Promoting Fair-Trade

Abstract

A ‘market device’ is defined as the ‘material and discursive assemblages that intervene in the construction of markets’ (Muniesa, Millo & Callon, 2007: 2), and it is the contention of this chapter that fair-trade is a powerful market device. It calls upon a whole host of actors – fair-trade organisations, NGOs, activists, retailers, businesses, the media, local and national government, community organisations and so on – who together work to qualify the characteristics of fair-trade goods and reconfigure the position of these goods within a world of similar commodities. Callon describes the market as a dynamic process in which ‘calculative agencies compete and/or co-operate with one another … [so that] each agency is able to integrate the already framed calculations of the other agencies into its own calculations’ (Callon, 1998: 32). This approach encourages us to think of both fair-trade and the citizen-consumer as contingent and shifting constructs that are constantly being defined and redefined through the interplay between different actors and organisations that may have different or even competing objectives. This chapter takes two popular promotional campaigns – Fairtrade Towns and fair-trade promotional periods (like Fairtrade Fortnight and World Fair Trade Day) – in order to show how the ‘fair-trade consumer’ is constructed and mobilised as a citizen-consumer, with specific attention paid to the range of actors and organisations involved in this process in diverse cultural contexts. As the previous chapter made clear, fair-trade switches are becoming a common feature of fair-trade provisioning in the UK, and to a lesser degree in Sweden and the USA. This chapter pays particular attention to the institutionalisation of collective fair-trade purchasing and asks how this choice-editing has been made possible through an evolving and complex set of interactions.