ORGANIC FOOD AND AGRICULTURE IN THE US:

Object Conflicts in a Health–Environmental Social Movement

DAVID J. HESS

This is a text draft version of the article. For the final, formatted version, see Science as Culture.

The politics of food constitute one of the main points of intersection
for social movements (SMs) oriented toward science, technology,
health, and the environment. Food-oriented SM mobilization can be
directed at the safety issues caused by pesticides, food processing,
industrial agriculture, or genetically modified organisms, or it can be
directed at the health and environmental benefits of a transition to
organic food production and sustainable, community-oriented food
systems. This article will focus on the latter, in particular the
conflicts that have emerged around the organic food and agriculture
movement (OFAM) in the United States. At a theoretical level, the
article will develop the concept of ‘object conflicts’, which may be of
general value for thinking through the role of laypeople, the public,
and SMs in democratizing decisions over scientific research agendas,
technology design, and infrastructure.

BACKGROUND CONCEPTS
The STS (science and technology studies) literature has increasingly
shown concern with how publics, citizens, or laypeople can be
afforded greater democratic participation in science and technology

(e.g. Fischer, 2000; Martin, 1999b). In addition to processes such as
deliberative policymaking and user-centred design, SMs provide one
avenue for increased democratic participation in science and technology.
However, the role of SMs with respect to science and technology
is often conceptualized as negative or oppositional, as in the case
of protest against nuclear energy or genetically modified food. This
essay focuses on an alternative form of mobilization, ‘technology-
and product-oriented movements’ (TPMs), which afford a somewhat
different dynamic than anti-technology or oppositional movements
(Hess, 2005).

TPMs are defined as support for an alternative technology and/or
product, as well as associated policies, production practices, and
research programmes, that generally involves both a mobilization of
civil society organizations and the formation of alliances with private
sector organizations. Examples of TPMs are movements for renewable
energy, complementary and alternative medicine, and open-
source software. TPMs are distinguished by their support for an
alternative technology/product, but they are often spin-offs or parts
of broader SMs that have articulated a politics of opposition to an
existing technology or product. As a result, there may be significant
interaction between TPMs and oppositional movements, such as
between opponents of genetically modified food and supporters of
organic food.

Although TPMs may include protest politics, in general they tend
to direct their political activity into the construction of alternatives.
This action may involve attempts to change government policies, as
in traditional forms of SMs, but TPMs generally also involve ‘private-
sector symbiosis’, or a mixture of civil society organizations and
for-profit firms that work toward the construction of alternative
technologies and products. Although large corporations and their
technologies/products are often viewed as a target of opposition, in
TPMs there are also some industries or firms that pioneer and
support the alternative visions of the TPM, and they become private-
sector partners and vehicles for SM politics. Because of this symbiotic
relationship with some segments of the private sector, TPMs
can be analytically distinguished as having a SM component, which
organizationally consists of NGOs and related advocacy organizations
and networks, and a ‘reform movement’, which consists of
organizations within the private sector that pioneer, development,
and market reform-oriented technologies and products. The reform
movement may also include challenging networks of ‘maverick’ or
‘suppressed’ scientists (Clarke, 2000; Martin, 1999a).

As the TPMs achieve success, existing industries often begin to
show an interest in ‘incorporating’ or co-opting the innovations, and
in the process the design of the technologies/products often undergoes
a transformation. Jamison (2001) has described the process of

‘incorporation’ of environmental social movement goals into business
practices; his analysis is extended here by drawing attention to
the concomitant transformations of the design of technologies, products,
and technological systems. The usual direction of the transformation
of the design is to modify aspects of the design that are in
conflict with existing technologies so that the ‘alternative’ becomes
‘complementary’ (Hess, 2003). One example is the transformation of
community-controlled wind energy into grid-controlled wind farms;
another is the change from alternative cancer therapies to complementary
cancer care. The process of incorporation and transformation
may coincide with mergers and acquisitions in the private
sector, particularly if the for-profit firms that originally supported the
alternative technology/product were small-scale and entrepreneurial.

Conceptual categories such as ‘TPMs’ are ideal types that define
a field of comparative analysis and may have better or worse matches
to specific historical cases. Although as a type TPMs can be found
in other time periods, they appear to be particularly prominent since
the middle of the twentieth century, and hence their analysis can
benefit from the perspective of historical sociology. Specifically,
TPMs display a particular linkage with the denaturalization of the
material world, represented by the increasingly important role of
science and technology, as well as concern with health risks and
environmental hazards. The ways in which TPMs are constructing
‘alternative pathways in globalisation’ are currently under investigation
in a larger work (Hess, 2006). At this point, it can be said that
TPMs represent a relatively middle-class but nonetheless crucial
political position in a broader pathway of other types of social
movements, such as oppositional or anti-technology movements and
justice movements. Although the role of private-sector symbiosis and
the importance of the incorporation and transformation process
might make it tempting to view TPMs as neoliberal SMs with an
inherently conservative class politics, such interpretations tend to
obfuscate the fluidity of TPMs over time, their tendency to migrate
across classes, and their linkages with other sorts of more traditional,
grassroots protest movements.

The concept of ‘object conflicts’ is developed here in part to
capture the problems of fluidity and multiple sites of contestation
that emerge in the development of TPMs. The concept draws on
and extends two traditions of research in STS. First, social worlds

theorists have drawn attention to the construction of ‘boundary
objects’ that allow cooperation and communication to occur among
disparate networks and organizations (Star and Greisemer, 1989).
Subsequent work in this tradition has drawn more attention to
conflict, particularly between scientists and SMs around woman-centred
contraception (Clarke, 2000). A second tradition focuses on the
design of technologies, infrastructures, and other objects, and it
draws attention to the political and societal implications of selections
among various design alternatives (Schumacher, 1999; Winner,
1986). Object conflicts are understood here as a specific type of
politics of artefacts that emerges from the incorporation and transformation
process. Organizationally, object conflicts take place between
the SM and RM sides of the TPM as well as between them
and large industries over the range of technologies/products and their
design. As the incorporation and transformation process develops,
the conflicts shift from alternative versus existing technologies/products
to choices among various types of alternative or complementary
technologies and products that are developed as the alternatives
become mainstreamed.

The case study developed here draws on the history of the
OFAM in the US. Other research has examined the cases of wind
energy, nutritional cancer therapies, and open-source software
(Hess, 2003, 2005). The OFAM case represents both a movement
for a particular type of technological system—organic agricultural
production, with an increasing array of variants over time—and a
movement for a type of product—organic food, which itself has
undergone change over time. Labels for this movement change over
time, and the movement has increasingly redefined itself around
themes of sustainability and local ownership. After first developing
an historical overview of the development of the movement in the
US, the essay will use the empirical materials to further elaborate the
concept of ‘object conflicts’.

THE ORGANIC FOOD AND AGRICULTURE MOVEMENT
IN THE US
The development of organic food and agriculture can be viewed
through the lens of knowledge and technology as a mixture of three
forms of expertise: traditional or pre-industrial horticultural and

agricultural knowledge, lay/professional knowledge embedded in the
practices of gardeners and organic farmers, and scientific knowledge
as produced formally in studies of organic agriculture (Hassanein,
1999). The alternative knowledges and technologies in turn are
embedded in a changing social movement (termed here the OFAM,
which over time increasingly shifted toward sustainability and localism).
As a SM, the development of organic food and agriculture is
largely a response to industrial agriculture, which itself was undergoing
change throughout the twentieth century. In other words, the
OFAM harkens back to preindustrial modes of agricultural production,
but it has a specific history that involves a dialectical
relationship with twentieth-century industrial agriculture that is currently
being worked out (Buck et al., 1997; Kaltoft, 2001). The
ongoing interaction with industrial agriculture and the food industry

results in a mutual shaping of industry and movements and their
respective knowledges, technologies, and products.

Most historical accounts see the American OFAM as developing
from various mid-twentieth century European thinkers. One convenient
point of origin is the mid-1920s, when Rudolf Steiner, the
leader of the anthroposophy movement, taught a course on biodynamic
agriculture, and the British colonial scientist Sir Albert
Howard began an agricultural research station in Indore, India,
where he perfected a composting method and an approach to
agriculture that became known as the Indore Process (Conford,
2000, p. 21). The 1940 book Look to the Land,by Lord North-
bourne, probably contains the first modern use of the term ‘organic’
farming (Lotter, 2000).

In the United States during this period support came from
Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, who advocated ‘humus’
farming, and J.I. Rodale, who launched the magazine Organic Gardening
in 1942 in the midst of war-generated shortages of industrial
inputs (Lotter, 2000; Peters, 1979). Rodale attempted to interest
scientists in testing and developing organic agricultural research, but
the research community largely ignored him, and in some cases
scientists attacked his calls for organic agricultural research (Peters,
1979). Rodale responded to attacks by criticizing the role of chemical
companies on the boards of directors of agricultural colleges, that
is, by using an argument that predated environmentalist critiques of
interested science (Peters, 1979). As a result, at least some of the
knowledge being produced around organic food and agriculture was
being produced outside the university setting (cf. Conford, 2002).
Radical in terms of its challenge to contemporary agricultural knowledge,
Rodale’s original vision of the object ‘organic’ (1948) was quite
technical and relatively free of the concerns with justice, sustainability,
and localism that would later preoccupy the activist end of the
movement.

At an organizational level the OFAM was structured as a mixture
of advocacy organizations and practitioner farmers and gardeners.
Some of the organizations had conservative and even fascist leanings,
particularly in Europe, but the politics shifted to the left after the
1960s (Conford, 2000; Reed, 2001). Rodale’s magazine, Organic
Farming and Gardening (originally Organic Gardening), was a leading
advocacy organization in the US. Although it was technically a firm

ORGANIC FOOD AND AGRICULTURE IN THE US

and eventually became a successful publishing company, during the
early years the magazine was supported by Rodale’s electrical wiring
company, and Rodale also funded a foundation (Peters, 1979). The
ambiguity of classification is an example of the mixture of advocacy
goals and profit-oriented production that is characteristic of TPMs.
Rodale was also a strong supporter of alternative health and nutritional
supplements—his company launched Prevention magazine in
1950—and his work is one example of the confluence of dietary
therapies in the medical field with the sustainable agriculture movement
(Conford, 2000; Hess, 2002). In other words, from the beginning
there was a mixture of advocacy with emerging markets and
industries. As organic farming developed, state-level organizations
devoted to the needs of organic farmers also emerged. The Northeast
Organic Farming Association of Vermont (2004), which claims to be
the oldest organic farming association in the US, was founded in
1971, and two years later the California Certified Organic Farmers
Association (2003) was founded.

In the wake of the 1960s social movements, the OFAM became
interwoven with environmental and social justice concerns, particularly
around issues of sustainable development at a local or regional
level. Several organizations that were influenced by the appropriate
technology movement—among them the National Center for Appropriate
Technology, the Center for Rural Affairs, and the Land
Institute—helped build networks of sustainable agriculture activists
(Kleiman, 2000). The Community Alliance with Family Farmers
(2002) provides one example of the diverse interests that could be
connected in agricultural advocacy organizations. The Alliance focused
on farmworkers’ rights, pesticide poisoning victims, pesticide
legislation, and creation of funding for the University of California to
help small farms and farmworkers. In the 1980s and 1990s the
organization became more involved in supporting organic agriculture,
connecting consumers with organic farmers, preserving water
rights for small farmers, and attempting to get more support for
research on sustainable agriculture.

The SM side of the OFAM developed in the direction of sustainable,
local agriculture that was centred around institutions that
linked consumers to small farmers or gardens and by-passed the
traditional food processing industry and retail supermarkets. Five
examples of such institutions are community-supported agriculture,

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farmers’ markets, food cooperatives, community gardens, and community-
oriented natural foods restaurants, all of which demonstrated
significant growth during the last half of the twentieth century. Three
of the institutions—farmers’ markets, food cooperatives, and community
gardens—were prominent earlier in the century but had
waned after World War II and then underwent renewal during the
last decades of the twentieth century. For example, farmers’ markets
grew by 79% from 1994 to 2002, by which time there were 3,100
farmers’ markets in the US, of which 82% were financially viable and
through which 19,000 farmers were selling food (USDA, 2003). Few
food cooperatives from the Depression era survive in the US today,
but a second wave of food cooperatives emerged after the 1960s, and
by 2001 there were about 300 food cooperatives in the US (Swanson
et al., 2001, pp. 2, 9). At the peak of World War II there were 20
million gardens of various sorts in the US that yielded 42% of fresh
vegetables, and some of the community or ‘victory’ gardens from
that era were still in operation at the beginning of this century (Von
Hassell, 2002, p. 40). Although the victory gardens entered into
decline after World War II, a new wave of community gardens
re-emerged in the wake of the post-1960s civil rights, poverty, and
environmental movements. By the end of the 1990s there were an
estimated two million community gardeners in 6,020 gardens in the
US (Von Hassell, 2002, p. 142). Other institutions in this group are
more recent in origin. For example, community-supported agriculture
in the US grew rapidly from the first farm in 1985 to over 1,000
farms in 1999 (University of Massachusetts Extension, 2003). During
this period some natural foods restaurants also developed linkages
with local farms, such as White Dog Cafe´in Philadelphia
(Gorman 2001) and Chez Panisse in California (Guthman, 2002),
and in 1993 the Chefs Collaborative (2004) was founded to link
restaurants with local farmers. In summary, this set of institutions
provides a key link between food and consumers that are rooted in
a vision of organic food that ties it to SM goals of enhanced justice,
local economic control, and environmental sustainability.

INCORPORATION AND TRANSFORMATION PROCESS
As growth occurred at the grassroots level, another type of development
occurred in the private sector. By the year 2000 organic food

sales had only reached 1–2% of total food sales in the US, but the
six-billion dollar industry had grown rapidly enough and had shown
high-enough profits to attract the interest of large-scale agribusiness,
the food-processing industry, and supermarket chains and restaurants.
As a result organic food and agriculture became increasingly
embedded in industrial agricultural production and supermarket
retailing. The phenomenon has attracted the attention of several
social scientists, who have analyzed various aspects of the process in
detail (e.g. Allen and Kovach, 2000; Goodman, 2000; Guthman,
1998; Klonsky, 2000). The literature has increasingly moved beyond
a linear conceptualization of the industrialization process, that is, a
view that the industrialization process has ended the earlier, SM
phase. Instead, there is increasing recognition of a bifurcation in
which both the SM side and the industrial side of the OFAM
continue to exist and grow (Campbell and Liepins, 2001; Guthman,
2002). This discussion will add to previous studies of the industrialization
of organic agriculture by developing a focus on the role of
technology design and object conflicts.

One dimension of the industrialization process was the consolidation
of farms and the development of large, commercial farms
oriented toward the emerging mass market for organic products. For
example, by 2001 several organic farms in California were 2,000–
5,000 acres, and the firm Horizon controlled about 70% of the US
organic milk market (Nutrition Business Journal, 2001; Pollan,
2001; Dupuis, 2000). The growth and consolidation process tends
to be associated with changes in agricultural technologies, such that
the larger farms tend to be less committed to the full range of
ecological farming techniques that were behind original conceptualizations
of organic farming (Guthman, 2000). The development of
organic standards created a minimum level of production and product
quality that is often below that of the more SM-oriented farms.

A second dimension of the industrialization process is the incorporation
of organic food into the food processing industry. In some
cases, organic farms have moved upstream into food processing,
where profits are higher. In the US the most well-known case is
probably Cascadian Farms, which was founded in 1971 to grow food
for hippies in the region near the farm. Eventually the farm developed
into a food processing company that was acquired by General
Mills (Pollan, 2001). The acquisition is far from a special case.

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During the 1990s major food corporations such as Kellogg, General
Mills, H.J. Heinz, Gerber, and Mars acquired smaller organic or
natural products firms.1 New organizations emerged to support the
growing industry; for example, the Organic Foods Production Association,
founded in 1985, changed its name to the Organic Trade
Association (2004) in 1994 partly as a reflection of the trend toward
a diversification of organic food production into food processing.

A parallel transformation occurred in the retail sector, as the
conventional grocery stores and chains (known as the ‘food, drug,
and mass channel’) developed natural foods sections and organic
foods offerings. By 2002 the food, drug, and mass channel of the
natural foods retail market was growing more rapidly than natural
foods retail stores (15% versus 9%), and its sales totalled $4.2
billion, that is, a little less than half the sales volume of the natural
food stores (Spencer and Rhea, 2003). Although food cooperative
sales grew at a rate that was comparable to other natural foods
retailers, food cooperatives were displaced by both the enclosure of
natural foods in supermarkets and the rapid growth of the natural
foods chains Whole Foods and Wild Oats (Swanson et al., 2001).
Although the two chains represented only a small share of the market
for natural products (about 30% of $10.4 billion in 2002), the food
cooperatives were watching the market consolidation process with
some trepidation, and some were investing in expansion (Spencer
and Rhea, 2003). In part to combat the rise of both natural foods
chains and the retail food sector, in the early 1990s food cooperatives
started forming regional cooperative grocer associations, and in 1999
they formed the National Cooperative Grocers Association (2002).

A second area of retail affected by the growth of the organic foods
industry was the restaurant business. The industry grew rapidly
during this period; for example, the percentage of meals eaten away
from home grew from 16% in 1977–78 to 29% in 1995 (Lin et al.,
1999). The Green Restaurant Association (2002a) was founded in
1990 to provide information to restaurants on the greening process.
The organization had 11 areas of greening—including ‘sustainable
food’, recycling, energy conservation, and the use of chlorine-free
paper products—and it offered certification and a logo for restaurants
that commit to some areas of the greening process (Green
Restaurant Association, 2002b). As with the organic foods retail
chains and supermarkets, the category of ‘green’ restaurant was

disengaged from the concerns of economic localism and the SM
goals that were embedded in the locally oriented natural foods
restaurants.

OBJECT CONFLICTS
As the incorporation and transformation of organic foods into the
mainstream food industry has proceeded, a nested series of ‘object
conflicts’ developed around the definition and design of alternative
foods. Analysis of object conflicts in the OFAM reveals three major
types: funding for research programmes that shape the future of
various types of alternative food, consumption decisions among the
array of possible alternative foods, and standards set by private-sector
or governmental bodies that govern definitions. These object
conflicts centre around the politics of definitions of what ‘organic’—
that is, the object—will be. In the rural sociology literature, Goodman
and Dupuis (2002) have argued for a focus on the politics of
knowledge embedded in contestations over organic standards; the
concept of ‘object conflicts’ is consistent with their approach but also
covers conflicts over product and technology design and from a
broader, cross-movement perspective.

Regarding research programmes, one category of object conflicts
involves funding decisions over how much money will be devoted to
organic research as well as decisions over the types of research on
organic food and agriculture. Because the category of ‘organic’
includes a wide range of production technologies that may or may
not include crop rotation, composting, and biological pest management
(Guthman, 1998), research agendas that focus on one dimension
of the production technology may favour industrial organic over
localist organic. A similar valence emerges in research agendas on the
health benefits of food and nutrients. Also known as ‘functional
food’ research, the field has been divided between an orientation that
focuses on specific nutrients and their health benefits (which can
then be added to processed food products) and an orientation that
focuses on the health benefits of whole foods (for which specific
nutrients are black-boxed or may be unknown).2 For example, a
research agenda can be tilted toward documenting higher levels of a
specific nutrient—such as omega-3 fatty acids in grass-fed, organic
meats—or tracking a general health indicator for a black-boxed

whole food, such as weekly consumption of grass-fed organic meats
in human subjects or animal models. To the extent that research
agendas on organic foods tend to focus on the health benefits of
specific nutrients (or the risks of specific pesticides or additives), they
will tend to promote an understanding of ‘organic’ as a subfood
entity (a nutrient) rather than a whole food. Those agendas will in
turn tend to favour an industrialized vision of organic as processed
food rather than fresh, whole food.

A second type of object conflict appears in the embedding of the
organic foods category in a broader category of health or natural
foods (Lockie et al., 2000). The food processing industry has capitalized
on the health consciousness and environmental awareness that
favoured organic food by developing the marketing category of
‘natural’ or ‘health’ food, as well as food that is free from a substance
that is perceived as risky, such as antibiotics or bovine growth
hormone (DeSoucey, 2004; Dupuis, 2000). However, categories
such as ‘natural’ or ‘health’ food are unregulated and generally only
have a vague meaning in terms of differential food quality. For
example, ‘health foods’ may be defined by the absence of partially
hydrogenated oils, growth hormones, or some types of preservatives.
Categories such as ‘natural’ and ‘health’ foods displace consumer
attention away from organic products by diversifying the product
mix so that health concerns are differentiated into the nutritional
benefits of a particular food choice versus the safety benefits of the
claimed levels of lower pesticides or other contaminants in organic
foods. Likewise, health concerns with nutritional benefits are separated
from environmental concerns associated with buying organic.
The development of complementary categories, such as natural and
health food, therefore creates a broader, confusing field of healthy or
green food options for which ‘organic’ is diminished to the status of
just one consumer choice among many.

A third type of object conflict is the one that has received the
most attention in the literature: product labelling and production
standards. In the US standard-setting for organic food was originally
based on state standards, such as those of the state of California, and
certification was completed by private organizations that were driven
by organic farmers. As the organic foods industry grew, standard
setting increasingly shifted to government-controlled bodies, and the
Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 mandated that the US

Department of Agriculture set up a National Organic Standards
Board. Although the creation of organic food standards was originally
driven by small farmers, over time the labels have increasingly
benefited food processors and retailers (Guthman, 2002). The focus
on ‘organic’ as a technology of production and type of product,
rather than a more complex system of small farmers and local
agricultural networks, has assisted the industrialization process.

The tensions between the SM side of the OFAM and the
increasing prominence of the industrial side were evident in a
controversy during the late 1990s over the national organic food
standard (Vos, 2000). In 1998 the US Department of Agriculture
proposed new organic food standards that would have allowed
sludge, irradiation, and modified seeds to be included in the
definition of organic, and it would have also increased paperwork
and fees for small farms. The Organic Consumers Association
(2003) was founded in the wake of the threat, and it launched the
SOS (Save Our Organic Standards) campaign, which mobilized
consumers primarily through health food stores, community-supported
agriculture groups, farmers’ markets, and food coops. After
the more-or-less successful campaign, the organization announced a
much broader series of goals that included conversion of US agriculture
to 30% organic by 2010, the phase out of the worst industrial
agriculture practices, and a moratorium on genetically engineered
food and crops. The platform directly connected the pro-organic
movement to the organizations involved in campaigns to label or
limit genetically modified foods, such as Greenpeace and the Campaign
to Label Genetically Engineered Foods. Meanwhile, in 1999
the standards-setting harmonization process continued at an international
level via the work of the Codex Alimentarius Commission of
the World Health Organization (EnviroWindows, 2002).

Even though the final US standards preserved some of the key
aspects of organic food quality, they increased the costs of labelling
and deleted some of the more environmentally oriented practices
that had been embedded in some of the state codes. For processed
foods that contain a mixture of organic and non-organic ingredients,
the standards also created a new interstitial category of food label
called ‘made with organic ingredients’. As a result, the standards
fragment the object ‘organic’ into a new set of categories of completely
organic versus made with organic ingredients. The distinction

may be defended as a helpful guide to consumers in the complex
world of processed foods, but it also implicitly encourages consumers
to think of organic as a separate object from fresh, whole foods that
have been grown on locally owned farms (Goodman, 2000). The
distinction also creates object conflicts for labelling organizations and
consumers, which face choices or trade-offs between the construction
of labels that focus on the technical dimensions of the object as
organic versus the societal dimensions of the object as contributing
to locally owned economic development networks.

Because object conflicts occur in diverse settings or arenas—in
this case research agendas, consumption decisions, and standard
setting—the resolution of a conflict in one setting may have
ramifications in others. For example, closure over a battle in standard
setting may impact consumer decisions and research agendas,
just as changes in research agendas and consensus shifts in scientific
fields may impact consumption decisions and regulatory standards.
At stake in the diverse settings is a constantly shifting politics of
definitions of what is the object: whole food versus food component,
health food versus organic food, technical standards versus social
standards, and so on.

CONCLUSION
The pattern of historical development for the organic food and
agriculture movement (OFAM) in the United States is best understood
in comparison with other technology-and product-oriented
movements (TPMs), that is, other movements that are not merely
opposed to existing technologies and products (e.g. nuclear energy,
genetically modified food) but are also in favour of alternatives (e.g.
renewable energy, organic food). The OFAM began as a very
marginal activity in the 1940s and 1950s, but over time it grew as
farmers and consumers embraced the concept. On the private-sector
side, an organic industry emerged that was eventually incorporated
into the conventional food industry via organic food processing and
the development of an organic niche in supermarkets. In the process,
the category of ‘organic’ became transformed into a technical product
standard that was increasingly divorced from other kinds of social
change goals. In a parallel historical development, the SM side
responded to the post-1960s social movements and the longer term

trends toward farm consolidation and globalization by increasingly
linking the category of organic with local and urban agriculture. The
concept of ‘object conflicts’ is introduced to describe the ongoing
conflicts over the definition of the technologies and products associated
with ‘organic’ and, increasingly, ‘sustainable, local agriculture’.
The conflicts play themselves out in various, interacting fields of
contestation: research agendas, consumer decisions and loyalties,
and production and product standards.

The concepts of object conflicts and the incorporation and transformation
process of TPMs have general implications for the study
of social movements, science, and technology. In TPMs the role of
private-sector partnerships between SM organizations and firms is
crucial to understanding the trajectory and outcomes of a movement.
The focus makes TPMs somewhat different from traditional SMs,
which tend to focus on the state and governmental policies as the
target of change and to utilize protest as the main means of change.
The general point can be accepted without dismissing the examples
of TPM activism that are continuous with traditional SMs or even
the confluence and spillover of TPMs and broader SMs. For example,
organic food and agriculture activists have supported changes in
governmental policies that would increase research on organic agriculture
and modify standards, just as local OFAM activists have
helped reform regional government policies to be more supportive of
community gardens and farmers’ markets. That said, there is still the
distinctive feature of TPMs, which is their focus on the politics of
change via the design and diffusion of different technologies and
products.

The points of similarity and difference between TPMs and
traditional protest movements provide an opportunity to draw on
SM theory and to elaborate on it, particularly regarding the problem
of how SM demands have been incorporated into mainstream institutions.
SM studies have long recognized that as elites open the
doors to the partial integration of SMs or radical political parties, the
SMs tend to undergo bureaucratization and migration toward the
political centre (Michels, 1958; Tarrow, 1998). Usually the process
is accompanied by the splitting of the SM into an accommodationist
wing that is brought into the political process and a radical wing that
remains outside it. The phenomenon has been documented in the
environmental and poor people’s movements in the US, among

others (Dowie, 1995; Piven and Cloward, 1977). However, the focus
of traditional SM theory on states and their policies limits understanding
of what ‘politics’ and political activism mean in the context
of science, technology, and social movements. The point has been
recognized in the study of health social movements, a category of
analysis that is very similar to TPMs and in some cases (such as
alternative medicine movements) overlaps with them (Brown et al.,
2004). The study of TPMs draws attention to the type of politics
that occur when reform efforts are directed at private industry and
their associated technologies and products, and when SM organizations
develop partnerships with private-sector firms that offer alternatives.
Under those conditions political activity expands to the
ground of material culture innovation and the politics of industrial
innovation.

The alternative focus of political activity, which the comparative
study of TPMs brings to light, has implications for theorizing the
advanced phases of the incorporation process in SMs more generally.
Although the process is similar in TPMs and traditional protest
movements, there are some differences. First, the definition of
success and failure is different. Because the goal is a shift in material
culture, to have an existing industry (such as agribusiness and the
major food processing companies) take up and incorporate that goal
represents a victory, even if the change involves displacing the
original, small-scale, entrepreneurial partners that represented the
‘cradles of innovation’ (Truffer and Durrenberger, 1997). The defeats
centre less on the acquisitions of alternative firms or their
displacement by large firms than on the transformation process and
the object conflicts that emerge around the redesign of the technology
or product in its new mainstream location.

A second difference from the incorporation process for traditional
SMs is that the activist end of the field does not necessarily disappear
or retreat into isolationism, sectarianism, or violence. Rather, in this
case the mainstream industry incorporates and transforms the technologies
and products of the TPM, but it does not destroy the
alternatives. Instead, the alternatives continue their own process of
historical development. To some extent they may even be driven to
new waves of organizational innovation, such as the development of
local direct-to-consumer marketing, due to the lack of capitalization
needed for access to conventional commodity chains (Buck et al.,

1997). In other words, the two pathways—a mainstreamed ‘complementary’
pathway and the alternative pathway that remains more
connected to the original SM goals—grow in parallel. In the case of
the American OFAM, the point was demonstrated with some of the
statistics for the more alternative institutions—urban agriculture,
farmers’ markets, and CSAs—that indicate that they are growing
alongside the organic foods industry.

The outcome of the incorporation and transformation process is
the diversification of a technological/product field, as well as associated
scientific research fields, with new political sites that emerge as
the fields themselves undergo change, rather than the simple
modification and mainstreaming of an innovation. The SM itself is
a dynamic historical entity that is changing over the decades, rather
than a static social entity that interacts with and is overwhelmed by
state and industry. In the case of the OFAM, as the technology and
product of ‘organic’ has been mainstreamed and transformed, the
SM has come to redefine the object as ‘sustainable, local agriculture’
to emphasize that organizational forms and economic scale are
crucial elements in its alternative vision of food and agriculture.

However, an historical perspective also brings attention to the
changed circumstances of the OFAM at the beginning of the twenty-
first century. The romantic localism of the back-to-the-land efforts of
the 1970s no longer makes sense in a world characterized by
globalization of markets, including food markets. Instead, the goal of
sustainable regional development is being conceptualized within the
problematic of production and consumption in a globalized economy.
As a result, an alternative politics of labelling and standards
emerges from these concerns, one focused on the product as carrier
not only of a technical standard of production, such as organic, but
also of a social standard of production, such as fair trade and
localism (Guthman, 2002; Raynolds, 2000). Here, the grounds for
object conflicts shift from battles over technical organic standards or
over bona-fide organic versus ersatz natural food products to battles
over technical concepts of organic versus those linked to fair trade
politics. The concept of object conflicts draws attention to the
continual shifts of sites of contestation as the history of a SM
unfolds. Its chief value may be to avoid encysting an analysis in a
linear model of phases and instead opening it up to the dialectics of
ongoing historical change and political activism.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to Krista Harper, Les Levidow, Melanie Dupuis, and the
faculty of the History and Philosophy of Science Department at the
University of New South Wales for comments on an earlier draft of
the paper; and to Jill Fisher, who tracked mergers and acquisitions as
part of her summer work as a graduate research assistant.

NOTES
1. Kellogg bought Morningstar Farms; General Mills bought Sunrise Organic
Cereal; and Hain bought Earth’s Best baby food. While H.J. Heinz took out a
stake in Hain, Gerber bought Tender Harvest baby food, and the Mars Company
acquired the organic food marketer Seeds of Change. Even MacDonald’s moved
into the arena when it acquired a minority interest in Pret a` Manger, a British
health fast-food company. See Advertising Age (18 September 2000, pp. 32–36) on
Kellogg, Morningstar, and Hain; Agricultural Marketing (May 2000, pp. 56–57) on
Heinz and Gerber; Advertising Age (13 October 1997, p. 3) on the Mars acquisition;
and Nutraceuticals World (March 2001, p. 18) on McDonald’s.

2. The material on functional foods is based in part on attendance at the Tenth
Annual Conference of the Functional Foods for Health Program, University of
Illinois at Chicago Circle, Chicago, June 2001. See also Lehenkari (2003).

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