Greening the networked economy - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 178

weblogs of - or sponsored by - these companies. McDonald's, a com-
pany that has been on the frontline of public criticism on animal wel-
fare, environment and healthy food, recently (2006) started a weblog
to enter digitally into dialogue with its consumers and critics. 21 But
other companies, such as Walmart, General Motors and the Japanese
car company Mazda, 22 have a less open weblog strategy. They secretly
mobilise (and reward) unidentifiable individual bloggers to promote
their products, counteract (environmental) criticism and 'serve' other
bloggers and media with positive company news, also with respect to
environmental performance.

Agro-food and ecolabelling

As an illustration of private and public informational governance in the
networked economy, I will detail the agro-food system and the expo-
nential use of labels in greening agro-food networks. Conventional
research in the Western agro-food sector has focused on the decline
of the Fordist food regime of mass food production/consumption and
the emergence of 'quality' and environmental issues in restructuring
food production-consumption chains. There is probably no better sec-
tor to illustrate the role of private informational governance, as food
networks are - and have to be - most advanced in issues of trans-
parency and trust. Various (inter)national food crises, controversies
and scandals (e.g., BSE, mouth and claw disease, bird flue, GMOs,
dioxins in chicken meat, pesticide residues, hormone residues in meat,
animal welfare) in national and transnational agro-food sectors and
chains have, among others, resulted in all kinds of certification, stan-
dardisation, information, labelling and control systems, as well as in
a growing market for green, organic or ecological food (experiencing
similar informational systems). Some of these systems come from the
sector (e.g., EUREP/GAP, BRC, GMP, SQF, ISO standards), 23 some

21

See http://csr.blogs.mcdonalds.com. Other examples are http://blogs.ford.com
of the car company Ford and http://blogs.msdn.com of Microsoft. There is a
growing literature on company blogs, for example, Scoble and Israel ( 2006 )
and Holtz and Demopoulos ( 2006 ).

22

Cf. NRC Handelsblad, 20 April 2006, p. 18.

23

Euro Retailer Produce Good Agricultural Practices (EUREP/GAP), Good
Manufacturing Practices (GMP), British Retail Standard (BRS) and Safe
Quality Food (SQF).