Greening the networked economy - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 174

commodity chains in two interrelated ways: (i) from issues of direct
control and power, to more indirect modes of governance and coor-
dination (control at a distance); and (ii) from a purely or dominantly
economic, productionist perspective of commodity chain governance
to more explicit attention to (product and process) quality. It is espe-
cially in such approaches that environmental governance finds an easy
place, and that the role of information in private environmental gov-
ernance takes shape.
Product safety arrangements and green conventions 14 can take dif-
ferent forms in governing product chains and networks. Some scholars
still claim the proximity and the length of a product chain/network
to be essential for quality and environmental conventions (e.g., those
working in the tradition of local food networks). But this is only one
mode of private quality governance. The identity (and thus quality)
of a product can be guaranteed or institutionalised in the 'repetition
of history' via three modes: through its region or country of origin,
by its brand name or simply through repeated interactions between
actors, irrespective of the length of a chain/network or its localised
origin. In addition, knowledge of quality becomes increasingly embed-
ded in standardised arrangements, often expressed through symbolic
tokens such as (technical) standards, labels and codes of conducts,
which reduce the need for other forms of quality institutionalisation.
So, in general, as Murdoch and Miele ( 1999 ) argue for the food sector,
there is no automatic link between quality and green conventions, on
the one side, and specific (that is, localised) forms of intra- and inter-
firm quality coordination in chains and networks, on the other. In the
emergence of these different quality conventions, market signals and
logics increasingly proved to be insufficient and are complemented by
wider information exchanges. With respect to these forms of standard-
isation of quality conventions, and the informational flows related to
it, lead firms have unequal power to control them. The political econ-
omy of networks and chains shows us that they have a more than
equal influence and control on designing these standards and gov-
erning these flows, and thus on 'regulating' entry barriers to these

14

In convention theory, several classifications are made between types of
conventions, such as between market, industrial, civic and domestic
conventions (cf. Boltanski and Thévenot, 1991 ; Ponte and Gibbon, 2005 : 19).