Allison Loconto
Biographic Data
| ID | 179463 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Allison Loconto |
| GIVEN NAMES | Allison |
| FAMILY NAME | Loconto |
| SIGNATURE | LOCONTO A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Sciences, Innovations, Sociétés |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8949-186X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 221 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Infrastructuring short food supply chains: How intermediaries bind rules, norms and values
Food supply chains are crucial for food security and socio-economic development, yet their length concentrates value away from producers and consumers disproportionate resources. As the COVID-19 pandemic and the wars in Ukraine and Iran exposed, overreliance on long chains produces global interdependencies that exacerbate food insecurity. In reaction, alternative agri-food networks (AFNs) and short food supply chains (SFSCs) have proliferated. Ad…
Trajectories and turning points: Objects of intermediation for generalisation
We introduce generalisation as an intermediated trajectory to explain how system innovations, like alternative food systems, diffuse. While existing literature on diffusion and scaling focuses on human agency and steady progression, we propose a relational, object-oriented approach that highlights the role of situated intermediation punctuating/disrupting trajectories of generalisation. We identify four key objects of intermediation—knowledge, va…
Multilevel factors shaping the adoption of agroecological practices: Evidence from small-scale market gardening in Senegal
Conventional farming threatens human health and the environment in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in the market gardening sector. Agroecological practices offer a sustainable alternative; however, their adoption remains low. This paper fills a critical research gap by examining the factors driving agroecological adoption among small-scale market gardeners in Senegal. We consider for the first time bundled practices, multilevel influences on far…
Demonstrating the deep institutionalisation of de facto responsible research and innovation (rri) in participatory market contexts: Examples from Bolivia and the Netherlands
International audience
Environmental governance through metrics: Guest introduction
International audience
Reconquer and divide: Comparative Standard-Setting Strategies Among Producer Organizations
Food standards, which are used to signal adherence to sustainability goals or a specific origin, have deep political implications. Standards crafted by retailers, processors, or third-party actors such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs) often disempower farmers. Moreover, due to the liberalization and globalization of many food value chains, producer organizations (POs) lost some of their legal privileges and market protections. This paper …
Governing value(s) and organizing through standards
Standards are strongly intertwined with values in economic contexts, which goes far beyond economic value. Standards' diversity is expressed in local spaces where standards are made, put into action, circulate and commensurate. In these mutually linked and globally distributed spaces, we can analyze the ways in which standards and value(s) encounter each other and what consequences this brings for individuals, organizations, communities, and soci…
Exploring prosumption: Reconfiguring labor through rural-urban food networks
Responsibilising the Fairtrade Premium: Imagining better decision-making
Governing food futures: Towards a ‘responsibility turn’ in food and agriculture
Keep Diversity––Make Standards! Spaces of Standardization for Diversity Analyzed through Cattle Breeding Industry
Standardization as spaces of diversity was introduced by Loconto and Demortain (2017) to advance the sociology of standards. Their analytical framework for studying standardization processes in interactive spaces is mobilized and expanded upon in this article in order to address the problematic relationship between standards and diversity. Studying industrialized animals highlights the existing tensions between these opposing forces and the socio…
Social movements and institutional change in organic food markets: Evidence from participatory guarantee systems in Brazil and France
Governing by models: Exploring the technopolitics of the (in)visilibities of land
The land sparing – land sharing controversy: Tracing the politics of knowledge
Can standards save organic farming from conventionalisation? Dynamics of collective projects and rules in a French organic producers' organisation
The unintended consequences of standards and certification schemes, particularly their challenges for alternative agri-food networks, is a core concern of rural sociology. The conventionalisation of organic agriculture is a prime example. In this article, we contribute to this debate by studying standards that organic farmers developed for themselves within a French organic producers' organisation. We introduce a 'regulationist theory of collecti…
Healthy diets and the retail food environment: A sociological approach
Mobile market and changing food governance: The world of non-certified organic food in Beijing
By engaging the frameworks of boundary organizations and social worlds, this article examines the emergence of non-certified organic agri-food in China by studying its pioneer organization ? the Beijing Farmers? Market (BFM). Based on tri-angulated analysis of texts, semi-structured interviews and on-site observations, we show that BFM allows diverse organic agri-food actors to cooperate by constructing a market configuration that accommodates el…
Participatory Guarantee Systems: Alternative Ways of Defining, Measuring, and Assessing 'Sustainability
Over the past 20 years, standards and certification have become the leading governance mechanism for determining what sustainability entails, how to measure it, and how to assess it. This system of sustainability standards has generally relied upon the third-party certification (TPC) model to ensure that producers are complying with standards. Over the past ten to fifteen years, critiques of this model have emerged in both practitioner and academ…
Standardization as Spaces of Diversity
Standards have become an important object of investigation in social science and STS scholars have called for a more systematic program of research to study standards or standardization (Busch 2011; Timmermans and Epstein 2010). In this considering concepts paper, we engage with their program for a sociology of standards and propose a new way to think about standards and standardization as “spaces of diversity” so as to push our thinking forward …
Models of Assurance: Diversity and Standardization of Modes of Intermediation
Assurance-an intermediary's guarantee of compliance with regulatory standards-is critical for legitimate governance within the sustainability field. This legitimacy classically depends on the degrees of separation that are needed between the RIT roles to create trust in regulators and enforce the compliance of targets. Following the emergence of the ISEAL Alliance-an apex organization of sustainability standards-setters-there has been a general s…
Dans les coulisses des labels: Régulation tripartite et marchés imbriqués
Cet article s'intéresse aux modalités concrètes du gouvernement par régime de standardisation tripartite. Cette forme de régulation alliant standards volontaires, certification et accréditation est de plus en plus utilisée dans de nombreux domaines de l'activité économique. À partir du cas de l'agriculture biologique, pour laquelle la certification par tierce partie accréditée a été imposée par l'Union européenne à partir des années 1990, nous mo…
Voluntary standards, certification, and accreditation in the global organic agriculture field: A tripartite model of techno-politics
Can Certified-Tea Value Chains Deliver Gender Equality in Tanzania
A popular approach over the past twenty years has been to rely upon voluntary standards as a means to make claims, measure, and judge whether a number of social-equity concerns exist in private-sector practices. But can voluntary standards deliver gender equity? This contribution responds to this question by exploring how standards and gendered division of labor interact in certified-tea value chains (for example, Ethical Tea Partnership, Fairtra…
Politics of private regulation: Isealand the shaping of transnational sustainability governance
Scholars describe the proliferation of sustainability standards by multi‐stakeholder initiatives as part of an organizational field for sustainability. The aim of this article is to gain a better understanding of the institutionalization process of this global organizational field by focusing on the case of theISEAL Alliance (the global association for sustainability standards). We show howISEALputs specific strategies into place to both reinforc…
Sustaining an Enterprise, Enacting SustainabiliTea
Standards that codify sustainability, such as Ethical Trade, Fairtrade, Organic and Rainforest Alliance, have become a common means for value chain actors in the Global North to make statements about the values of their products and the practices of producers in the Global South. This case study of Tanzanian tea value chains takes a closer look at how sustainability, in the form of SustainabiliTea, is done by actors who did not participate in def…
Politics of private regulation: Isealand the shaping of transnational sustainability governance
Scholars describe the proliferation of sustainability standards by multi‐stakeholder initiatives as part of an organizational field for sustainability. The aim of this article is to gain a better understanding of the institutionalization process of this global organizational field by focusing on the case of theISEAL Alliance (the global association for sustainability standards). We show howISEALputs specific strategies into place to both reinforc…
Standards, techno-economic networks, and playing fields: Performing the global market economy
This paper explores the construction of what the authors term a ‘tripartite standards regime’ (TSR) by looking at the pragmatic emergence of standards development organizations (SDOs) and national accreditation bodies (NABs). The authors explain how, through their network of audit, the TSR is entangling intermediaries and processes into specific supply chains. Moreover, they argue that the emphasis placed on the role of ‘metrology’ is overstated …
Voluntary standards, certification, and accreditation in the global organic agriculture field: A tripartite model of techno-politics
Models of Assurance: Diversity and Standardization of Modes of Intermediation
Assurance-an intermediary's guarantee of compliance with regulatory standards-is critical for legitimate governance within the sustainability field. This legitimacy classically depends on the degrees of separation that are needed between the RIT roles to create trust in regulators and enforce the compliance of targets. Following the emergence of the ISEAL Alliance-an apex organization of sustainability standards-setters-there has been a general s…
Social movements and institutional change in organic food markets: Evidence from participatory guarantee systems in Brazil and France
Participatory Guarantee Systems: Alternative Ways of Defining, Measuring, and Assessing 'Sustainability
Over the past 20 years, standards and certification have become the leading governance mechanism for determining what sustainability entails, how to measure it, and how to assess it. This system of sustainability standards has generally relied upon the third-party certification (TPC) model to ensure that producers are complying with standards. Over the past ten to fifteen years, critiques of this model have emerged in both practitioner and academ…
Environmental governance through metrics: Guest introduction
International audience
Governing value(s) and organizing through standards
Standards are strongly intertwined with values in economic contexts, which goes far beyond economic value. Standards' diversity is expressed in local spaces where standards are made, put into action, circulate and commensurate. In these mutually linked and globally distributed spaces, we can analyze the ways in which standards and value(s) encounter each other and what consequences this brings for individuals, organizations, communities, and soci…
Governing food futures: Towards a ‘responsibility turn’ in food and agriculture
The land sparing – land sharing controversy: Tracing the politics of knowledge
Healthy diets and the retail food environment: A sociological approach
Responsibilising the Fairtrade Premium: Imagining better decision-making
Sustaining an Enterprise, Enacting SustainabiliTea
Standards that codify sustainability, such as Ethical Trade, Fairtrade, Organic and Rainforest Alliance, have become a common means for value chain actors in the Global North to make statements about the values of their products and the practices of producers in the Global South. This case study of Tanzanian tea value chains takes a closer look at how sustainability, in the form of SustainabiliTea, is done by actors who did not participate in def…
Dans les coulisses des labels: Régulation tripartite et marchés imbriqués
Cet article s'intéresse aux modalités concrètes du gouvernement par régime de standardisation tripartite. Cette forme de régulation alliant standards volontaires, certification et accréditation est de plus en plus utilisée dans de nombreux domaines de l'activité économique. À partir du cas de l'agriculture biologique, pour laquelle la certification par tierce partie accréditée a été imposée par l'Union européenne à partir des années 1990, nous mo…
Can Certified-Tea Value Chains Deliver Gender Equality in Tanzania
A popular approach over the past twenty years has been to rely upon voluntary standards as a means to make claims, measure, and judge whether a number of social-equity concerns exist in private-sector practices. But can voluntary standards deliver gender equity? This contribution responds to this question by exploring how standards and gendered division of labor interact in certified-tea value chains (for example, Ethical Tea Partnership, Fairtra…
Standards, techno-economic networks, and playing fields: Performing the global market economy
This paper explores the construction of what the authors term a ‘tripartite standards regime’ (TSR) by looking at the pragmatic emergence of standards development organizations (SDOs) and national accreditation bodies (NABs). The authors explain how, through their network of audit, the TSR is entangling intermediaries and processes into specific supply chains. Moreover, they argue that the emphasis placed on the role of ‘metrology’ is overstated …
Politics of private regulation: Isealand the shaping of transnational sustainability governance
Scholars describe the proliferation of sustainability standards by multi‐stakeholder initiatives as part of an organizational field for sustainability. The aim of this article is to gain a better understanding of the institutionalization process of this global organizational field by focusing on the case of theISEAL Alliance (the global association for sustainability standards). We show howISEALputs specific strategies into place to both reinforc…
Sustaining an Enterprise, Enacting SustainabiliTea
Standards that codify sustainability, such as Ethical Trade, Fairtrade, Organic and Rainforest Alliance, have become a common means for value chain actors in the Global North to make statements about the values of their products and the practices of producers in the Global South. This case study of Tanzanian tea value chains takes a closer look at how sustainability, in the form of SustainabiliTea, is done by actors who did not participate in def…
Can Certified-Tea Value Chains Deliver Gender Equality in Tanzania
A popular approach over the past twenty years has been to rely upon voluntary standards as a means to make claims, measure, and judge whether a number of social-equity concerns exist in private-sector practices. But can voluntary standards deliver gender equity? This contribution responds to this question by exploring how standards and gendered division of labor interact in certified-tea value chains (for example, Ethical Tea Partnership, Fairtra…
Voluntary standards, certification, and accreditation in the global organic agriculture field: A tripartite model of techno-politics
Standardization as Spaces of Diversity
Standards have become an important object of investigation in social science and STS scholars have called for a more systematic program of research to study standards or standardization (Busch 2011; Timmermans and Epstein 2010). In this considering concepts paper, we engage with their program for a sociology of standards and propose a new way to think about standards and standardization as “spaces of diversity” so as to push our thinking forward …
Models of Assurance: Diversity and Standardization of Modes of Intermediation
Assurance-an intermediary's guarantee of compliance with regulatory standards-is critical for legitimate governance within the sustainability field. This legitimacy classically depends on the degrees of separation that are needed between the RIT roles to create trust in regulators and enforce the compliance of targets. Following the emergence of the ISEAL Alliance-an apex organization of sustainability standards-setters-there has been a general s…
Dans les coulisses des labels: Régulation tripartite et marchés imbriqués
Cet article s'intéresse aux modalités concrètes du gouvernement par régime de standardisation tripartite. Cette forme de régulation alliant standards volontaires, certification et accréditation est de plus en plus utilisée dans de nombreux domaines de l'activité économique. À partir du cas de l'agriculture biologique, pour laquelle la certification par tierce partie accréditée a été imposée par l'Union européenne à partir des années 1990, nous mo…
Mobile market and changing food governance: The world of non-certified organic food in Beijing
By engaging the frameworks of boundary organizations and social worlds, this article examines the emergence of non-certified organic agri-food in China by studying its pioneer organization ? the Beijing Farmers? Market (BFM). Based on tri-angulated analysis of texts, semi-structured interviews and on-site observations, we show that BFM allows diverse organic agri-food actors to cooperate by constructing a market configuration that accommodates el…
Participatory Guarantee Systems: Alternative Ways of Defining, Measuring, and Assessing 'Sustainability
Over the past 20 years, standards and certification have become the leading governance mechanism for determining what sustainability entails, how to measure it, and how to assess it. This system of sustainability standards has generally relied upon the third-party certification (TPC) model to ensure that producers are complying with standards. Over the past ten to fifteen years, critiques of this model have emerged in both practitioner and academ…
Healthy diets and the retail food environment: A sociological approach
Keep Diversity––Make Standards! Spaces of Standardization for Diversity Analyzed through Cattle Breeding Industry
Standardization as spaces of diversity was introduced by Loconto and Demortain (2017) to advance the sociology of standards. Their analytical framework for studying standardization processes in interactive spaces is mobilized and expanded upon in this article in order to address the problematic relationship between standards and diversity. Studying industrialized animals highlights the existing tensions between these opposing forces and the socio…
Social movements and institutional change in organic food markets: Evidence from participatory guarantee systems in Brazil and France
Governing by models: Exploring the technopolitics of the (in)visilibities of land
The land sparing – land sharing controversy: Tracing the politics of knowledge
Can standards save organic farming from conventionalisation? Dynamics of collective projects and rules in a French organic producers' organisation
The unintended consequences of standards and certification schemes, particularly their challenges for alternative agri-food networks, is a core concern of rural sociology. The conventionalisation of organic agriculture is a prime example. In this article, we contribute to this debate by studying standards that organic farmers developed for themselves within a French organic producers' organisation. We introduce a 'regulationist theory of collecti…
Exploring prosumption: Reconfiguring labor through rural-urban food networks
Responsibilising the Fairtrade Premium: Imagining better decision-making
Governing food futures: Towards a ‘responsibility turn’ in food and agriculture
Governing value(s) and organizing through standards
Standards are strongly intertwined with values in economic contexts, which goes far beyond economic value. Standards' diversity is expressed in local spaces where standards are made, put into action, circulate and commensurate. In these mutually linked and globally distributed spaces, we can analyze the ways in which standards and value(s) encounter each other and what consequences this brings for individuals, organizations, communities, and soci…
Demonstrating the deep institutionalisation of de facto responsible research and innovation (rri) in participatory market contexts: Examples from Bolivia and the Netherlands
International audience
Environmental governance through metrics: Guest introduction
International audience
Reconquer and divide: Comparative Standard-Setting Strategies Among Producer Organizations
Food standards, which are used to signal adherence to sustainability goals or a specific origin, have deep political implications. Standards crafted by retailers, processors, or third-party actors such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs) often disempower farmers. Moreover, due to the liberalization and globalization of many food value chains, producer organizations (POs) lost some of their legal privileges and market protections. This paper …
Infrastructuring short food supply chains: How intermediaries bind rules, norms and values
Food supply chains are crucial for food security and socio-economic development, yet their length concentrates value away from producers and consumers disproportionate resources. As the COVID-19 pandemic and the wars in Ukraine and Iran exposed, overreliance on long chains produces global interdependencies that exacerbate food insecurity. In reaction, alternative agri-food networks (AFNs) and short food supply chains (SFSCs) have proliferated. Ad…
Trajectories and turning points: Objects of intermediation for generalisation
We introduce generalisation as an intermediated trajectory to explain how system innovations, like alternative food systems, diffuse. While existing literature on diffusion and scaling focuses on human agency and steady progression, we propose a relational, object-oriented approach that highlights the role of situated intermediation punctuating/disrupting trajectories of generalisation. We identify four key objects of intermediation—knowledge, va…
Global trade, sustainability, and social impact (19 works) · Political science (19 works) · Organic Food and Agriculture (17 works) · Economics (16 works) · Business (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development (11 works) · Agriculture (8 works) · Corporate governance (8 works) · Geography (8 works)