The CRIC–MUP series New Dynamics of Innovation and Competition is designed to make an important contribution to this continually expanding field of research and scholarship. As a series of edited volumes, it combines approaches and perspectives developed by CRIC’s own research agenda with those of a wide range of internationally renowned scholars. A distinctive emphasis on processes of economic and social transformation frames the CRIC research programme. Research on the significance of demand and consumption, on the empirical and theoretical understanding of competition and markets, and on the complex inter-organisational basis of innovation processes provides the thematic linkage between...

Food in late modern societies is marked by controversy. It was never a matter of indifference, of course, in other times and places. Yet, with the food supply secured in the western world against the seasons, pestilence and drought, with most foods wholesome, and mostly available at affordable prices, its significance as a topic of political argument must appear somewhat surprising. Subject to enormous scrutiny – in the media, through political disputation and by cultural evaluation, as well as in everyday conversation – it is a field of contrary opinions.

The unifying theme of this book is a highly contentious issue, that...

This chapter draws on a study of amateurs’ – music-and food-lovers’ – practices, to show that taste is anactivityand not a passive or determined state. We use the words ‘amateur’, ‘taste’ and ‘lover’ in their broad senses referring to any form of love or practice, and not only the restrictive cultured sense of a connoisseurship centred on a knowledge of the object itself. Amateurism is contrasted, on the one hand, to the lack of concern of lay-people who pay little attention to what they eat or listen to, and, on the other hand, to the certified expertise of the professional....

Very broadly speaking, there are three alternative understandings of the relationship between an object and its individual user. First, the value of an object is inherent to that object’s use in its capacity for satisfying its user’s needs or functions. Second, value is based on the individual’s subjective evaluation of the object in question, regarding its utility, capacity to give pleasure, etc. The third, culturalist, alternative is to understand the value of an object in terms of the cultural meaning assigned to it and shared by the members of a community. It is thus determined by its place in a...

The importance of food quality issues in the contemporary global context is well established. Since the early 1990s we have seen developments in nutrition, life sciences and biotech programmes; the setting up of food quality standards in Europe as well as in other OECD countries; the heightened focus of the media on food issues and a series of food safety crises. On the market side these trends have included a reconsideration of business strategy on the part of firms and their implementation of quality standards, which, as a result, are profoundly renewing and extending food differentiation. Moreover, two complementary tendencies...

In French mosques, the rules surrounding the consumption of food and drink (such as pork and alcohol), as well as table manners (using the right hand rather than the left to convey food to the mouth) and eating patterns (fasting during the month of Ramadan), are subject to frequent inquiry, along with those concerning marriage, sexuality and dress code. All such questions have one point in common: they question the limits of Muslim coexistence with non-Muslims. May a meal be shared with a non-believer? May a Muslim marry a non-Muslim? In whose presence may a Muslim woman remove her veil?...

The UK public’s confidence in the quality of the modern food supply, and in the governance of that supply, took a buffeting through a series of food safety crises in the 1980s and 1990s. The much-quoted list ranged from pesticide residues to salmonella in eggs, to BSE (which was estimated as a cost of over £4 billion to the public purse) and E.coli 0157. The internal market of the EU shared in some of those incidents, notably that of BSE, and added others such as dioxin contamination and nitrofurans in feed and poultry in the 1990s and into the early...

Recent debates concerning food quality offer an important window on the changing nature of broader social, political and economic relations. Not least, this has reinforced a more serious concern with understanding food consumption processes; through more theorisation and conceptualisation of social and natural factors in the context of wider consumption trends and processes (see Goodman 2002). In this chapter my aim is to re-examine some of the key issues associated with the production and regulation of foodquality. These are, as will become clear, highly influenced by consumption dynamics; but, for the moment, I regard it as important to analytically...

In recent times, an apparent contradiction between high levels of output and improved food quality has arisen within the food sector. The development of mass food markets, alongside ‘Fordist’ methods of production and their associated economies of scale, has generated unprecedented abundance (Montanari 1994). Yet, at the same time, industrialisation processes have resulted, seemingly, in greater and greater product standardisation, so that differing foods are rendered more alike in terms of their manufactured content. This process of standardisation affects not just production, processing and retailing, but eating itself, so that meals now carry their industrial properties into the stomachs of...

Anthropology and sociology have been keen to show that consumption is a social and moral field, and that consumer practices are part of an ongoing process of negotiation of social classifications and hierarchies. Food consumption in particular has been associated with symbolically mediated notions of order (Douglas and Isherwood 1979). We know that particular foods are identified with annual festivities, set apart for specific categories of people, deployed to indicate indulgence or self-restraint, to declare one’s own beliefs and to signify one’s place in the community. While there may be no essential national food, food consumption has been implicated in...

A book about quality is inevitably about controversy over standards, and the foregoing chapters display a set of diverse and detailed observations and analyses of what it is to make a claim that something is of better quality than something else. This has been a central issue of wider social scientific and cultural discussion for a couple of decades, a result of the development of postmodernist thought. Who shall decide what is good, and how might such goodness be established in a non-arbitrary and non-self-interested way? Claims to quality, like claims to value or good taste, become highly problematical in...