'The invisible mouth: Mobilizing 'the consumer' in food production-consumption networks
'The invisible mouth: Mobilizing 'the consumer' in food production-consumption networks
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DOI：
10.1111/1467-9523.00217
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发表时间：
2002-10-01
影响因子：
4.1
通讯作者：
Lockie, S
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Lockie, S
生产与消费关系在空间和时间上的距离，以及社会理论的历史生产主义偏见，促进了粮食生产和消费社会学的发展，使其成为基本上不相关的学术话语。以生产为基础的农业食品研究倾向于将消费视为与生产不同但由生产决定的社会实践领域，或视为生产者必须相互竞争以满足的“需求”来源。这两种观点都未能处理粮食消费做法的复杂性或它们与粮食供应做法的关系。这个问题的一个解决方案，由行动者网络理论和商品系统分析提供信息，是对特定商品链或网络的检查，以及物质从生产点到摄入点的物质和符号转换。然而，正如一些研究所发现的那样，简单地将迄今为止被忽视的消费活动添加到商品链的末端已经证明是困难的;这种方法最终有利于分析相对较小的利基和特色食品链，可以毫无问题地确定具体的行为者。本文认为，虽然生产-消费的概念化的演员网络本身是强大的，方法论的禁令，简单地遵循演员通过网络是有问题的。还需要更多的概念和方法工具，以便审查行为者如何设法使其他人“在远处”可知和可管理，即如何安排分散和复杂的网络。例如，以同样的方式，工业生产的食品的消费者越来越看不到生产点，同样地，那些生产者可能看不到的无形食品也是如此。然而，通过应用技术，包括市场研究、调查数据和销售记录保存点，“消费者”是可知和可管理的。在快速扩展的有机食品网络中，“消费者”是可知的方式的调查说明了随后的话语“消费者需求”被部署在每个网络内的多个点动员演员的方式，包括从这个需求据称是流动的摄入点。
The distanciation of production-consumption relationships in space and time, and the historically productivist bias of social theory, have contributed to the development of sociologies of food production and consumption as largely unrelated academic discourses. Production-based agri-food studies have tended to treat consumption as either a domain of social practice distinct from, but determined by, production, or as a source of 'demands' that producers must compete among themselves to meet. Both perspectives fail to deal either with the complexity of food consumption practices or their relationships with practices of food provision. One solution to this problem-informed by actor-network theory and commodity systems analysis-has been the examination of specific commodity chains, or networks, and the material and symbolic transformations that substances undergo as they move from the point of production to the point of ingestion. However, as a number of studies have found, simply adding the hitherto neglected activity of consumption to the end of the commodity chain has proved difficult; this method ultimately favoring the analysis of relatively small chains for niche and specialty foods for which specific actors may unproblematically be identified. This paper argues that while the conceptualization of production-consumption in terms of actor-networks is itself robust, the methodological injunction to simply follow actors through networks is problematic. Additional conceptual and methodological tools are needed that allow an examination of the ways in which actors seek to render others knowable and governable 'at a distance'; that is, to order diffuse and complex networks. In much the same way, for example, that the point of production has become increasingly invisible to the consumers of industrially produced foods, so too are those ingesting food potentially invisible to its producers. 'The consumer' is, however, made knowable and governable through the application of technologies including market research, survey data and point of sale record keeping. Investigation of the ways in which 'the consumer' is made knowable within rapidly extending organic food networks illustrates the ways in which ensuing discourses of 'consumer demand' are deployed to mobilize actors at multiple points within each network-including the point of ingestion from which this demand is purported to flow.