This chapter started with the statement that each regulation is triggered by a problem to which the regulation proposes a solution. The establishment of normative expectations regarding the safety of GM Food has been defined as the shared regulatory trigger of the legal frameworks in Germany and in the United States. In both these cases, the cognitive uncertainty that is underlying the issue has to be resolved, if certain, stabile behavioral expectations are to be
53 As a proof for the success of this regulatory scheme, often the lack of such high-profile food scares as BSE in the American food supply is cited.
established. Nevertheless, both these regulatory frameworks differ in their ways of dealing with the cognitive uncertainty and, thus introduce different
‘solutions’ to the fields that they are designed to regulate. These differences can tentatively be traced back to the disparate definitions of the issue GM Food that pervade the succeeding regulation as well as the instruments provided thereby.
Germany
Within the German context, the nature of the conflict – or, more moderately, the problem – that has to be solved by the legal regulation of GM Food, has been defined as cognitive conflict. Consequently, knowledge-based problem solving strategies have been invoked to solve this problem. But since the rule does not provide a substantial definition of the issue itself, it leaves broad room for interpretation among those to whom it is addressed. Thus, it is left up to the field to fill the phrase ‘novel food’ with meaning. Despite this lack of a sub-stantial – and thus probably guiding – definition of the issue, the regulatory scheme in Germany is not backed by as powerful consumer protection laws as the ones provided for in the United States.54 In addition, German industry does not fear litigation as the US industry does since the instruments for public in-terest litigation are not as established in Germany as they are in the United States (see chapter 1.2.1). Therefore, the rules regulating the introduction of GM Food into the German network have merely to rely on their own ‘force’, i.e., the force that is derived from its status as official law of the state (and the sanctions build into it). But as the rule remains ambiguous about its very char-acter and at the same time is likely to enter a field in which a variety of defini-tions of the issue and, consequently, practices and routines for its handling, compete with each other in order to become the dominating, appropriate rou-tine it is unlikely that this regulation has the capacity to establish the expecta-tion that GM Food is – if not uncontested – but at least safe.
Consequently, as the rule offers itself as only one draft of how to handle the issue GM Food it is likely that the rule will be accompanied – if not resisted or avoided – by knowledge that is generated by the constituents of the field, throughout their attempts to cope with the issue. Thus, it will be confronted with other ‘drafts’ and will have to stand the ‘test of practice’. Instead of pro-viding an even possibly contested answer to the abstract question of the net-work what is considered as an adequate way of dealing with the issue GM Food? the outlined regulatory framework asks this question in return. In doing so, it opens the network for a variety of answers that can be expected to
54 This is not to say that German consumers are not protected by legal obligations but the German system of consumer protection has increasingly been criticized as still neglecting the aspect of precaution, for instance (Hippel 2001).
pete with each other, in order to become the dominant one throughout the net-work. Thus, in the German case a conflict ridden, ‘untilled’ field is likely to evolve and – the legal rule itself has prepared the ground for it.
United States
Within the American context, a different picture was presented: the regulatory framework here introduced a very precise definition of what has to be under-stood as ‘GM Food’ into the field. By referring to institutionalized and tested knowledge, a very precise framework for an appropriate way of dealing with the issue could be provided. The problem that has to be resolved in this case is the subsumtion of a new case under existing categories, an endeavor that in the given case is backed by the existence of strong laws in the background. It is thus likely that the (normative) expectation of food security can be established throughout the network – at the cost of abolishing, suppressing or neglecting interpretations, which are not in tune with what the rules have proposed. Thus, the regulatory framework in the United States can be expected to be accompa-nied by power in the first place. In sum, the American field ‘GM Food’ can in contrast be expected as a tilled field wherein categories are coined, tested strategies are employed and less opportunities for friction are provided.
In sum, to take up the discussion at the beginning of the present chapter, the particular regulatory framework prepares part of the ground of what is go-ing to happen when it is introduced into the field it was originally designed to regulate. Against the background of the outlined regulatory approaches of both these cases, the assumption can be made that these will affect the relations among those to whom the rules are addressed to as well as their relations and the particular issue GM Food. It will therefore be one aim of the next chapter to analyze in what ways the respective organizations that constituted the networks have responded not only, or not exactly to these regulations but to what they have perceived as their respective legal environment and the expectations, con-straints, pressures and chances contained therein.
“When you make policy that way you really run the risk that when it becomes a matter of public discussion
you won’t have asked or answered the questions that the public has and I think that has happened.”
(Interview #14#/USA)
4 From Norm to Action: Organizational Responses
While the previous chapter was dedicated to the description of the respective regulatory schemes that have been issued in order to guide the introduction of GM Food, the present chapter aims to fathom what has become of their ‘origi-nal’ normative meanings throughout the processes of rereading, reobserving, reinterpreting, thus throughout organizational responses to these norms?
One decisive claim of the present study is that the role of organizations in the regulatory process is underdeveloped or at least underestimated and that by focusing on organizations as social systems a more appropriate understanding of the regulatory process can be achieved. This argument has been developed against the theoretical background of modern systems theory and a new institu-tionalist approach that focuses on organizational studies. On this theoretical level, several reasons could be identified for considering organizations when one wants to investigate what happens when a legal rule becomes implemented into its field that is characterized by cognitive uncertainty. These theoretical considerations concluded with an understanding of the regulatory process as the interplay of law, knowledge and power that is orchestrated by the problem, which has to be resolved and fulfilled by the organizations of the given net-work. Depending on the case, the legal rule will be accompanied either by power or by knowledge in the first place. This interplay between law, knowl-edge or power and the organizations will become manifest in specific regula-tory structures, that evolve as decisive characteristics of a given interorganiza-tional network. As each issue will develop its ‘own’ network, such structures will differ contingent on the problem.
This approach is expected to contribute to the domain of comparative re-search on regulation, especially to the question of what exactly is hidden be-hind a so-called national style of regulation. Even though the prevailing under-standing of national regulatory styles employs those as explanatory variable, it remains fairly unexplained what they are about. By focusing on organizations instead, these ‘black boxes’ can be unpacked, as organizations have to be un-derstood as the central parts of the regulatory process. Thus, the ground floor
level of regulation becomes revealed as the various organizations’ perceptions of their legal environment(s) are addressed. These perceptions are likely to impact on the organization’s particular way of dealing with the issue GM Food, in that they determine what will be understood as ‘appropriate’, ‘rationale’ and
‘sensible’ in the context of a given organization.
Here, one has to distinguish between the normative and the cognitive rules, which in their total as its script, guide the organization’s operations (de-cision-making). While the normative rules are fed by the organization’s respec-tive function system, the cognirespec-tive rules are fed by the organization’s percep-tion of its environment. Therefore, a given organizapercep-tion will make sense on the background of its normative orientation and then operate because of this knowledge, thus enact its environment. It is in this phase, that an organization is confronted with its environment, thus not only with norms and expectations but also with other organization’s knowledge, interpretations, strategies and the like. As discussed in chapter 2.1, organizational scripts function soundless and unreflected as long as they are not confronted with opposition. If organizations observe a deviation from their own description, this becomes scrutinized and, dependent upon environmental pressures, constraints and possibilities, it will become revised or upheld. Dependent upon the dominance of that environment, the organization can thus uphold its normatively derived interpretation or it is forced into a revision of its (decision-) premises. Therefore, as confronted with an environment, the question arises to what extent an organization can uphold its interpretation of the focal issue and the subsequent strategies against the challenges of what it perceives as ‘reality’. In sum, this embeddedness deter-mines which organization(s) gain the power of definition throughout their net-work. Against this background, the observable differences in the way of deal-ing with GM Food in Germany and in the United States are now put in a new perspective.
Firstly, given that world society is defined as being enclosed in each sin-gle social subsystem's communication, a similarity between the German and the American network can be expected in that each ‘national’ GM Food-network is likely to be constituted by the same types of organizations. At the surface, there will be legal, economic, scientific, political, and probably reli-gious organizations that (at least) in the first place interpret GM Food based on the functional primacy of their respective social subsystem. Decisions concern-ing the issue will follow a scheme – or a decision-program – that are guided by distinctions such as legal/illegal, payment/nonpayment or truthful/untruthful.
Therefore, one can assume that the organizations’ perceptions in Germany as well as in the United States will be guided by these same distinctions. At this stage, and without any specification of the context, it cannot be claimed in a meaningful way what the decisive characteristics of, for instance, a specific
‘American truth’ would be, in contrast to a German, Italian or French truth.
Instead, homogeneity among the organizations of the given networks is likely to occur.
However, as has been claimed in chapter 2, this is not the entire ‘truth’
about world society, or, more specifically, about the processes by which it be-comes established. Importantly, this perspective does not explain the observ-able differences in the societal way of dealing with a seemingly identical issue such as GM Food in differing national contexts like Germany and the United States. These differences (or, world society’s heterogeneity) come into sight if one considers that each organization has not only to be described as norma-tively closed but also as cogninorma-tively open at the same time. In so doing, it can be expected that its actual embeddedness into its respective environment will affect the organization’s perception and thus on its subsequent way of dealing with the issue. Further, the aforementioned binary oppositions are filled with meaning only throughout their application in varying organizational contexts.
As they cannot be considered as ontologically given but moreover as depend-ent from an observer, they also cannot be considered as existing beyond all contexts. Consequently, the meaning of the distinction between legal and ille-gal cannot be taken as a constant but rather as dependent variable. By taking into account that the actual meaning of superficial identical terms and concepts depends upon the context of their application, a perspective is taken that re-veals the hidden, fundamental differences behind these terms and concepts.
Consequently, it will become obvious that the fundamental differences are not to be found between an ‘American regulatory culture’ and a ‘German regulatory culture’, thus between national approaches to GM Food. Instead, it will be argued that the decisive differences lie between the embeddedness of the single organizations of the various societal subsystems that not only consti-tute the interorganizational network(s) but that also traverse countries. There-fore, both these networks are in a very fundamental sense characterized by a heterogeneity that follows from a plurality of organizational perspectives on the focal issue.
The present chapter therefore is dedicated to the presentation of the vari-ous organizational responses as manifestations of the organizational scripts. By reconstructing and describing organizational responses, the rules are made ex-plicit that guide the single organization’s perception of its environment and consequently its perception of ‘its’ network that has emerged around the focal issue. Finally, but most notably, also the perception of this issue is guided by the script and will become explicit in the given organizational response.