Meat, metrics and market devices: Commensuration infrastructures and the assemblage of ‘the schedule’ in New Zealand's red meat sector

Abstract

Caliskan (2007) has argued that while we live in worlds that are saturated with a concern with prices, we know very little about how they are fashioned and circulated. This concern with prices, and in particular low prices, has been a reoccurring point of problematisation within New Zealand's red meat sector and the prompt for ongoing work. Yet, as Caliskan suggests more generally for agricultural commodities, we know little of the ways in which prices within the red meat sector are created. Taking this provocation as a starting point this paper explores the regular listing of prices for sheep and beef traditionally known as ‘the schedule’ in New Zealand. The paper frames ‘the schedule’ as form of market device and traces the complex filigree of associations that are assembled to make it durable. In tracing these associations what emerges are wider metrological assemblages performed through the complex and unstable interaction of market devices, price, agency and materialities. What this suggests is that because price is often a key metric of problematisation, we need to develop our understanding of the materialities, artefacts and infrastructures that are assembled to make prices possible, and the different possibilities that those things enact.