15 pages, The post-war Western world has seen a gradual shift from government to governance, a process that also concerned the issues related to agro-food sustainability, such as food quality, environmental impact, social justice, and farm animal welfare. Scholars believe that social media are a new site that reconfigures relations between various actors involved in the governance of these problems. However, empirical research on this matter remains scarce. This paper fills this gap by examining the case of Februdairy, a Twitter hashtag campaign to promote the British dairy industry, hijacked by animal protection activists. For this case, I employ the relational perspective on technology affordances—as operationalised by Faraj and Azad (in: Leonard et al. (eds), Materiality and organizing. Social interaction in a technological world, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012)—to highlight two distinct strategic modes of embracement of social media functionalities by the opposing groups: hashtag hijacking and crowdsourcing transparency. The analysis reveals also that a pre-existing social structure of the agro-food system conditions reconfiguration of social relations by technology in a way that actually strengthens the tendency to govern the issue of farm animal protection with market mechanisms.
19 pages, via Online journal, This article discusses the interplay of public policy and market-driven initiatives to improve farm animal welfare (FAW). Over the last couple of decades, the notion of ‘market-driven animal welfare’ has become popular, but can the market deliver the FAW that consumers and politicians expect? Using the Danish pork sector as the empirical setting, this article studies efforts to improve private FAW standards following changes to general regulations. The analysis shows that ethical misgivings regarding the adequacy of current and prospective FAW standards are tempered by the economic considerations that guide the practices of some actors. The study also shows that efforts to improve FAW standards are contingent on collaboration and coordination across globalised markets among actors with divergent interests. The findings have important implications for market practices and public policy in relation to FAW.
