VITA

Dr. Lawrence Busch is University Distinguished Professor of Sociology and founder and former Director of the Center for the Study of Standards in Society at Michigan State University. Until recently he was also Professor of Standards and Society at Lancaster University (UK).  He is coauthor or coeditor of a number of books including Plants, Power, and Profit: Social, Economic, and Ethical Consequences of the New Biotechnologies (Blackwell, 1991); From Columbus to Conagra: The Globalization of Agriculture (Kansas, 1994); and Making Nature, Shaping Culture: Plant Biodiversity in Global Context (Nebraska, 1995),  The Eclipse of Morality: Science, State, and Market (Aldine deGruyter, 2000), Agricultural Standards (Springer, 2006), Universities in an Age of Corporate Science (Temple, 2007), and most recently, Standards: Recipes for Reality (MIT, 2011), and as well as more than 100 other publications. He is past president of the Rural Sociological Society, past president of the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a Chevalier de l’Ordre du Mérite Agricole and a member of the Académie d’Agriculture de France. He recently was awarded a Doctor Honoris Causa from the Universidade Técnica de Lisboa.  Dr. Busch has worked in France, Norway, Kenya, Brazil, India, and a number of other nations on issues related to food and agriculture. He has been a consultant to the International Service for National Agricultural Research and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. He has written and spoken on a variety of social, political, and economic issues associated with food standards, both here and abroad. Dr. Busch’s interests include food and agricultural standards food safety policy, biotechnology policy, agricultural science and technology policy, higher education in agriculture, and public participation in the policy process.

Busch’s work is focused on developing an empirically grounded, strategic, general theory of standards.  As such his research focuses on linking the very disparate literatures on standards for people and things, while enhancing our understanding of standards as means of (re)ordering aspects of reality.