Tad Mutersbaugh
Biographic Data
| ID | 88346 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tad Mutersbaugh |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tad |
| FAMILY NAME | Mutersbaugh |
| SIGNATURE | MUTERSBAUGH T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Kentucky |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 328 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Beyond the commodity
Increasingly, women are the producers of many agricultural commodities around the world and feminist scholars astutely argue that women subsidize global agricultural production because the exchange value attributed to their products in commodity chains does not fairly compensate them. Although this is the case with women's smallholder coffee in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, in this paper we seek to move beyond an analysis of value and exploitation…
Solidarity Interrupted
Ethical commodity networks have been advanced as a means to promote cooperative development, engender more democratic forms of governance, promote environmental conservation, and redistribute a greater share of returns to farmers and workers. This essay draws upon long-term ethnographic research on the role of solidarity within two Mesoamerican coffee-producing cooperatives to understand the effects of certification regimes that undergird many et…
Constructing the female coffee farmer
The quest for gender economic equality is becoming a component of corporate and transnational institutional antipoverty initiatives in the Global South. Framed as "smart economics," this approach explicitly ties women's empowerment to economic growth. On one hand, this framework employs a discursive construction that depicts women as attentive, family-oriented entrepreneurs and caregivers who are more likely than their male counterparts to invest…
Environmental Certification and Eco‐Labeling
Certification is a set of practices that includes the writing of standards, the inspection and labeling of products that meet those standards, and the accreditation and auditing of producers, inspectors, and agencies involved in certification. This entry will discuss the growth and expansion of certification and certified product consumption, and address the following points. First, certification itself is becoming more standardized under ISO (In…
A review of Coffee by Gavin Fridell
Gavin Fridell provides an invaluable, beautifully written and thoroughly engaging account of the contemporary global coffee market. I would recommend this work widely, not just for those interested
The triple burden
Stealing Shining Rivers
Food Systems in an Unequal World
Wainwright’s Geopiracy
Local or localized? Exploring the contributions of Franco-Mediterranean agrifood theory to alternative food research
Dialectics of Disassembly
This paper examines 'protocols'-instructions that inform project recipients about how technology is to be used. Our case study of 'heifer-care' protocols associated with a microdairy scheme raises two questions. First, we ask how these protocols effect a disassembly of social relations within the village-'poisoning' them, as coop members put it. Second, we raise the question of persistence: namely, how were village participants in the microdairy …
Transparency and democracy in certified ethical commodity networks
Gender equity in fairtrade–organic coffee producer organizations
Brewing Justice
Oaxaca
Certifying rural spaces
Certified organic agriculture in Mexico
Fighting Standards with Standards
In this paper I explore the remaking of globalized standards through harmonization, and its impact upon certified-organic and fair-trade agrofood networks. I focus on certification standards and discuss four shifts associated with globalized standards (an increased importance of multilateral institutions, changes to standards language, displacement of network-specific standards, and a shift away from relational standards). It is then argued, with…
Serve and Certify
In this paper I argue that certified-organic inspection agents play a key role in reworking transnational organic-product certification standards to the unique conditions found within Mexican (Oaxacan) organic-coffee producer villages. First, I document the steps through which transnational product-certification norms, under the International Organization for Standardization guide 65 rubric, are codified as practical standards by organic-product …
Building Co-ops, Constructing Cooperation
Cooperative rural development has been the subject of much scholarship, yet little attention has been paid to the importance of cooperative spatial strategies. In this study, the efforts of an Oaxacan (Mexican) rural producer cooperative to construct a co-op building appear to far exceed the structure's potential contribution to commodity production. This research argues that the outsized investment into co-op infrastructure is explicable when th…
Migration, common property, and communal labor
The Number is the Beast
The author argues that organic-coffee certification enacted under the rubric of transnational certification norms alters the logic and practice of economic management and governance in an Oaxacan (Mexican) peasant producers' union. As the title indicates, these changes are productive of social and economic tensions. An economic and ethnographic analysis of 'certification labor' demonstrates (a) that the work of certification is distributed within…
Bread or Chainsaws? Paths to Mobilizing Household Labor for Cooperative Rural Development in a Oaxacan Village (Mexico)
This ethnographic case study of a rural production co‐op in the indigenous community of Santa Cruz (Oaxaca, Mexico) documents men's efforts to enlist women's participation in men's co‐op projects. Over an eight‐year period, men initiated a number of production projects, only to see them fail when women refused to participate. I use data from participant observation, surveys, and interviews to construct gendered time‐geographies of agricultural an…
Women's Work, Men's Work
Research undertaken in the Oaxacan (Mexican) indigenous community of Santa Cruz indicates that gender differences in technology acquisition derive in part from locally unique gendered patterns of labor participation. Previous studies have identified constraints on women's adoption of technology which stem from women's relative resource poverty and mode of insertion into the labor process. In the present comparative gender analysis labor-process t…
Commentary
Fighting Standards with Standards
In this paper I explore the remaking of globalized standards through harmonization, and its impact upon certified-organic and fair-trade agrofood networks. I focus on certification standards and discuss four shifts associated with globalized standards (an increased importance of multilateral institutions, changes to standards language, displacement of network-specific standards, and a shift away from relational standards). It is then argued, with…
Gender equity in fairtrade–organic coffee producer organizations
Serve and Certify
In this paper I argue that certified-organic inspection agents play a key role in reworking transnational organic-product certification standards to the unique conditions found within Mexican (Oaxacan) organic-coffee producer villages. First, I document the steps through which transnational product-certification norms, under the International Organization for Standardization guide 65 rubric, are codified as practical standards by organic-product …
Local or localized? Exploring the contributions of Franco-Mediterranean agrifood theory to alternative food research
Certified organic agriculture in Mexico
Transparency and democracy in certified ethical commodity networks
Certifying rural spaces
The Number is the Beast
The author argues that organic-coffee certification enacted under the rubric of transnational certification norms alters the logic and practice of economic management and governance in an Oaxacan (Mexican) peasant producers' union. As the title indicates, these changes are productive of social and economic tensions. An economic and ethnographic analysis of 'certification labor' demonstrates (a) that the work of certification is distributed within…
The triple burden
Migration, common property, and communal labor
Constructing the female coffee farmer
The quest for gender economic equality is becoming a component of corporate and transnational institutional antipoverty initiatives in the Global South. Framed as "smart economics," this approach explicitly ties women's empowerment to economic growth. On one hand, this framework employs a discursive construction that depicts women as attentive, family-oriented entrepreneurs and caregivers who are more likely than their male counterparts to invest…
Building Co-ops, Constructing Cooperation
Cooperative rural development has been the subject of much scholarship, yet little attention has been paid to the importance of cooperative spatial strategies. In this study, the efforts of an Oaxacan (Mexican) rural producer cooperative to construct a co-op building appear to far exceed the structure's potential contribution to commodity production. This research argues that the outsized investment into co-op infrastructure is explicable when th…
Women's Work, Men's Work
Research undertaken in the Oaxacan (Mexican) indigenous community of Santa Cruz indicates that gender differences in technology acquisition derive in part from locally unique gendered patterns of labor participation. Previous studies have identified constraints on women's adoption of technology which stem from women's relative resource poverty and mode of insertion into the labor process. In the present comparative gender analysis labor-process t…
Commentary
Solidarity Interrupted
Ethical commodity networks have been advanced as a means to promote cooperative development, engender more democratic forms of governance, promote environmental conservation, and redistribute a greater share of returns to farmers and workers. This essay draws upon long-term ethnographic research on the role of solidarity within two Mesoamerican coffee-producing cooperatives to understand the effects of certification regimes that undergird many et…
Dialectics of Disassembly
This paper examines 'protocols'-instructions that inform project recipients about how technology is to be used. Our case study of 'heifer-care' protocols associated with a microdairy scheme raises two questions. First, we ask how these protocols effect a disassembly of social relations within the village-'poisoning' them, as coop members put it. Second, we raise the question of persistence: namely, how were village participants in the microdairy …
Oaxaca
Commentary
Women's Work, Men's Work
Research undertaken in the Oaxacan (Mexican) indigenous community of Santa Cruz indicates that gender differences in technology acquisition derive in part from locally unique gendered patterns of labor participation. Previous studies have identified constraints on women's adoption of technology which stem from women's relative resource poverty and mode of insertion into the labor process. In the present comparative gender analysis labor-process t…
Bread or Chainsaws? Paths to Mobilizing Household Labor for Cooperative Rural Development in a Oaxacan Village (Mexico)
This ethnographic case study of a rural production co‐op in the indigenous community of Santa Cruz (Oaxaca, Mexico) documents men's efforts to enlist women's participation in men's co‐op projects. Over an eight‐year period, men initiated a number of production projects, only to see them fail when women refused to participate. I use data from participant observation, surveys, and interviews to construct gendered time‐geographies of agricultural an…
Building Co-ops, Constructing Cooperation
Cooperative rural development has been the subject of much scholarship, yet little attention has been paid to the importance of cooperative spatial strategies. In this study, the efforts of an Oaxacan (Mexican) rural producer cooperative to construct a co-op building appear to far exceed the structure's potential contribution to commodity production. This research argues that the outsized investment into co-op infrastructure is explicable when th…
Migration, common property, and communal labor
The Number is the Beast
The author argues that organic-coffee certification enacted under the rubric of transnational certification norms alters the logic and practice of economic management and governance in an Oaxacan (Mexican) peasant producers' union. As the title indicates, these changes are productive of social and economic tensions. An economic and ethnographic analysis of 'certification labor' demonstrates (a) that the work of certification is distributed within…
Serve and Certify
In this paper I argue that certified-organic inspection agents play a key role in reworking transnational organic-product certification standards to the unique conditions found within Mexican (Oaxacan) organic-coffee producer villages. First, I document the steps through which transnational product-certification norms, under the International Organization for Standardization guide 65 rubric, are codified as practical standards by organic-product …
Certifying rural spaces
Certified organic agriculture in Mexico
Fighting Standards with Standards
In this paper I explore the remaking of globalized standards through harmonization, and its impact upon certified-organic and fair-trade agrofood networks. I focus on certification standards and discuss four shifts associated with globalized standards (an increased importance of multilateral institutions, changes to standards language, displacement of network-specific standards, and a shift away from relational standards). It is then argued, with…
Oaxaca
Transparency and democracy in certified ethical commodity networks
Gender equity in fairtrade–organic coffee producer organizations
Brewing Justice
Dialectics of Disassembly
This paper examines 'protocols'-instructions that inform project recipients about how technology is to be used. Our case study of 'heifer-care' protocols associated with a microdairy scheme raises two questions. First, we ask how these protocols effect a disassembly of social relations within the village-'poisoning' them, as coop members put it. Second, we raise the question of persistence: namely, how were village participants in the microdairy …
Local or localized? Exploring the contributions of Franco-Mediterranean agrifood theory to alternative food research
Wainwright’s Geopiracy
Food Systems in an Unequal World
A review of Coffee by Gavin Fridell
Gavin Fridell provides an invaluable, beautifully written and thoroughly engaging account of the contemporary global coffee market. I would recommend this work widely, not just for those interested
The triple burden
Stealing Shining Rivers
Environmental Certification and Eco‐Labeling
Certification is a set of practices that includes the writing of standards, the inspection and labeling of products that meet those standards, and the accreditation and auditing of producers, inspectors, and agencies involved in certification. This entry will discuss the growth and expansion of certification and certified product consumption, and address the following points. First, certification itself is becoming more standardized under ISO (In…
Constructing the female coffee farmer
The quest for gender economic equality is becoming a component of corporate and transnational institutional antipoverty initiatives in the Global South. Framed as "smart economics," this approach explicitly ties women's empowerment to economic growth. On one hand, this framework employs a discursive construction that depicts women as attentive, family-oriented entrepreneurs and caregivers who are more likely than their male counterparts to invest…
Solidarity Interrupted
Ethical commodity networks have been advanced as a means to promote cooperative development, engender more democratic forms of governance, promote environmental conservation, and redistribute a greater share of returns to farmers and workers. This essay draws upon long-term ethnographic research on the role of solidarity within two Mesoamerican coffee-producing cooperatives to understand the effects of certification regimes that undergird many et…
Beyond the commodity
Increasingly, women are the producers of many agricultural commodities around the world and feminist scholars astutely argue that women subsidize global agricultural production because the exchange value attributed to their products in commodity chains does not fairly compensate them. Although this is the case with women's smallholder coffee in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, in this paper we seek to move beyond an analysis of value and exploitation…
Political science (19 works) · Global trade, sustainability, and social impact (17 works) · Economics (16 works) · Organic Food and Agriculture (12 works) · Business (11 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Agriculture (9 works) · Economic growth (9 works) · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development (8 works) · Certification (8 works)