Differentiating Organics: Performing Multiple Objects to Organize Singular Markets for Organic Tea and Biscuits in the UK - Re-Thinking Organic Food and Farming in a Changing World - page 59

the construct of a social movement. These multiple practices should be expected
considering how the movement was built upon a number of experiments in diverse
geographic locales (e.g., Balfour 1978 ; Steiner and Gardner 1993 ;Howard 2006 ;
Northbourne [1940] 2003 ) and slowly consolidated into standards of practice and
then formal regulations.
The first organic standards (and accompanying certification systems) were intro-
duced in the 1960s and 1970s as good agricultural practices to teach (mostly small)
farmers how to farm according to the organic principles (Guthman 2004 ). Initially,
these were only remotely connected to consumers, but over time, and with the
involvement of supermarkets (offering more choice) and governments (protecting
consumers from fraud) the standards came to be at the heart of organizing organic
markets and consumption. For example, the European Union (EU) regulation is used
by producers around the world as the EU and United States (US) markets combined
comprise of 97 % of the global demand for organic products (Willer and Kilcher
2011 ). While there are a large number of certification bodies that are certifying
against the EU organic regulation, the majority of products on UK supermarket
shelves carry the Soil Association certification mark. The Soil Association accounts
for around 80 % of the certified organic food sold in the UK (Soil Association
2011 ) and is noted for its own standard that predates and goes beyond the EU
requirements. The standardized practices called for by the Soil Association suggest
that all of those organic products that carry the Soil Association seal are produced
under the detailed conditions embodied by the rules in the standard. However, the
literature suggests that what is prescribed in a standard doesn't always translate
smoothly into practice (e.g., Power 1997 ). In fact, recent research suggests that
the practices of complying with sustainability standards are influenced by factors
that are not necessarily included in the written standards themselves (Gibbon et al.
2010 ; Loconto 2010 ). In other words, there is an unresolved tension between the
singularity of practices proposed by a standard and multiplicity enacted in practice.
In this paper we examine the notions of singularity and multiplicity in organic
practice, arguing that the concept of organic is indeed enacted in multiple ways
while the process of singularization is fundamental to the organization of a market
for organic. As Guthman ( 2004 ) argues, the diversification of the organic consumer
has been accompanied by the diversification of the producer, thus the standards
that we see in practice today are used by both large agribusinesses and small
farmers. While this could be seen as an ontological shift away from the foundational
principles of organic agriculture (Guthman 2002 ; Jaffee and Howard 2009 ), we
argue that the performances of individual producers are still multiple. Indeed, they
are necessarily so, due to the local and historical situated-ness of organic practices
and are only singularized at the point where 'organic products' circulate. We use
the notion of 'performativity' to analyze how the practice of organic farming is at
once similar and dissimilar based on the contexts in which a product is grown and
traded. Here we utilize the notion of the standard as a calculative device (Callon
1998 ) to explore how organic tea grown in Tanzania and organic cereals grown in
the UK are rendered 'singular' in the UK market, yet 'multiple' in the practices of
production. We conclude that despite the use of standards as market devices to create