Varietals of capitalism a political economy of the changing wine industry

A refusal to seriously address the politics and multiscaled structuration of economic activity and the importance of policy implementation is a common failing of much commentary on Europ

Varietals of Capitalism

A volume in the series

Cornell Studies in Political Economy

edited by Peter J Katzenstein

A list of titles in this series is available at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu

Copyright © 2016 by Cornell University

All rights reserved Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission

in writing from the publisher For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850 First published 2016 by Cornell University Press

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Itçaina, Xabier, author.

Varietals of capitalism : a political economy of the changing wine industry / Xabier Itçaina, Antoine Roger, and Andy Smith.

pages cm — (Cornell studies in political economy)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-5017-0043-9 (cloth : alk paper)

1. Wine industry—Economic aspects—European Union countries

2. Wine industry—Government policy—European Union countries

I. Roger, Antoine, author II. Smith, Andy, 1963 July 24– author III. Title IV. Series: Cornell studies in political economy.

HD9365.A2I73 2016

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List of Figures, Tables, and Text Boxes vii Acknowledgments ix

PART I

The Analytical Challenge of Economic Change 9

1 Existing Approaches to Change in and beyond the

2 Structured Contingency: Institutions, Fields, and

PART II

Shaping and Negotiating Deep Reform 55

Contents

vi Contents

PART III

Implementing Change: Reinstitutionalization

8 Microeconomic Support: New Instruments in Old Bottles? 192

References 235 Index 257

5 An industry as an order of four institutionalized relationships 36

7 An industry as a set of fields and an institutional order 45

Tables

1 The four dominant approaches to socioeconomic change

2 Percent of wine distributed by supermarkets in 2004 by value 93

6 Representatives at the Challenges and Opportunities

7 Volume of wine produced and used for crisis distillation

8 Vines grubbed out in France, Spain, and Italy, 2008–2011 145

9 Number of AOCs and VdPs per select EU member state

Figures, Tables, and Text Boxes

viii Figures, Tables, and Text Boxes

Text Boxes

2 Azpilicueta, Domecq, Pernod Ricard: A story of

3 Grands Chais de France: From outsider to dominant player 97

7 The “reflection document” issued to the participants at the

8 A comparison of the European Commission’s proposal

and the regulation adopted by the European Council

The research for this book was financed by the French Agence Nationale

de la Recherche within the program Gouvernement européen des industries led by Andy Smith and Bernard Jullien from 2010 to 2014 Along the way, our reflections have been nourished by the following colleagues who all, in different but decisive ways, contributed to our work by commenting upon our initial results and papers We thank in particular Thierry Berthet, Marc Blyth, Caitriona Carter, Clarisse Cazals, Pierre François, Philippe Gorry, Colin Hay, Bernard Jullien, Laura Michel, Matthieu Montalban, Tomaso Pardi, Claudio Radaelli, Sigfrido Ramirez, Filippo Randelli, Raphặl Schirmer, Jean-Marc Touzard, and Axel Villareal Sigfrido even took an active part in some of our fieldwork in Italy and Madrid We also thank Cornell University Press’s anonymous reviewer and Peter Katzenstein for their perspicacious and encouraging comments on earlier versions of this manuscript Responding

to their promptings for more clarity and rigor has been a challenging but rewarding experience More generally, Peter and Roger Haydon at Cornell have been highly supportive throughout Notwithstanding all this assistance,

we of course take total responsibility for what follows

From a different but equally supportive angle, we also take this nity to thank those who have provided us with technical and logistical sup-port where we all work, at Bordeaux University’s Centre Emile Durkheim Particular thanks go to Myrtille Birghoffer, Dominique Nguyen, and Caro-line Sagat

opportu-Finally, we thank all the practitioners who gave up their time to be viewed for this study Without the input of such people, the political econ-omy we practice would be both impossible and meaningless

inter-Acknowledgments

AO Appellation d’Origine (Designation of Origin)

AOC Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (Registered

Designation of Origin)AOP Appellation d’Origine Protégée (Protected

Designation of Origin)APEV Asociat¸ia Producătorilor şi Exportatorilor de Vinuri

din România (Association of Romanian Wine Producers and Exporters)

ASAJA-ARAG Asociación Agraria de Jóvenes Agricultores–Asociación

Riojana de Agricultores y Ganaderos (Agrarian Association of Young Farmers–Association of Farmers and Breeders from La Rioja)

CCAE Confederación de Cooperativas Agroalimentarias de

España (Confederation of Agrifood Cooperatives of Spain)

CEEV Comité Européen des Entreprises Vins (representative

body of the EU industry and trade in wines)CIVB Conseil Interprofessionnel des Vins de Bordeaux

(Interprofessional Body of the Bordeaux wines)

commune de marché)COAG Coordinadora de Organizaciones de Agricultores y

Ganadores (Coordination of Farmers’ and Breeders’ Organizations)

COGEA Consulenti per la Gestione Aziendale (Business

Management Consultants)

Abbreviations

xii Abbreviations

Confcooperative Confederazione Cooperative Italiane (Italian

Confederation of Cooperatives)COPA-COGECA Comité des Organisations Professionnelles

Agricoles—Comité général de la coopération agricole de l’Union Européenne (European Farmers’ Organizations Committee—European Agri-cooperatives)

DG AGRI Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural

Development (European Commission)DOC Denominazione di Origine Controllata (Registered

Designation of Origin) (Spain; chapters 4, 8)DOC Denumiri de Origine Controlată (Controlled

Designation of Origin) (Romania; chapter 7)DOCG Denominazione di Origine Controllata e Garantita

(Registered and Guaranteed Designation of Origin)DOP Denominaciones de Origen Protegidas (Protected

Indication)

OIV Organisation internationale de la Vigne et du Vin

(International Organization of Vine and Wine)ONIV Organizat¸ia Nat¸ională Interprofesională Vitivinicolă

(National Interprofessional Wine Producers’

Organization)ONIVINS Office national des vins

PNVV Patronatul Nat¸ional al Viei şi Vinului (National

Association of Vineyard and Wine Production Employers)

VSIG Vin sans IG (wine without geographical indication)

Varietals of Capitalism

The wines of Europe are often spontaneously associated with traditions and places that are seen as timeless “Bordeaux” today evokes red wines that can be kept for decades and stone-walled villages such as Saint-Émilion, and Chianti is invariably linked to the “unique” history and landscape of Tus-cany However, even the occasional drinker knows that wine from these areas has changed considerably over the last generation Moreover, most tourists visiting these regions soon learn that the contemporary production of wine bears little relation to the folkloric imagery of horse-drawn plows and peas-ants treading grapes.

Whether they are practitioners, journalists, or academics, most specialists agree not only that European wine has been changing for centuries but also that this change has accelerated over the last twenty to thirty years How-ever, there is disagreement about what the drivers of this change are For many, European wines have changed simply because reductions in domes-tic consumption in large producer states such as Spain have forced produc-ers to seek new markets abroad For others, change has been fueled above all by the rise of exports from New World countries such as Australia and South Africa (globalization),1 and then by the realization of European wine producers that they would have to compete directly with them Yet another interpretation attributes change to alterations in the way public authorities

in Europe have intervened in wine markets through public policies and

leg-Introduction

Wine and the Politics of Economic Change

1 The category “New World” was in fact invented by American and Australian producers

at the beginning of the 1990s to highlight their common interest in taking on their European competitors It has since been extended to include businesses in South Africa, New Zealand, Chile and Argentina.

2 Introduction

islation Rather than add another partial explanation of why European wine has changed so fast and so deeply, this book provides a holistic account that draws not only on original empirical research but also, more fundamentally,

on a new standpoint in social science debates about economic change

We believe that understanding change in an industry such as the wine industry can be fully captured only by developing a generalizable perspec-tive on its politics What determines or obstructs such change? What are the scope conditions for its occurring and then “sticking” during implemen-tation? These are fundamental questions raised in various academic disci-plines, in particular research that uses concepts and methods taken from the new institutionalism While we draw on certain institutionalist theories of change, we nevertheless propose a sharper focus on the politics of economic activity that refuses to dodge key conceptual choices in the name of seeking consensus We believe that it is vitally important to reshape and restate the analytical program of an institutionalism in a way that focuses on both agency and what structures it Our explanation of how and why European wines have changed therefore illustrates a sustained theoretical proposition that asserts

that the cause of economic change relates to structured contingency: actors

prepare and make such change in institutional orders that are deeply socially configured and highly constraining

This proposition combines the tools of constructivist approaches to tutionalism (Hay 2006a; Abdelal, Blyth, and Parsons 2010), Bourdieu’s the-ory of fields (1992, 1993a, 1996, 2013), and a Weberian sociology approach

insti-to political work in industries (Jullien and Smith 2011, 2014) The resulting analytical framework has been developed and refined around a major empir-ical study that focused on the negotiation and implementation of a reform of the European Union’s (EU) wine policy that was formally adopted in 2008 The content of this reform is now generally accepted as radical because it has shifted public support away from measures designed to directly affect the supply of wine, then moved it toward concentrating instead on demand More precisely, since 2008:

• The EU has abandoned direct intervention in wine markets through the subsidized distillation of surpluses

• A final campaign has used EU funds to grub out 175.000 hectares of vines across Europe

• Laws that once prevented European producers from making wine using specific techniques that are permitted elsewhere in the world have been annulled

• New, simplified categories of European wine have been created

• Efforts to better promote European wines in non-EU countries have been partially financed by public authorities

• A range of “modernization” grants have been distributed

Wine and the Politics of Economic Change 3

2 Throughout this book, we use “new consumer,” “supply,” and “demand” not as neutral and descriptive categories but as terms used as a weapon by many of the actors we have stud- ied They will be enclosed in quotation marks at only the first use in each chapter.

The effects of this reform have been both considerable and highly varied Why was this reform so readily accepted in 2008, after years of bitter resis-tance at both EU and national scales to parts of its content and much of its underlying rationale? Just as important, why do almost all commentators on the wine industry not even consider these questions? Specifically, why have they consistently reduced explanations to one or more of the following three assertions?

1 The reform had to happen because globalized wine markets made it necessary for EU producers to align themselves with changes in “demand.”2

2 This globalization was a reaction to interdependent shifts in “consumer demand” on the one hand and corporate ownership and behavior on the other

3 The EU could no longer sustain an interventionist wine policy because it costs too much and because the World Trade Organization had outlawed

it as trade-distorting

Notwithstanding the confidence with which these accounts of the form have generally been expressed, even our initial research on the reform quickly revealed that none of them actually fit the information we gleaned from documents and interviews On the contrary, although consumption of wine has clearly changed since the 1970s, it has never sent unambiguous sig-nals to producers that they simply had to change their products and modes of marketing Markets are actually deeply complex and thus provide uncertain information, a point that seriously undermines the claim that one universal vision of current demands for wines ever existed, let alone affected producer and merchant behavior automatically Similarly, the companies involved in growing grapes, making wine, and then selling it have clearly also changed considerably in recent years As in so many other industries, a concentration

re-of ownership and vertical integration has occurred in many wine regions However, this process is still far from completely dominating the world’s wine industry, especially that of Europe, where relatively small operators continue

to predominate In addition, the concentration of wine companies has not translated automatically into changes in how producers or merchants con-struct and represent their interests As we will show, changes have indeed oc-curred in this direction, but none of them directly affected the construction and implementation of the EU’s 2008 reform Finally, the budgetary cost of the EU’s wine policy and the influence of the World Trade Organization also

4 Introduction

clearly need to be taken into account in any explanation of policy change The 2008 reform did not decrease the EU’s costs; instead, it reshaped them Although EU representatives often invoked the force of World Trade Orga-nization law as a motive for change, in practice such declarations legitimized what they were already seeking instead of being a primary cause of change

In short, very little of the standard explanation of the 2008 reform stood up

to the test of even our first few weeks of empirical investigation

The more we strove to answer the questions Why this reform? and Why in 2008?, the more we had to examine closely the expertise that surrounds the making of commercial and political decisions, the shaping of interest groups, the organization of public authorities, and the way a supposedly common EU policy has actually been implemented in the vineyards of Europe Specifi-cally, as the closing section of chapter 2 sets out in detail, fieldwork in Brus-sels and national capitals and comparisons of four member states (France, Spain, Italy, and Romania) and major vineyards in those states (Bordeaux, Rioja, Chianti, and Romanian vineyards considered as a whole) provide the empirical evidence on which we base our answers to queries about change in the wine industry This fieldwork also grounds in empirical evidence our an-swers to the general social science questions about the politics of economic change that we raise throughout this book

Our starting point for rethinking economic change is a reaffirmation that politics is and always has been an omnipresent driver of the economics of wine Moreover, this politics is deeply multiscalar (global, EU, national, re-gional, vineyard), although this multiscalarity is neither new nor specific to wine However, its shifts over the past twenty to thirty years have contributed considerably to the conditions for the deep change in EU policy and the ef-fects of this reform, which, as will be seen, have varied in revealing ways from country to country and vineyard to vineyard This book shows that the 2008 reform synthesized a process of change that has spanned more than twenty years We insist that the changes recounted in this book cannot be reduced simply to the legislative changes adopted in 2008 Instead, a more revealing story about change caused by structured contingency needs to be told to capture what created the conditions for that reform and has since shaped its implementation

To substantiate these claims, we open with theory positioning A refusal

to seriously address the politics and multiscaled structuration of economic activity and the importance of policy implementation is a common failing of much commentary on European wine Put bluntly, chapter 1 shows that four major theory-driven interpretations of change in the European wine industry are incomplete or wrong More fundamentally, it identifies why the general assumptions about politics, economics, and change that underlie each of these four approaches—namely institutionalist economics, regulationist eco-nomics, sociological institutionalism, and actor-network theory—urgently need replacing The first two of these approaches are excessively material-

Wine and the Politics of Economic Change 5

istic Although their claims contrast sharply, they both interpret policy and political change as the consequence of exogenously caused changes in stocks

of material resources and power In contrast, analyses based on cal institutionalism and actor-network theory are insufficient analytically be-cause they give excessive explanatory weight to the interactions between in-dividuals and groups (or objects) In so doing, and despite their considerable differences, they focus on the positioning and repositioning of firms within networks and underestimate the unintentional resonances between differen-tiated, historically structured, and partially autonomous spaces

sociologi-Elements of each of the four theories mentioned above are of course worth retaining, but we maintain that other sources of concepts and ques-tions are needed to build a coherent alternative analytical framework This

is the aim of chapter 2 which, as noted above, is inspired by constructivist approaches to institutionalism, and the sociologies of Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu Our generic approach to the causes of economic change, which

we call structured contingency, has three key components

The first is a conception of economic activity as structured by institutions that are both highly structuring and fundamentally contingent Institutions, which we define as stabilized rules, norms, and conventions, are the arti-facts around which industries such as wine are regulated In so doing, they produce an institutional order that provides a certain degree of stability for economic activity but is also fraught with tension and likely to evolve

Following Bourdieu, we consider this relationship between stasis and change to be structured most deeply by the spaces of action we call fields These spaces reflect both the objective positions of actors and the outcomes

of struggles for symbolic hierarchization Strong differentiation between fields is an initial consequence of this structuration (here we will focus on the economic, scientific, and bureaucratic fields; i.e., those most relevant to our case study) A second consequence is that each field is underpinned by its own logic, organized around specific issues, and driven by a balance of power that is relatively autonomous from other such spaces Third, fields are also multiscalar: a local field exists within larger ones (e.g national, European, global) that are built around the same issues but entail a greater number of positions Furthermore, struggles in several different fields will at times coin-cide However, this is rarely because individual actors manage to bring them together through their entrepreneurship Instead, interfield connections or transfers need to be analyzed in terms of accidental institutional resonance.The third and final part of our analytical framework directly tackles the dynamism of fields and thus institutional orders Instead of reducing such dynamics to the social skills of individual actors or organizations, we claim that they are the consequence of political work, a process that is conditioned

by the contingent coincidence between fields and is consistently threefold First, it encompasses the activities that define what constitutes the public problems that dominate policymaking over a particular period of time Sec-

6 Introduction

ond, political work generates the instruments through which public and lective actors seek to regularize the treatment of the aforementioned prob-lems Finally, both problems and instruments are constantly worked on from the angle of legitimation; that is, how actors seek to justify and normalize them through discourse and symbolic action

col-Using this analytical framework, Part 2 focuses on the preparation of the EU’s 2008 reform and on the academic struggles that oriented the progres-sive institutionalization of demand-centered arguments in the wine industry, the work commercial, associative, and public actors did to recycle and dif-fuse the ideas this new paradigm conveyed, and, finally, the negotiation of the reform in 2006–2008 Chapter  3 focuses on the relationship between knowledge, science, and power that lay behind the 2008 reform Mobilizing

a dynamic conceptualization of fields, we show that the role played by the ences of vine and wine was a precondition for the production and legitima-tion of a new approach to the government of this industry Chapter 4, which focuses on the 2002–2005 period, builds on this analysis This time span was marked by new challenges to EU policy and an increase in the political work carried out along lines merchants and deviant producers traced in the new paradigm; that is, by actors located in the wine industry’s economic field During this period, these two sets of actors began to propose a new approach

sci-to the EU’s government of the wine industry By the mid-2000s, the very nition of the problem had already changed for a large number of key actors Crucially, alternative definitions of the problem had either been stigmatized

defi-or were not even opened fdefi-or discussion Chapter 5 zeros in on the adoption

of new EU legislation over the years 2006–2008 Not surprisingly, bargains were struck and deals were made among actors from the bureaucratic field

to get the reform package through However, debate was no longer about deep issues of policy direction and substance because these had largely been settled previously

Part 3 concentrates on implementation Our aim here is to analyze the institutionalization of the reform and assess whether the degree of change announced in 2008 has actually taken place In general, we find that imple-mentation has indeed substantiated the deep change announced at the time

of the reform In particular, it has sustained the contention that only wine that fits with the demand of what is frequently labeled the “new consumer”

is economically sustainable and merits EU support In addition, merchants have gained legitimacy and power in this new version of EU government, to the detriment of the growers However, the implementation of this reform has been heterogeneous and has led to differentiated institutionalizations

In order to explain both the changes in the industry prompted by the reform and the diversity of forms it has taken, Part 3 addresses the three main types

of policy instruments it has affected Chapter 6 focuses on the drastic tions in the deeply interventionist dimensions of previous EU policy These instruments previously sought to control most wine prices by limiting the

reduc-Wine and the Politics of Economic Change 7

supply of grapes produced and the supply of wine entering markets In order

to encourage EU wine producers to accept the abandonment of this policy,

a second aspect of the 2008 reform concerned the reprograming of markets, the focus of chapter 7 Here the reformers sought to assist European wine producers and merchants by restructuring the range of wines they produced and simplifying how they are presented to the public, a shift in policy and practice that was legitimized by once again evoking the practices of challeng-ers from the New World In the mid-2000s, initial reaction from producers

to the European Commission’s proposals on these issues was often hostile However, translating them both into action has thus far been a relatively smooth process Finally, chapter 8 focuses on the EU’s microeconomic mea-sures (subsidies for promotion, restructuring, and investment) that sought to improve the competitiveness of its wine producers and merchants The 2008 reform placed a great deal of emphasis on regulatory policy tools as a way

of reprograming markets, but has not meant that the EU has abandoned all budgetary support for the wine industry Instead, the reform has transferred much of the money that was previously spent on grubbing out vines and distillation to microeconomic measures aimed at improving the competitive-ness of individual firms and regional vineyards However, our fieldwork shows that in practice, actors differ widely in the economic and social value they attach to these microeconomic measures Reactions to and interpretations

of the reform as a whole have varied, but not simply due to material minants Instead, the causal mechanisms our research identified concern the extent to which regional actors located in both the economic and bureau-cratic fields have “normalized the policy paradigm” (Hay 2006a, 59) at the heart of the 2008 reform

deter-Overall, and beyond the wine industry, we aim to contribute to two terrelated general academic and political debates The first relates to un-derstanding the government of the EU as a whole From our perspective, European policies stem from a complex set of contingent political work conducted in the economic, scientific, and bureaucratic fields As we shall demonstrate, this stance distinguishes us from the materialistic perspectives that argue that EU governmentalization is nothing more than the reflection

of power struggles between economic interest groups It also rejects an tergovernmentalist perspective that reduces EU policy to the mere output of bargaining between member states We focus instead on the mechanisms of

in-a complex process of decision min-aking in-and institutionin-alizin-ation thin-at is specific

to the European scale without isolating the bureaucratic field from its nomic and scientific counterparts In addition, our approach seeks to grasp the whole process of an EU-driven policy change—from the premises of the reform through its implementation—to capture the thickness of the institu-tionalizations in which change or stasis occurs

eco-Secondly, as our conclusion underlines, we not only call for a reassessment

of institutional change and reproduction in the European government of

8 Introduction

wine; we also maintain that the structured contingency approach we use to alyze the wine industry could usefully be extended to other parts of social sci-ence devoted to economic phenomena and potentially way beyond this area

an-of inquiry What follows is therefore just as much about studying the politics an-of change in general as it is about understanding the reorientation of European wine In this sense, the analytical model we advocate aims first at contributing

to the ongoing rich but currently stalled debate about types of ism Second, and more fundamentally, our approach to politics within struc-tured contingency raises a challenge for and proposes a contribution to the deep scientific debate about the changing relationships between individual actors, social structures, and institutions Indeed, although this book’s title

institutional-is partly tongue in cheek, what follows institutional-is very much about variations within contemporary capitalism and how they can and should be studied

re-of these theories provides a sufficiently complete and convincing tion of economic change Chapter 2 builds an alternative analytical frame-work to capture not only the dynamics observed in the case of EU wine policy but also the dynamics we consider to occur recurrently in all economic activ-ity Although we share a commitment to the institutionalism many colleagues

explana-in political science and sociology espouse, the origexplana-inality of our structured contingency approach lies in its documentation of the role fields play in so-cioeconomic activity This approach also seeks to innovate by identifying how coincidences between fields can create space for the political work that, we hypothesize, brings about institutional change or stasis

Wine has inspired a vast literature in the social sciences, particularly in sociology, history, and geography There is much to be taken from this re-search In analyses of recent change, however, most existing publications raise and reflect the deep analytical problems of academics working on this and many other parts of economic life The following critique of existing literature critically discusses not only the research that specifically concerns wine but also the approaches to economic change that underpin it.

To date, several broad theories of change have been used in analyses of the wine industry The most basic debate is between approaches that emphasize the agency of wine firms and those that give material structures a determin-ing role Other schools of thought have developed in order to move beyond this opposition While they have each contributed to knowledge about what determines economic activity in general and the wine industry in particular, they all have analytical limitations which this book seeks to move beyond

Agency versus Structure: Economics (Still)

in Search of Its Actors

The opposition between agency and structure has been the subject of a great deal of thought in social science (Lizardo 2010) When it is transposed into analyses of economic exchange, it generally takes the form of a cleavage be-tween institutionalist economics and regulationist economics The former stresses choices, calculations, and the contracts firms enter into, while the second focuses on the accumulation regimes and social hierarchies that (it claims) constrain choices, calculations, and contracts However, both provide

1

Existing Approaches to Change in and

beyond the Wine Industry

12 The Analytical Challenge of Economic Change

a restricted viewpoint that hinders comprehension of the deep causes and consequences of change

Institutionalist Economics: Calculation and Contracts

Institutionalist economics is the theoretical lens most frequently used, both

in general and for the wine industry According to the originator of its tral concept of “transaction costs,” Oliver Williamson (1975), economic ac-tors are above all opportunists whose self-interested and short-term-oriented behavior generates uncertainty that has costs These costs encourage actors, often aided by the state, to collectively produce institutional safeguards to protect themselves from attacks from their competitors In their purest form, these measures create an institutionalized hierarchy that is an alternative to pure markets Those who subscribe to institutionalist economics contend that hybrids of markets and institutions are what structure economic behav-ior More precisely, those who defend this theory argue that economic actors put in place explicit or implicit contracts that they rationally follow in order

cen-to protect and enhance their material interests The assumption here is that actors enter into this contractual environment in full knowledge of its con-straints and opportunities, as well as what is in their own best interest.Accordingly, institutionalist economists explain the success of New World wine companies as the result of their high capacity to reduce transaction costs by closely aligning the production of grapes with their processing, mar-keting, and distribution (see figure 1) For example, they depict straightfor-ward and transparent contractual arrangements between grape growers and

F3 MARKET

REDUCED TRANSACTION COSTS

Figure 1 Institutionalist economics

Existing Approaches to Change in the Wine Industry 13

large wineries in the United States and Australia as characterized by strict and verifiable growing and processing norms (Rousset and Traversac 2004; Rousset 2005) This set of institutions flows into another set that involves export strategies whereby New World suppliers commit to long-term supply contracts with supermarket chains backed by enforcement mechanisms that reduce transaction costs still further (Traversac 2011) Proponents of this in-terpretation of the rise of New World wines have a strong tendency to believe that the 2008 reform of the EU’s wine policy was inspired and promoted by European wine companies who saw policy change as a straightforward ad-justment measure The goal was to facilitate change in the hierarchy of the various actors involved in Europe’s wine industry by encouraging the restruc-turing of grape farming (through the subsidized grubbing out of vines and the end of plantation rights) and introducing new ways of classifying wines (e.g., by reforming product specifications for wines produced in designated areas) (Cafaggi and Iamiceli 2010) Consequently, institutionalist econo-mists see the EU’s new wine policy as simply the result of pressure exerted

by the European companies that were best placed to improve their position

in this hierarchy, and thus to compete most efficiently with their opposite numbers in the New World (Corsinovi, Begalli, and Gaeta 2013; Gaeta and Corsinovi 2014) This view resonates with an increasingly popular but deeply problematic (Oatley 2011) approach to open-economy politics (Lake 2009) that reduces analysis to making assumptions about the preferences of private actors, mapping how they organize in national settings and only then raising questions about the structuring effects of international institutions

Notwithstanding the apparent coherence of the theories of economic change of institutionalist economics, they have been hotly contested The first alternative theory incorporates other institutions that are more distant from economic calculation but are seen as central to the regulation of eco-nomic activity

Regulationist Economics: Accumulation Regimes and

Social Hierarchies

Critiques of the overemphasis on calculation in economics abound, but the most sustained of these originated in this discipline itself around the regu-lationist school of economics Founded in France by a group of neo-Marxist scholars (Aglietta 1979; Boyer and Saillard 2002), regulationist theory begins from the premise that economic activity takes place in accumulation regimes that structure the relationship between production and consumption, which themselves are reproduced by types of political and social organizations Con-sequently, in contrast to institutionalist economists, regulationists claim that extra-economic norms and historically shaped hierarchies are what explain the stabilization of productive and commercial activity at any given period (Goodwin 2009) This approach has been extended by researchers who think

14 The Analytical Challenge of Economic Change

in terms of transnational historical materialism, in particular members of the Amsterdam Research Centre for International Political Economy (Over-beek 2000; Van Apeldoorn 2004) These researchers focus on the concepts

of control that, they maintain, explain the development and reproduction

of capitalism at the global scale They see these concepts as the mechanisms through which the ideas and practices of the ruling class define the space of possible action for a society Although for centuries these ideas and practices have been shaped at the national scale, regulationists argue that they have broadened in scope as a transnational ruling class has emerged Indeed, the latter has come to possess a specific form of class agency that entails operat-ing simultaneously in several national spaces Regulationists explain this shift

as the result of a transformation of the relations between capital and labor and the evolution of different forms of capital (financial or productive)

In the context of the study of agri-food industries, the initial aim of search using regulationist economics was to identify food regimes Using this concept, for example, Harriet Friedman and Philip McMichael identified a mode of relations between farmers and consumers that has stabilized at the global scale as a specific way of accumulating capital To support this claim, they pointed to a range of materially determinant factors and data, such as modes of imperialist organization, customs tariffs, land rights, and consump-tion patterns in industrial centers They explained regime collapses as what happens when a disjunction between these factors precipitates a crisis (Fried-man and McMichael 1987)

re-When applied to wine (see figure 2), variants of regulationist theory tulate that a global industry is shaped by numerous structural factors Change and stability in that industry is attributed to dynamics caused by “the differing

CLASS FORMATION IN CORE MARKETS:

Consumption

CLASS FORMATION IN EMERGING STATES:

Consumption patterns

MODES OF REGULATION

Figure 2 Regulationist economics

Existing Approaches to Change in the Wine Industry 15

fortunes of consumers, investors, landowners and workers.” Consequently, the task of researchers is to study the “relationship between capital, class formation and accumulation across and within different scales” (Overton and Murray 2013, 703); that is, “the relationship forged between key buyers (and/or owners) in the core country markets and the producers and suppliers

in the countries of the global semi-periphery” (Gwynne 2008b, 98–99; see also Goldfrank, Korzeniewicz, and Korzeniewicz 1995) Regulationists thus see relations between growers and wineries as crucial to the external posi-tioning of products in the “global wine consumption space” (Pritchard 2002, 187) Authors who develop and promote such interpretations highlight in-creases in the global demand for wine and shifts within that demand (An-derson, Norman, and Wittwer 2003, 2004) Their research often seeks to identify change in consumption habits in states where historically high quan-tities predominated (e.g., France) They generally attribute such change to exogenous shifts in social hierarchies and ways of life But such research also closely examines new markets for wine, in particular those linked to the de-velopment of a middle class in emerging states such as China (Banks and Overton 2010; Parcero and Villanueva 2011; Overton, Murray, and Banks 2012) The overall conclusion regulationists draw is that companies based

in the New World have taken advantage of globalization by adjusting their strategies appropriately In so doing they have deepened a position of com-parative advantage based on the availability of suitable land and technologies that enables them to produce wine of standardized qualities while reduc-ing production costs (Campbell and Guibert 2006; Campbell 2007; Cox and Bridwell 2007; Gwynne 2008a, 95), thereby benefiting mechanically from up-scaling (Gwynne 2006; Gwynne 2008b; Overton and Murray 2013) From this angle, regulationists see the reform of the EU’s wine policy as simply an adap-tation of European production and processing to a regime change that had already occurred in the global economy of wine (Meloni and Swinnen 2012).Notwithstanding the commitment by regulationists to analyzing eco-nomic activity by underlining the importance of a wide range of institutions and social hierarchies, their mechanistic account of change or stasis is deeply problematic Positing that the structures of the global economy shift as a result of forces that are separate from individual and collective actors has led, for example, to descriptions of national and EU administrations as sim-ply writing up a change that was brought about elsewhere Such an account

is wrong in the case of the wine industry More fundamentally, it seriously underestimates the role of agency in all economic activity: the class agency that this approach concentrates on is merely the product of autonomous economic forces that leave no room for contingency

More generally, the polarization of debate between institutionalist and regulationist economists has led to a simple and straightforward cleavage between agency and structure Institutionalists emphasize the strategies in-dividual firms use, while regulationists emphasize macrostructural factors

16 The Analytical Challenge of Economic Change

However, two other schools of thought have attempted to overcome this opposition by putting forward new proposals based on an interactionist ap-proach They themselves clash on a different level and mark out a new set of theoretical divisions that have their own significant omissions

Beyond Agency and Structure via Networks? The

Limits of Interactionism

Promoters of sociological institutionalism have attempted to move beyond the division between agency and structure by explaining that the two are inextricable They emphasize embedded agency and thus contend that the strategic action of economic actors takes place in a partially constraining so-cial context In contrast, researchers who subscribe to actor-network theory propose a move beyond the distinction between structure and agency and argue that the terms of the structure-agency equation do not make sense Because they refute all forms of structural analysis, they dismiss the very ex-istence of a social context as being outside of, and therefore anterior to, action, reject classic conceptions of agency, and concentrate on the material arrangements that support actors’ economic thought and make coordina-tion between them possible The tools these two schools provide have been used to analyze the construction and evolution of the wine economy Despite their differences, they share the same disadvantage of only explaining how markets evolve in terms of interactions between individuals and groups (or objects) They thus limit analysis to the activities of businesses, without taking into account partially autonomous dynamics at work in other spaces that also cause economic reproduction or change

Sociological Institutionalism: Organizational Networks

and Embedded Agency

Sociological institutionalism has positioned itself against institutionalist economics and transaction costs theory without discarding agency (Emir-bayer and Mische 1998; Schneiberg and Clemens 2006; Convert and Heil-bron 2007; François 2008; Steiner and Vatin 2009; Mische 2011) Indeed, it emerged as a hybrid of two alternative approaches

One of these approaches is social network analysis Following Harrison White, authors who adopt this approach postulate that actors use informa-tion they draw from their networks of relations through monitoring the behavior of others (White 1970; White, Boorman, and Breiger 1976) This approach interprets markets as frameworks actors refer to when they assess and compare themselves against their respective competitors (their “mutual comparability”: White 1981) This approach was extended by the concept

of embeddedness, the idea relationships are not the product of utilitarian

Existing Approaches to Change in the Wine Industry 17

calculations of transaction costs but are instead strongly embedded in social contexts (Granovetter 1985, 482) Social network analysts distinguished these networks from both markets and hierarchies because they feature repeated exchanges that generate mutual expectations and relationships of trust By interacting with each other, firms develop forms of collaborative learning Their development is thus embedded in social context, a key element that institutionalist economics does not take into account

Organizational analysis is the second approach that underpins logical institutionalism Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell, its initial main proponents, see institutional organizations as relatively stable social forms that define acceptable actions and place limits on individual expectations

socio-In seeking to clarify the reasons why forms of organization converge, zational analysts focus on interactions between actors and the relationships between organizations and their environment The principal argument they put forward is that a quest for legitimacy takes priority over profit seeking In order to obtain this legitimacy, organizations that are exposed to the same institutional pressures tend to adopt the same visions of reality and the same routines This concept is referred to as the organizational field Those who study organizational fields look at “organizations that directly interact or are indirectly oriented to each other, and that in the aggregate, constitute a recognized area of institutional life” (DiMaggio and Powell 1983, 148) An organizational field takes shape when interactions between organizations in-tensify and when the increasing volume of information exchanged favors the development of a collective rationality (DiMaggio 1988) The structure of the field acts as a filter for preferences and explains why the homogenization

organi-of organizational characteristics can occur (DiMaggio and Powell 1991, 11)

It did not take long for this hybridization of approaches to make itself felt The defenders of organizational analysis have gone so far as to use the tools of social network analysis to map organizational fields (DiMaggio 1986; Powell 1990; Powell, White, Koput, and Owen-Smith 2005; Padgett and Pow-ell 2012) Their goal was to enrich research in economic sociology based on the concept of embeddedness For example, Paul DiMaggio has advocated studying the activities and strategies of institutional entrepreneurs, that is to say, actors who have the ability to modify the rules of a field by convincing other members of the need for change (DiMaggio 1988) DiMaggio explains that economic action is embedded not only in social structure but also in cul-ture, which, in turn, generates phenomena of “cultural entrepreneurship” (DiMaggio 1990, 114; DiMaggio and Louch 1998, 621; see also Mohr 2000; Lounsbury and Ventresca 2003) After several reformulations, this line of rea-soning has culminated in the concept of institutional work, defined as “the purposive action of individuals and organizations aimed at creating, main-taining and disrupting institutions” (Lawrence and Suddaby 2006, 215) Em-phasis is placed on the discursive procedures through which central actors strive to either maintain shared visions of reality, or change them (Lawrence

18 The Analytical Challenge of Economic Change

and Suddaby 2006, 248; Lawrence, Suddaby, and Leca 2009; Wry, Lounsbury, and Glynn 2011) Institutional work is not necessarily done by individuals For example, in cases where there is a highly institutionalized organizational field, it can be undertaken by a professional association Indeed, professional associations are often seen as being in a good position to initiate theoriza-tion, or “the process whereby organizational failings are conceptualized and linked to potential solutions” (Greenwood, Suddaby, and Hinings 2002, 58) Whether individual entrepreneurship or theorization led by trade associa-tions predominates, in both cases embedded agency is highlighted by orga-nizational field analysts (Garud, Hardy, and Maguire 2007)

This reasoning was quickly taken up by proponents of social network analysis Mark Granovetter (1992, 5) has conceptualized institutions as “con-gealed networks” in which “interactions between people gradually acquire

an objective quality, and eventually people take them for granted.” In his later work, Harrison White introduced the concept of “decoupling” to ac-count for the process that leads a stabilized network to transform into an institutionalized organization He pursued this line of thought by including analysis of discourse and visions of reality within network analysis (White

1992, 2002c) This involves seeing networks as guiding the behavior of actors through “narratives” that build a “network ecology for identities” (White 2002a) White proposed mechanisms through which actors attempt to shape networks by engaging in “control projects” and blocking the action of oth-ers Because of White’s emphasis on narratives, he sees cognitive frames as

a factor that explains changes in network structures (White 2000, 2002c; see also Fuhse 2009)

The merging of social network analysis with organizational analysis has cently led to the term “organizational social network research” (Kilduff and Brass 2010) or, more simply, “organizational networks” (Ahuja, Soda, and Za-heer 2012) Work to consolidate these ideas has been done by Neil Fligstein, both alone and in association with Doug McAdam.1 They have developed the concept of strategic action fields as a way of synthesizing previous studies They define strategic action fields as “constructed social orders that define

re-an arena within which a set of consensually defined re-and mutually attuned actors vie for advantage” (Fligstein and McAdam 2012, 64) Such fields are based on intersubjective agreement: each party takes account of the other

in order to guide his or her actions (Fligstein and McAdam 2012, 216) search in this vein thus seeks to uncover the “shared understandings that

Re-1 The stated objective is to draw upon social network analysis and organizational analysis, overcoming the limits of both techniques through cross-fertilization Fligstein and McAdam explain that organizational analysis provides “a theory of how conformity occurs in already ex- isting fields” but that “it lacks an underlying theory of how fields emerge or are transformed” (Fligstein and McAdam 2012, 28; see also Fligstein 2008; Fligstein and Vanderbroeck 2014) They also argue that social network analysis “can be a powerful tool to help map fields” but that

it lacks a theory to explain “the dynamics that shape fields” (Fligstein and McAdam 2012, 30).

Existing Approaches to Change in the Wine Industry 19

2 From the same perspective, Jens Beckert holds that “the notion of field refers to a lation of actors that constitute a social arena by orienting their actions toward each other.”

popu-A field is a “local order” in which “actors develop mutual expectations with regard to each other’s behavior” (Beckert 2010, 609) A “theoretical umbrella” (Beckert 2010, 619) is thus provided that can be used to see the market as a combination of social networks, institutions, and cognitive frames instead of concentrating on one of these dimensions to the detriment

of the other two For Beckert, change within a field can be explained by the friction between these three structuring principles (Beckert 2010, 619–620; see also King and Pearce 2010) Other authors aspire to bring about renewal by extending and hardening the “cultural turn”

in sociological institutionalism, starting with the concept of cultural entrepreneurs and the later works of Harrison White The approach consists of making a bridge between previous work and pragmatic sociology (Pernkopf-Konhäusner 2014) It emphasizes the “institutional logics” that are external to organizations (Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury 2012, 42), which are conceived as action grammars that are publicly available but in limited ways Institutional logics are not reducible to transactions between individuals any more than they are to internal- ized values They are expressed in the form of “vocabularies of practice” that provide support

are critical to field level interactions.” They emphasize “collaborative ing making” and “the attempt by social actors to create and maintain stable social worlds by securing the cooperation of others” (Fligstein and McAdam

mean-2012, 49, 10; see also Fligstein 1997, 398) This orientation has also drawn

on symbolic interactionism Fligstein thus uses the complementary concept

of social skill, defined not only as an ability to get others to cooperate with you, but also as the capacity to get others to act with each other by creating collective identities for actors and producing meaning—in other words, by creating a feeling of common belonging (Fligstein and Vanderbroeck 2014) From this perspective, analyzing social skill is a matter of assessing “how indi-viduals or collective actors possess a highly developed cognitive capacity for reading people and environments, framing lines of action, and mobilizing people in the service of these action ‘frames’ ” (Fligstein and McAdam 2011, 3–7; 2012, 16–18, 45–53, 108–112; see also Fligstein 2001b) Those who have social skill are able to “convince others that their view of the problems of the field and the identity they provide for others in solving those problems work for everyone” (Fligstein and McAdam 2012, 25, 218) In so doing, they help stabilize the field

This framework is used to characterize the evolving relations between cumbents” who make the field work to their advantage and “challengers” who seek instead to reorient it by constructing an alternative collective iden-tity When the field experiences an exogenous shock, challengers are offered new opportunities A change in a proximate or closely related field may offer new resources, for example by causing an influx of new members and there-fore potential allies But change may also be endogenous if challengers in-crementally succeed in reorganizing coalitions and destabilizing established relations between members of the field When the challengers’ offensive is successful, the field enters a phase of settlement and quickly reestablishes a regular mode of functioning (Fligstein and McAdam 2012, 96–108; see also Fligstein 2013).2

“in-20 The Analytical Challenge of Economic Change

for agency (Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury 2012, 42–44, 59–60) Note also that the ence to pragmatic sociology is shared with some proponents of the economics of conventions and actor-network theory This leads some researchers to advocate closer links between socio- logical institutionalism and these two approaches (Mützel 2009; Knoll 2013; Diaz-Bone 2014) However, such appeals for theoretical syncretism should not conceal the major differences between the approaches.

refer-Some proponents of sociological institutionalism have striven to terize developments in the wine economy using these interpretive models According to their analysis, strategic action fields in the wine sector have successively developed several forms (see figure  3) Their initial structure was shaped by the Bordeaux Wine Official Classification of 1855; sociologi-cal institutionalists describe this as an organizing field–level event Accord-ing to this analysis, the social skill of the major landowners of the Bordeaux region enabled them to build alliances and form a broad coalition around their criteria, gradually smothering any challenges Their aristocratic image

charac-of wine underpinned a broad-based mobilization charac-of identity against which small wine growers came to define themselves (Croidieu 2011) Gradually, its effectiveness extended beyond the Bordeaux region The same principle was repeated in other local strategic action fields and even beyond France There were only a few challengers to this model, in particular in cases where cooperatives structured identity in the field (Croidieu and Monin 2010) The daily life of the strategic action field of the wine industry has subsequently been analyzed from this point of departure Sociological institutionalists see long-standing interfirm networks as facilitating interactive and collaborative learning and emphasize the relationships between producers who are con-stantly observing each other (Chiffoleau and Laporte 2006; Rössel and Beck-ert 2013) In this analysis, market cultures are constructed around a trade-off between volume and quality (White 2002b) Thus, institutional change is seen as caused by various different factors

The changes such research attributes to the emergence of New World producers have been analyzed using the same tools They locate the origin of this change in California’s Napa Valley The difficulty for local producers in that area was to find an identity that would fit both wine businesses conceived

as specialized organizations (concentrated on one segment) and ist organizations (Swaminathan 2001; Zhao 2009) In order to get around these difficulties, Napa Valley wine makers—or rather those with the most social skill—began working institutionally in a targeted way In the 1990s, they retrospectively constructed their own organizing field–level event; they mobilized the “Judgment of Paris” (a 1976 blind tasting by an international panel of wine experts where American wines outperformed French vintages for the first time) This narrative was used as a form of cultural entrepreneur-ship to forge a collective memory and mobilize local actors around the same objective (Anand 2011) According to this reading of events, Robert Mondavi

general-Existing Approaches to Change in the Wine Industry 21

emerged as the main cultural entrepreneur because he used his social skills first to organize vertical relationships between wine growers and producers throughout the Napa Valley, and second, to restructure horizontal relation-ships between businesses (Hira and Swartz 2014) This formed the basis for

“interactions amongst specialists in an embryonic and emerging network.”

As a first step, there were moves to ensure “information pooling” (Taplin

2011, 127) Once a common identity had been consolidated, a strategic tion field was structured that took the form of a “wine cluster.” Sociological institutionalists contend that the strategic action field formed in California demonstrated innovative capacities that depended on particular local con-stellations of interfirm networks that integrated wineries and multiple actors into the same identity project This diffusion of skills and knowledge relied

ac-on collective resources and coordinatiac-on (Hira and Swartz 2014)

In order to analyze the regular functioning of the new strategic action field of California wine growers, proponents of this approach study how co-ordinating actors managed collective identity maintenance They have found that organized events (competitions, wine tastings, etc.) were used to build

up “inter-organizational sensemaking” that “enhance[d] organizational members’ self-esteem” and guaranteed them “categorical status recognition” (Zhao and Zhou 2011, 1438) Maintenance was ensured when linkage was achieved between internal recognition and external validation (Zamparini

Longstanding actors

New entrants

Regular interaction

Mobilizations (using social skills)

Figure 3 Sociological institutionalism A typical strategic action field.

22 The Analytical Challenge of Economic Change

and Lurati 2012, 498) The regular functioning of the strategic action field permitted internal divisions, provided they were based on a high level of co-ordination The California wine industry thus emphasized the status of each firm (indexed to its affiliation decisions, i.e., to its concrete links with other actors) rather than its reputation (seen as being based instead on previous behavior) High-status producers enjoyed increased returns from their in-vestment in product quality because status increased the positive effect of the quality of products on prices (Benjamin and Podolny 1999)

Sociological institutionalists claim that once the effectiveness of this model for the wine industry had been proven in California, it was reproduced else-where in the United States, particularly in North Carolina In this state, “a few large wineries have played a key role in establishing efficiency parameters for small wineries” that produced an “incipient industry identity” and pro-vided “an important benchmark for industry newcomers” (Taplin and Breck-enridge 2008, 352) The model quickly spread beyond the United States

to other parts of the New World In Argentina, the wine-making province

of Mendoza became a major area for exports in the 1990s by constructing

“a new constellation of institutions and networks that support[ed] sustained improvements in processes and products in a wide variety of firms.” The Cali-fornia strategy thus produced an institutional model that could be replicated (McDermott 2005, 12–16 and 21–22; see also McDermott and Corredoira 2011) Indeed, structurings of the same type have been identified in Chile (Giuliani and Bell 2005; Giuliani, Pietrobelli, and Rabellotti 2005), South Af-rica (Wood and Kaplan 2005), Australia (Aylward and Turpin 2003; Aylward 2004), and New Zealand (Dana and Winstone 2008)

According to sociological institutionalists, the success of the approaches adopted in these New World countries had the effect of an external shock

on wine-growing strategic action fields in Europe (Aylward and Zanko 2008)

It threw into question longstanding relationships between wine quality and quantity, wherein either the latter was sacrificed to achieve the former or vice versa, by emphasizing instead the need for creativity and innovative oe-nological practices (Aylward 2011) This was accompanied by an “increased codification of knowledge” that devalued the local know-how that had been highly prized up to that point (Giuliani 2007) This generated a horizontal classification principle, in contrast to the vertical one that up to then had been dominant in Europe Because “classifications confer identities on so-cial actors,” (Zhao 2005, 179) challengers with social skills could use this new model to unsettle the general equilibrium of European strategic action fields In Italy, for example, established categories were challenged in ways that increased the role of intermediary actors who were positioned between producers and consumers (Odorici and Corrado 2004; Negro, Hannan, and

Rao 2011) This can be seen in the workings of a consorzio (trade association)

where major changes have taken place, producing a new “organizational story alignment” through “a managerial symbolic use of meta-identities to

Existing Approaches to Change in the Wine Industry 23

aggregate multiple identities.” Members of the consorzio who wanted to

im-pose new ways of functioning acted as challengers They “constantly worked

to signal narratives internally, thus reminding individual organizations of what they were as a regional cluster, what they are, and what they want to be-come.” At the same time, they used this collective identity story to construct their external image (Zamparini and Lurati 2012, 498, 500, 502; see also Brunori and Rossi 2007)

If we follow the interpretation proposed by sociological ists, the EU’s 2008 wine reform simply gave new support to challengers (or cultural entrepreneurs) and removed obstacles to change that incumbents had previously constructed This theory thus ascribes a determining role to the social skill of actors who run businesses No account is taken of the pos-sibility that multiple objects of confrontation—each possessing their own dynamic—may have converged in contingent ways and affected the Com-mon Market Organization reform for different reasons Nor do they leave open the possibility that change was not the result of an external shock and

institutional-a strinstitutional-aightforwinstitutional-ard opening up of wine-minstitutional-aking orginstitutional-anizinstitutional-ations In pinstitutional-articulinstitutional-ar, sociological institutionalists fail to consider the possibility that legitimation

of the initiatives launched by some wine businesses may have also been based

on bureaucratic changes and processes

Actor-Network Theory: Affiliations without

Structures or Contexts

Actor-network theory’s fundamental theoretical proposition is a focus on semblages of humans and non-humans—actors and actants—“from which action springs” (MacKenzie et  al 2007, 15) This is because “realities are not real outside the chains of practices that perform them” (Law 1999, 242) There is nothing outside networks—neither structure nor social context This approach has resulted in the formulation of general explanatory principles (see box 1) Michel Callon and his associates have sought to use these prin-ciples to renew the analysis of economic activities Accordingly, actor-network

as-theory sees markets as “socio-technical arrangements or agencements”

(Cal-lon 2007a, 140) The approach analyzes the technical devices whose form and density make lasting economic activity possible (Caliskan and Callon

2010, 9) It emphasizes actor-networks that may “attach” the cognitive tions of a consumer to a particular product and that may involve “detaching” them from another product (Callon, Méadel, and Rabeharisoa 2002, 205) Constructing an attachment requires the mobilization and integration of a series of actors and technologies (such as advertisements, packaging, sales locations, etc.) (Callon and Muniesa 2005) Callon and his associates thus ar-gue that the “struggle for attachment and detachment is at the heart of com-petition” (Callon, Méadel, and Rabeharisoa 2002, 207) Each market econ-omy consists of a very large number of actor-networks that strive to attach

opera-24 The Analytical Challenge of Economic Change

clients to a particular product and detach them from others (Callon 1999, 191) Analyses of economic change that emphasize structural factors or so-cial changes should therefore be abandoned and replaced by a reading of the economy as a web of more or less unstable relations between innumer-able units (Muniesa, Millo, and Callon 2007)

Actor-network theory has thus positioned itself against sociological tionalism, in other words, against authors who seek to identify the social con-text in which economic action is embedded For proponents of actor-network theory, there is no basis for this approach simply because there is no social context What is social is merely the result of assemblages observed in the course of action itself (Callon 1998, 253; 2013)

institu-Actor-network theorists also criticize sociological institutionalism because

it is anchored in social network analysis They distance themselves from this approach on two levels First, in contrast to a social network, an actor-network includes nonhumans Second, the form of an actor-network does not constrain

BOX 1 BASIC PRINCIPLES OF ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY

The initial formulations of actor-network theory were used to study entific activity The stated objective was “to follow how sciences shape society” and how they define “what it is made of” (Latour 1983, 144) Proponents of actor-network theory reject the influence of social context

sci-on scientific research or, csci-onversely, the influence of scientific research

on social context In their view, one should see context as being created

by the scientist who succeeds in “translating” the object of his or her research, in other words arousing interest in it in various circles, accept- ing that “interests, like everything else, can be constructed” (145) On this basis, politics means being “the spokesman of the forces you mold society with and of which you are the only credible and legitimate au- thority” (157–158), while “strength and success lies in the ability to bind together forces, to make them compatible and equivalent” (Callon and Latour 1981, 292) Success here requires actors and actants to construct and use sociotechnical arrangements—in other words, networks that associate humans and nonhumans The more actors and actants are in- cluded, the more solid and durable the network (Law 1992; Callon 1991, 150) Thus, social scientists should limit themselves to describing these relationships following a simple principle: “follow the actors” (Callon, Law, and Rip 1986, 228) The only appropriate way to conduct research is to trace the strengthening and weakening of horizontal connections without attempting to insert the object of study into a previously structured so- cial space (Latour 2005)

Existing Approaches to Change in the Wine Industry 25

3 Around these principles and concepts, actor-network theory has been used extensively

to analyze food networks, in particular by researchers at Michigan State University (Busch and Juska 1997; Konefal and Hatanaka 2010), who emphasize standards as normative devices that found and stabilize shared judgments This is not only a matter of standardizing objects but also of bringing together all those who place their faith in the same norms Standards thus overcome the heterogeneity of actors and objects by producing the conditions for the agreements that hold each network together (Bingen and Siyengo 2002; Hatanaka, Bain, and Busch 2006).

4 Actor-network theory has strong links with the economy of conventions and pragmatic sociology (see, e.g., Thévenot 2001; Favereau, Biencourt, and Eymard-Duvernay 2002) Many authors use combinations of these three theories to study the building and operation of mar- kets (Guggenheim and Potthast 2012).

the strategies and activities of its members Instead, it includes “distributed collective action, sometimes incarnated in the figure  of individual agency,

at other times by that of a group, but which in all cases is action that is posed, dispersed, recommenced, diverted, re-launched” (Callon and Ferrary

com-2006, 40, our translation) For Callon, “no point is weak or strong by nature,

or has resources or not There are merely assemblages, arrangements, structions, and configurations that cause a point to be strong or weak Power only exists by being exercised and tested out: will the associations hold or will they come undone?” (Callon and Ferrary 2006, 37–38, our translation).This position leads Callon to put forward his own definition of agency

con-For him, “a calculating homo economicus really does exist” (Callon 1998, 51)

More precisely, actors are “in a position to act deliberately” even when there

is “imperfect and asymmetrical information” (Callon 1991, 154) Economic cognition is based both on “computational work,” which consists of com-piling and handling quantitative data, and on “literary work,” which makes

it possible to define what should be counted and evaluate it (Cochoy and Dubuisson-Quellier 2013, 6) Research must therefore concentrate on the

“market devices” (IT tools, econometric models, etc.) that “equip” actors’ economic cognition and make their calculations possible (Muniesa, Millo, and Callon 2007, 1–2) For example, a particular price means nothing with-out an analysis of the work that has gone into describing the product and making it possible for others to recognize its value (Callon 2007b).3 Callon and his associates go so far as to speak of an “economy of qualities” in order

to stress the centrality of these dimensions of the functioning of markets (Callon, Méadel, and Rabeharisoa 2002).4

Researchers who have used actor-network theory to analyze the wine dustry have focused on the sociotechnical devices of markets (see figure 4) For example, they have notably highlighted the role of the Universal Exhibi-tions in Paris in 1889 and 1900 They describe these events as a way of staging and presenting French wine and constructing around it an actor-network that brought together the vine (which they see as an actant), production and trade businesses, researchers, journalists, bodies promoting tourism, and politicians They construe the stands that presented wine products at these