Shuai Man,寻找安全食品：一项信任演化逻辑的社会学考察

Food safety scandals have become so common in China especially after the 2008 scandal over melamine-tainted milk. From gutter oil to fake eggs to clenbuterol, there is hardly a food that has not been exposed as having safety risk. The long list of food safety incidents in China means that domestic consumers are deeply worried about the food they can buy and eat. How to avoid the poisonous food and how to access the healthy become serious concerns for the public.

The situation has been blamed on the combined effects of the country’s food supply system, the food quality regulation, and characteristics of the agriculture industry. Food safety problems occur at all stage of food production, from farmers to procurers, processors, wholesalers, and retailers. Vegetables, for example, run the safety risk due to the regulatory loopholes of quality inspection and the malfunctional traceability system. In the past decades, public affair, economics, and legal scholars have largely contributed to our understanding of function and failure of Chinese food safety regulatory system (e.g. Zhang, 2005). Some scholars investigate the growth of green agricultural industry as the alternative way to the current. Although structural factors have been mentioned, there are no systematic studies on the food safety strategies developed by the public voluntarily.

Man Shuai’s book in Chinese inspects food safety problem in urban China from the campaign of ordinary consumers, who have taken innovative actions to access the safe and healthy vegetables. Other than an individual strategy like growing one’s own vegetables in the garden, these actions occur in the form of self-organization. Some people spontaneously unit together to initiate consumer communities in order to purchase healthy and safe agricultural products. As local group-buyers, these communities build up supply chains between qualified farms, group-buyers, and community members. Shuai refers these communities and their members’ ongoing activities as ‘safe food action’. With a dynamic perspective informed by sociology of practice, she selects ‘City S Healthy Food Procurement Group’ (SPG), ‘City S Farmer Market’ (SFM), and ‘City B Farmer Market’ (BFM) as three representative organizations to understand the logic of consumer-initiated communities’ evolution and operation. Different from the existing literature on Chinese food safety crisis, Shuai’s work studies one fundamental aspect of Chinese food supply system, not top-down institutions, but bottom-up consumer groups and their actions.

For Shuai, the food safety problem arises from the lack of social trust that results from the overall transformation of Chinese society during the past 40 years. Since the reform and open-up, the marketization and urbanization accelerated the collapse of the social credit system maintained by hometown relations and Danwei administration (Zhai, 2011). The public’s anxiety about food safety, including their distrust of organic certification, the retailers, and experts, mirrors the crisis of generalized morality in China nowadays. In such a hostile environment, how is the ‘safe food action’ possible? How do some consumers develop mutual trust and organize their own communities? How do the communities operate to purchase safe food? How do the communities inoculate and construct group identity? These questions echo the intellectual interest of sociology in trust. The origin of interest can be traced back to the classic work of Alexis de Tocqueville (1835-40/2000), who argued that the best way to align the divergent interests of people toward the common good is to have them participate in voluntary associations. A version of social capital also claims the reciprocal relation between civic engagement and public spiritedness (Putnam, 2000). Although Shuai’s study on safe food action may enrich our understanding of ‘Tocqueville paradigm’ (Warren, 2001), but her work does not spin the cliché of connecting civic engagement and generalized trust. Instead, she conceptualizes ‘trust’ as a multidimensional social force having three types – interpersonal trust, network structural trust, and institutional trust – and manifesting constructive mechanisms of and conversion between these three in the case of safe food action. In other words, safe food action is examined as a structural phenomenon of trust rather than a new social movement.

To illustrate that phenomenon, Shuai collects extensive fieldwork data on the evolution of SPG and conceptualizes it as a four-step project of trust construction. The first step is to construct trust relationship between consumers and SPG – initiators mobilize network, promote via website, and hold workshops that recruit new members and gain their endorsement of SPG. The second step is to develop trust between SPG and farmers. SPG seeks for farmers who share the same philosophy about environmental protection and builds mutual benefit relation with them strategically. The third step is to pass on the trust from the consumer to the famer. As an intermediary agent, SPG guarantees the credit of farms and their products, and evaluates consumers’ feedback to famers on QQ and BBS. The fourth step is to sponsor SFM, a platform that gather more than eight farmers to exhibit their products and cultivation to the public on the market day. SFM enables consumers to communicate with and supervise producers directly and therefore motivates their trust on the whole supply chain. In Shuai’s words, these four steps mentioned above construct a closed trust system of safe food that builds on an SPG centric network. This trust system is both the reason and result of safe food action.

Chapters 1 to 4 document the emergence of SPG and provide detailed description on the four-step formation of trust system. The author attempts to establish a two-way causal relationship between the system and group buying for safe food. Chapter 5 formalizes the four-step system formation into a model of trust conversion. The author states that the rise of SPG indicates the conversion of interpersonal trust to network structural trust, the collaboration between SPG and SFM indicates the conversion of network structural trust to institutional trust, and the dismiss of a leader from committee indicates the damage to the institutional trust. Chapter 6 compares the structure of trust between BFM and SPG. According to the author, BFM develops a different model of trust management and maintenance that diverges its developmental path from SPG. Its dense collaborative network, broad membership, and stable institutional trust make it grow from a small NGO into a profitable social enterprise. In Chapter 7, the author introduces another two consumer organizations – City B Green-Mom Procurement Group and Taiwan Housewives Union Life & Consumption Association – to enrich her discussion about trust transformation and conversion. Based on archive data, she gives brief description about these two organizations and swift jumps to her summary about their respective reciprocity model and strength. In her view, the former organization’s expansion results from strong and stable reciprocity between members, and the latter’s deeper reciprocity and stable institutional trust represents the highest developmental stage of consumer organizations. Their success and SPG’s stagnation underline the importance of reciprocity in trust construction and evolution. In the last chapter, Shuai summarizes her findings and discusses the social reflexivity of actors.

After reading the book, I rethink the title Looking for Safe Food: A Sociological Research on the Evolutionary Logic of Trust. For me, the title promises a systematic investigation on food safety problem and a sociological analysis on the constitutive role of trust in shaping the problem. I expect an explanation about the Chinese model of trust and its specific relation to a Chinese social problem in the era of rapid moral and social change. However, both the main title and the subtitle imply different things. Basically, Shuai understands safe food action as organizational behavior of consumer groups and her analysis of the behavior seems like to apply a version of trust theory – guanxi circle – to make sense of phenomenon and in turn support theoretical applicability. The logic of trust here is not a logic in action, which needs to be discovered from scrambled empirical materials, but an already existing rule that determines and predicts the process of organizational evolution. As the cornerstone of analytical framework, guanxi circle theory should have become a crucial issue, but review and discussion about it only account for few lines. Is it a generalizable theory? Is it a formal or substantial theory? Does the circle mean a structure or a nature of human relation? Are its layers equivalent to different types of trust and why?

The ambiguous orientation of guanxi circle theory also affects the analysis on trust conversion in Chapter 5. To illustrate the first conversion, the author draws three concentric circles to identify social network graph of SPG and labels it as a three-layer guanxi circle composed of the hub (committee), the core (active volunteers), and the peripheral circle (ordinary members). In her words, the form of trust generated by the layered guanxi circle is defined as ‘guanxi circle trust’ that counts one type of network structural trust (p. 103). To illustrate the second conversion, the author listed SPG’s administrative rules, procedures of collective decision, and charters of organization and claims that the establishment of these rules represents the formation of institutional trust (p. 103). However, the ground of identification and definition needs to be examined at the first place and the criteria used to evaluate institutional trust also need to interrogated.

To conclude, this book represents the latest effort of the Chinese sociologists to understand social action of resolving food safety problem. Using qualitative methods, Shuai reveals how the consumer group, an important type of social action, takes place and undergoes transformation. The safe food action is still an ongoing process and the efficacy and replicability of consumer organization are still under examination.