Suchergebnisse

"In recent years, we have witnessed three parallel and intertwined trends: First, food retail
and processing firms have embraced private standards, usually with some form of third
party certification employed to verify adherence to those standards. Second, firms have
aligned themselves increasingly aligned themselves with, as opposed to fighting off,
environmental, fair trade, and other NGOs. Third, firms have embraced supply chain
management as a strategy for increasing profits and market share. Together, these trends
are part and parcel of the neoliberal blurring of the older liberal distinction between state
and civil society. In this paper I ask what the implications of these changes are from the
vantage point of the three major approaches to ethics: consequentalism, virtue theory, and
rights theory. What are the consequences of these changes for food safety, for suppliers,
for consumers? What virtues (e.g., trust, fairness) are these changes likely to embrace
and what vices may accompany them? Whose rights will be furthered or curtailed by
these changes?" (author's abstract)

Recent accounts of "the biological" emphasize its thoroughgoing transformation. Accounts of biomedicalization, biotechnology, biopower, biocapital, and bioeconomy tend to agree that twentieth- and twenty-first-century life sciences transform the object of biology, the biological. Amidst so much transformation, we explore attempts to stabilize the biological through standards. We ask: how do standards handle the biological in transformation? Based on ethnographic research, the article discusses three contemporary postgenomic standards that classify, construct, or identify biological forms: the Barcoding of Life Initiative, the BioBricks Assembly Standard, and the Proteomics Standards Initiative. We rely on recent critical analyses of standardization to suggest that any attempt to attribute a fixed property to the biological actually multiplies dependencies between values, materials, and human and nonhuman agents. We highlight ways in which these biological standards cross-validate life forms with forms of life such as publics, infrastructures, and forms of disciplinary compromise. Attempts to standardize the biological, we suggest, offer a good way to see how a life form is always also a form of life.