Production management as an ordering of multiple qualities: negotiating the quality of coffee in Timor-Leste

ABSTRACT

The emergence of close-knit global–local links in many agro-food production systems has necessitated rigorous coordination between the key stakeholders to ensure that quality and safety standards are met. To analyze this new supply chain configuration, agro-food studies inspired by convention theory have drawn significant attention to the plurality of quality conventions. In the literature specifically focusing on the inter-relationships between multiple quality conventions, the ways of interpreting a specific value orientation are perceived to have important implications. This view may lead to a questioning of how the configuration of multiple quality conventions can be stabilized if conflicting justification principles are not easily reconciled. The argument is further connected with an examination of situated plurality in a particular context, focusing on how the boundary among multiple quality conventions is stabilized on the ground. In this paper, through a case analysis of coffee quality management in Timor-Leste, I attempt to demonstrate that commoditization is to be reformulated as the process in which the qualification of objects and regularization of action are constituted through the differentiation of consumable quality as generality from heterogeneous cultural elements as particularity.