Critiquing the Inter-Disciplinary Literature on Food Fraud

Abstract

The European Horsemeat Scandal of 2013 is a recent manifestation of the problem of 'Food fraud'. It is important from a criminological perspective because it exists at the nexus between organized crime and bad business practice and is a contemporary example of criminalentrepreneurship. From a practical perspective it is a pernicious criminal activity perpetuated by diverse organized-crime-groups, rogue-entrepreneurs and food-industry-insiders. It is a whitecollar-crime committed in the commercial arena, across an extended international food-chain. Geographic and policy boundaries make it difficult to police. Although a high level of awareness of the fraud exists globally, there is a dearth of critical academic research into the phenomenon. The extant literature is spread thinly across various disciplinary silos. This essay by two Business School Scholars and a Food Scientist, discusses the need to develop a more critical, interdisciplinary approach to developing appropriate theoretical frameworks.

International sourcing decisions in the wake of a food scandal

“…Food fraud is a collective term encompassing the deliberate and intentional substitution, addition, tampering, or misrepresentation of food, food ingredients, or food packaging, or making false or misleading statements about a product for economic gain (Spink and Moyer, 2013). Coincident with the recent growth in public interest in food fraud, literature on the issue has expanded across a variety of academic disciplines (Smith, Manning and McElwee, 2017). From an economic perspective, the most relevant of this literature can be divided into three inter-related strands: (1) understanding suppliers' incentives to engage in fraud (Manning, Smith and Soon, 2016;Moyer, DeVries and Spink, 2017;Song and Zhuang, 2017),…”

Forgotten children: a socio-technical systems analysis of the 2004 and 2015 forced child labour reports from Indian cottonseed farms

“…A better understanding of the mediating role of stakeholder attitudes in global food supply chains is needed alongside discrete audit tools to assess labour welfare in agriculture value chains. As a result of situational and organisational factors such as time pressure, availability of resources, workload, incentives/motivation and competition, stakeholders demonstrate varying degrees of policy compliance in complex sociotechnical systems (Bates and Holroyd 2012 ; Smith et al 2017 ; Humaidi and Balakrishnan 2018 ). As has been shown in these case studies, external influences such as political and financial factors destabilise these systems leading to adaption and change.…”

Advancing understanding of pinch-points and crime prevention in the food supply chain

“…Profit maximisation 194 in the agricultural sector is contextualised by characteristics of constant 195 uncertainty and risk of failure due to weather, animal disease etc. and many 196 farming organisations have limited opportunities in terms of growth orientation 197 and business expansion (Smith et al, 2017b). We now turn to examine these 198 pinch-points in the supply chain that give rise to the environment where crime 199 could occur.…”