Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive of over 1,500 titles.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Where do the various crises of property in the seed industry leave us? This concluding chapter argues that the power of property to solve social problems has largely been exhausted: every new form of property we add to plant breeding will rather lead to more, rather than less politization. In this respect, the seed sector is paradigmatic for a wider trend. From property in personal data to the enclosure of cultural heritage, property fails to live up to our expectations. At the same time, however, there is no convincing alternative in sight to take over property’s role in our society. In the face of the ubiquity and persistence of property, this chapter thus pleads for treating property pragmatically – continually asking ourselves what it can realistically achieve while remaining wary of its shortcomings as a social institution.
Recent decades have witnessed the creation of new types of property systems, ranging from data ownership to national control over genetic resources. This trend has significant implications for wealth distribution and our understanding of who can own what.
This book explores the idea of ownership in the realm of plant breeding, revealing how plants have been legally and materially transformed into property. It highlights the controversial aspects of turning seeds, plants and genes into property and how this endangers the viability of the seed industry.
Examining ownership not simply as a legal concept, but as a bundle of laws, practices and technologies, this is a valuable contribution that will interest scholars of intellectual property studies, the anthropology of markets, science and technology studies and related fields.
This chapter develops a more-than-legal concept of property. It starts from a discussion of three competing understandings of property: as a thing, as a person-thing relation and as a relation between people mediated by things. While each of these understanding have their merits, they also have specific drawbacks and blind spots and are usually formulated as mutually exclusive. The chapter argues that a synthesis between them is needed that allows to highlight different dimensions of property without defining what it is made of from the outset. For this purpose, the notion of the ‘bundle of rights’ is introduced and subsequently expanded to also exclude social practices and technologies. Illustrating this conceptual expansion through the ethnographic example of a wheat harvest, the text makes the case for understanding property pragmatically: as a ‘bundle of scripts’, which are identified through their effects on property relations, subjects and objects, rather than their materiality as texts, practices or devices.
Starting from the Broccoli/Tomatoes II landmark case, this introductory chapter lays out the core question of the book: why is it that the advance of property seems unstoppable and running in circles at the same time? Drawing from Hannes Siegrist’s concept of ‘propertization’, it looks at the particular case of plant breeding, where property has become increasingly politicized. The chapter outlines two key strands of property critique, a political-economic one questioning access and distribution and a moral-ontological one criticizing its misapplication to subjects. Subsequently, it proposes a third, cultural type of critique that examines the appeal and the limits of property as a way of organizing life. To this end, this introduction makes the case for a ‘more-than-legal’ concept of property that does not simply rely on legal texts and authority but equally on technologies, practices and the materiality of property objects themselves. The chapter further provides an overview over key traditions that think about property along these lines and gives an outline of the following chapters.
Alienability is often cited as a key characteristic of private property. As such, however, it is all too often taken for granted: when property is sold in a market transaction, the implication is that is also appropriated by someone else. Drawing from the past and present of commercial seed development in Germany, this chapter seeks to provide the reader with an understanding of applied plant breeding and the particular difficulties seed companies encounter when they try to sell their seeds. Alienating seed as a commodity presupposes a product that can be appropriated by farmers, that is, practically and materially made part of farm operations. At the same time, breeders must not alienate to much but retain one crucial script, that is, the ability to multiply and sell seed. The chapter details how European plant varieties were turned into ‘quasi-commodities’ in the years after World War II, resulting in seed that could be sold and appropriated but was never fully alienated. The new property regime of plant variety protection thus allowed two distinct groups – farmers and breeders – to own the same object in different ways.
This chapter explains how plants became patentable property objects. While European plant variety protection propertized seed as a uniform, tradeable farm input, contemporary US legislation focused on new and unique plant characteristics. With the molecular turn in plant breeding, however, new possibilities for propertizing plants emerged: DNA as a molecule gave rise to an understanding life along the lines of chemistry while the Bayh-Dole Act and the Diamond v. Chakrabarty ruling led to a surge in biopatents. Genetic manipulation finally allowed for appropriating plant genes materially, which prompted European countries to introduce another layer of intellectual property on top of plant variety protection. Genes and biotechnology served as catalysts for a legal and economic paradigm change: even after the demise of transgenic plants in Europe, patents persisted as a complementary yet contradictory form of property. This development eventually culminated in the Broccoli/Tomatoes II case, in which the patentability of conventional seed was affirmed, threatening to disrupt established breeding practices and seed markets.
In discussing two other forms of property that have recently emerged as problematic, this chapter makes the case that the seed industry is not just suffering from a misapplication of patent law but a much wider ‘property condition’. It follows the German seed industry’s attempts to renegotiate the post-war arrangement between breeders and farmers: as the preconditions for the success of plant variety protection started to fade in the 1990s, seed companies sought to extend their property claims to farm-saved seed, leading to a clash with farmers. Although the industry’s lobbying efforts succeeded in revising European PVP law, the state and other actors in the seed industry refused to enforce it. To stop farmers from reproducing self-fertilized varieties, breeders thus sought to remodel the biology of their plants, with limited success. Meanwhile, seed producers suddenly face property claims by countries all over the world who demand their share in genetic resources under the Nagoya Protocol. The chapter argues that these clashes cannot be overcome by financial compensation alone: property is used by owners to reassert themselves and demand respect from others; a fact that stands in the way of simply getting rid of property.
Both mainstream economics and political economy often assume that property erects a fence around value that would otherwise be accessible to others. This chapter seeks to complicate the idea that there is value ‘in’ property by asking different stakeholders in the Broccoli/Tomatoes II debate how they draw value, positive or negative, from their or others’ patents. While for some companies patents indeed enclose the results of investments in plant breeding, other firms instead use them as a bulwark against hostile business practices. But patents can also be monopoly machines, bargaining chips, signals of innovativeness, vehicles for financialization and speculation or assets that extract lasting revenues from farmers. The difficulty of judging their value for the plant breeding industry and society as a whole stems from this multiplicity of patent values and their mutual entanglement: reigning in one specific way of making value from patents will also affect other business practices that have emerged around them over time.
This chapter closely examines the meeting between the Personal Insolvency Practitioner and the debtor who wishes to be made insolvent. From a distance, this appears to be a bureaucratic meeting based on rules, but in reality it is a carefully negotiated series of micro-interactions that takes the form of a Foucauldian confession.
The practitioner lacks the time or resources to fully investigate the financial case of each client. Instead, they bring the debtor to their office and ask them to explain everything that has happened in the form of a moral story, seeking to gauge how contrite and apologetic the debtor is. A strong element of class and gender emerges here, with working-class debtors attempting to placate the middle-class gaze of the practitioner, while women must choose to either adopt or resist the negative stereotypes associated with women in financial distress.
This chapter unravels the implications this has for the governmentality of debt and debtors as they navigate this system and are increasingly pushed to embody entrepreneurial norms and become responsibilized subjects.
This chapter explores those who are successful in their application for insolvency and unpacks how this process works in detail. Once the debtor has the support of an insolvency practitioner, their chances of success increase significantly. They first apply (and get) a protective certificate, a legal instrument that prevents creditors from contacting them and gives breathing space to lodge a full application. This application will involve a 3–6-year insolvency programme where the debtor must live on a mandatory limited budget called their Reasonable Living Expenses. This is the subject of considerable negotiation between the debtor, the practitioner, and creditors. If creditors dislike the proposed arrangement, they may veto it, though this can also be overturned at a court review. In this chapter we meet the rare few who are successful in this process. In doing so, we see how they use the language of salvation to describe the feeling of being relieved from their debt burdens. This is often summarized using the phrase ‘clean slate’.
