Resumo

The impacts of the Cup of Excellence program on the Brazilian specialty coffee market derive from its different events, that is, the quality competition, the award ceremony and the virtual auction stage. In all of them, the perspective of market agencies and the constructivist dynamics of sociotechnical collectives integrated in the network are relevant subjects for analysis. COE cupping competitions and awards ceremonies can be analyzed to provide greater insight into the qualification process carried out within the context of specialty coffee quality competitions.

When consulting the literature, the works involving the COE program (Donnet et al., 2008; Traore et al., 2018; Wilson & Wilson, 2014; Wilson et al., 2012) emphasize quantitative value calculations, but do not address how the bases for this calculation are built or how such devices were developed. Therefore, the aim of this research was to investigate the construction of the qualification process developed in the Cup of Excellence Brazil program and its influence on the country's specialty coffee market.

Market agencements are hybrid collectives composed of human and non-human entities that bring action to the market (Çalişkan & Callon, 2010; Le Velly & Dufeu, 2016). Market devices have a crucial role as “calculative agencies” (Callon, 1998) and in the intermediation between actors in the markets (Çalişkan & Callon, 2010; Kim, 2017). Callon et al. (2002) emphasize that calculations are not limited only to price and profit factors, but also to goods and their qualities.

This is a qualitative and exploratory-descriptive research developed from a case study (Yin, 2001). Data were collected from documentary research, semi-structured qualitative interviews and non-participant observation. From the collected data, the materials were organized and analyzed in a chronological and thematic way so that it was possible to build a historical structure that will be presented below. More specifically, Content Analysis was adopted in its qualitative, semantic and categorical strand of closed grid (Bardin, 2016), with the adoption of sentences as units of analysis.

As could be seen in the development of cupping forms in the competition, the definition of categories and evaluation criteria were built from the relationship between the prior knowledge of some judges, discussions about the divergence between what should be considered a defect or quality, as in the case of acidity, and with the presence at all times of market devices such as the cupping form itself, which brought agency to the competition and modified the program's practices over time.

A series of devices, practices and market agencies in the COE program that transformed the Brazilian specialty coffee market. It is suggested that further research can carry out an integration between the market agencies identified in the COE and the market practices (Kjellberg & Helgesson, 2007) identified during the history of the program in Brazil. Another fruitful possibility would be to compare the results found here with the history of the Program in other countries that host its competitions.

Çalişkan, K., & Callon, M. (2010). Economization, part 2: A research programme for the study of markets. Economy and Society, 39(1), 1–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085140903424519 Callon, M., Méadel, C., & Rabeharisoa, V. (2002). The economy of qualities. Economy and Society, 31(2), 194–217. Muniesa, F., Millo, Y., & Callon, M. (2007). An introduction to market devices. The Sociological Review, 55, 1–12.