the generation no longer doing so. To think of the pensioner as ‘released’ from the market, and so decommodified because no longer dependent on market exchanges, is a complete mis-description. Unlike the resources flowing to education to support the production of a collective knowledge base, pensions are dedicated to supporting the purchase of commodities, they are means of ensuring the commodity circuit for those out of employment, as indeed are many of the other benefit systems that characterise welfare regimes. The insufficiency of power resource theories in accounting for the emergence of retirement is that they fail to take account of the importance of economic growth, and growth in productivity, as underpinning the possibility of retirement. Although, this will be controversial in the way I phrase it, but there is an important sense in which part of the labour force became ‘surplus to requirements’, and there was increasingly a process of differentiation between unemployment for the fully able bodied, and the ageing employed population. There is a lot of evidence that employers, as well as political movements claiming rights, were significant in promoting retirement. Even if I would be hesitant in arguing that retirement is functional to capitalist labour markets, I would be hard pushed to find evidence that it was inherently dysfunctional. But, if I am right, there is a deep-lying link between economic growth and the sustainability of different levels of retirement, and clearly, the huge debates around ages of retirement and various crises of pension systems, point to growing instability of the ‘instituted economic processes’ underlying retirement, now given an additional twist by the current crisis. So, finally, if we think of the contemporary patterns of lifecourses, and their structural differences for men and women, for the UK and Germany, for Japan and the US, they are all a testament of the different and evolving institutional forms of multi-modality. At a societal level, there are ongoing processes of differentiation and interdependence between market and non-market modes of various kinds, societal configurations of multi-modality. But equally, this societal level is refracted through the structuring of lifecourses – the phases of lifecourse, even difficult and problematic transitions – nonetheless are articulated with each other. Equally, there are gendered interdependence between male and female lifecourses, linked amongst other things to child and elder-care, that again testify to the complex interdependence between the different economic modes of capitalism.