Discourses of sustainability and imperial modes of food provision: agri-food-businesses and consumers in Germany

It is widely accepted that overcoming the social-ecological crises we face requires major changes to the food system. However, opinions diverge on the question whether those ‘great efforts’ towards sustainability require systemic changes or merely systematic ones. Drawing upon Brand and Wissen’s concept of “imperial modes of living” (Rev Int Polit Econ 20:687–711, 2013; The imperial mode of living: everyday life and the ecological crisis of capitalism, Verso, London/New York, 2021), we ask whether the lively debates about sustainability and ‘ethical’ consumption among producers and consumers in Germany are far reaching enough to sufficiently reduce the imperial weight on the environment and other human and nonhuman animals. By combining discourse analysis of agri-food businesses’ sustainability reports with narrative consumer interviews, we examine understandings of sustainability in discourses concerning responsible food provision and shed light on how those discourses are inscribed in consumers’ everyday food practices. We adopt Ehgartner’s discursive frames of ‘consumer sovereignty’, ‘economic rationality’, and ‘stewardship’ to illustrate our findings, and add a fourth one of ‘legitimacy’. Constituting the conditions under which food-related themes become sustainability issues, these frames help businesses to (1) individualise the responsibility to enact changes, (2) tie efforts towards sustainability to financial profits, (3) subject people and nature to the combination of care and control, and (4) convey legitimacy through scientific authority. We discuss how these frames, mirrored in some consumer narratives, work to sideline deeper engagement with ecological sustainability and social justice, and how they brush aside the desires of some ostensibly ‘sovereign’ consumers to overcome imperial modes of food provision through much more far reaching, systemic changes. Finally, we reflect on possible paths towards a de-imperialised food system.

The Working Class in the Service Sector: Outlining the Issue and Reviewing Current Sociological Discourse

This study focuses on reviewing and analyzing the current sociological discourse devoted to the problems of routine service labor. The article reveals such aspects as the specifics of interactive service work, methods for assessing the size and composition of the service portion of the working class, how the updated properties of labor relations influence the traditional methods used by researchers to conceptualize them, the specific qualities of class consciousness inherent to the service sphere. It has been established that in foreign discourse of sociology of labor, research in the service sphere is currently at the forefront. The focus is on such problems as the structure of the new post-industrial working class, the inclusion of the client into the traditional worker/employer dyad as a third element that reconfigures the stable structures of labor relations, the increased importance of “emotional labor”, physicality and the so-called “soft qualities” of workers, the ideology of consumer sovereignty and the problems that it generates, the precarization of labor that leads to the deprivation of interactive service workers, the class consciousness and resistance practices of routine services employees. In domestic science, this issue is considered mainly from the standpoint of economics and management. In Russian sociology, service research has not been fully updated, there is no theoretical foundation, and the concept of service workers as part of the working class has not yet taken form. The majority of Russian authors rely on the structural and functional paradigm in the study of the service sphere, which does not correlate with the problems relevant to international sociology and the methods of their analysis.

The Theory of Competitive Markets

Chapter 2 explains how the theory of competitive markets became the benchmark for economic analysis, implicitly leading to the assumption that firms actually compete in real-world markets rather than acting as oligopolies. The chapter begins by showing how competition theoretically maximizes resource allocation and constrains the behavior of firms. Then it analyzes the assumptions that underlie the theory, emphasizing the problems that stem from the assumption of consumer sovereignty and the ability of producers to manipulate consumer preferences. It also explains how the assumption that markets are competitive became the paradigm of economic education, as advocated by Alfred Marshall, rather than recognizing the prevalence of monopolies and oligopolies, as advocated by Marshall’s successor, Joan Robinson. Finally, the chapter shows how the assumption that real-world markets are competitive is used to justify opposition to government regulation, based on the notion that competition already provides the only necessary constraints.

How Antitrust Really Works: A Theory of Input Control and Discriminatory Supply

------->Antitrust law and policy today are a semi-coherent welter of legal and economic doctrines. Immanent in them, however, is a structure of great simplicity and utility. The concept at the heart of the antitrust laws is the linear supply chain, consisting of an essential input, a downstream market in which competition is harmed through the discriminatory supply of the input to downstream firms, and consumers who pay higher prices for finished products as a result of the discriminatory behavior. Antitrust attacks this problem of the discriminatory supply of inputs in two ways. First, it seeks to prevent any one intelligence from taking control over the input, because absent such centralized control, competition from input suppliers eliminates any attempt at discrimination. Stopping the centralization of control over inputs is not always possible, however, because sometimes centralized control improves the quality of the input, and antitrust follows an implicit rule of “innovation primacy,” which holds that any act that plausibly improves the product likely does more good for consumers than any resulting increase in prices harms them, and so the act must be immune from antitrust scrutiny. ------->Second, antitrust regulates attempts by input controllers to use their power to increase their profits other than by charging what they know to be the highest possible prices for their products given their level of knowledge of consumer willingness to pay. Profits can be increased in this way by only three routes, each of which involves discrimination by the input controller in the supply of inputs to downstream firms. The input controller can discriminate in favor of firms that improve the final product ultimately sold to consumers and so increase consumers’ willingness to pay. The input controller can discriminate in favor of downstream firms that supply the input controller with information about consumer willingness to pay, enabling the input controller better to choose its prices to maximize its profits. And the input controller can discriminate against downstream firms that refuse to give the input controller access to profits that the firms have in turn extracted from consumers. The doctrine of innovation primacy protects discrimination that improves the final product sold to consumers, but not discrimination that facilitates information acquisition or the disciplining of refractory downstream firms. ------->This analysis resolves numerous longstanding conundrums in antitrust, including (1) whether antitrust picks winners (it must), (2) whether picking winners limits consumer sovereignty (impossible, because whenever a firm discriminates in the supply of inputs, the firm picks winners, and antitrust, which does no more than challenge such discrimination, therefore only ever substitutes its judgment for that of firms, never for that of end consumers), (3) whether antitrust should have a monopoly power requirement (it should, but the requirement should apply to the input market and not, as at present, to the downstream market in which competition is harmed), (4) whether firms should be allowed to compete on their own platforms as a general matter (of course they should, unless it is thought that consumers always know better than firms how everything they buy should be made, from start to finish), and (5) how to define the limits of the firm (the boundary of the firm does not end where formal ownership ends, but rather where discrimination in the supply of inputs ends). The analysis also shows why Lorain Journal, Aspen Skiing, Linkline, Trinko, Microsoft, Qualcomm, exclusive dealing, and tying are all the same basic case.

What’s in, what’s out? Towards a rigorous definition of the boundaries of benefit-cost analysis

Benefit-cost analysis (BCA) is typically defined as an implementation of the potential Pareto criterion, which requires inclusion of any impact for which individuals have willingness to pay (WTP). This definition is incompatible with the exclusion of impacts such as rights and distributional concerns, for which individuals do have WTP. I propose a new definition: BCA should include only impacts for which consumer sovereignty should govern. This is because WTP implicitly preserves consumer sovereignty, and is thus only appropriate for ‘sovereignty-warranting’ impacts. I compare the high cost of including non-sovereignty-warranting impacts to the relatively low cost of excluding sovereignty-warranting impacts.

Dirty Work and Emotional Labor in Public Service: Why Government Employers Should Adopt an Ethic of Care

This article combines theories on emotional labor in public service and dirty work to argue that organizations should adopt an ethic of care to support their workers. The economics of public services undermine the consumer-sovereignty narrative in government, particularly where public servants are agents of social control and enforcement. Public servants cannot and should not behave according to a customer-service ethos in many important areas of public service. Emotional labor is the process by which workers manage the identity-damaging aspects of public service. This article critiques individual-level human resource management (HRM) approaches and recommends dismantling customer service expectations that are inappropriately applied in public-service contexts.

Book Review: Austrian Economics in Contemporary Business Applications

"Austrian Economics in Contemporary Business Applications" shows how Austrian ideas—value subjectivity, consumer sovereignty, capital allocation, entrepreneurship, etc.—can be useful “to practical management problems.” It is, up to this point, the highest scholarly achievement of the "Economics for Business" project of the Mises Institute. The book does not cover everything, but is a good first approach to summarizing Austrian ideas for business people. Next efforts should turn the focus more explicitly to entrepreneurs and businessmen and less to academics.