Dr Matthias Zick Varul (Principal Investigator)
Department of Sociology and Philosophy, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of
Exeter, Amory Building, Rennes Drive, Exeter EX4 4EH, United Kingdom telephone 0044 (0)1392 26 3283, e-mail m.z.varul@exeter.ac.uk

Ethical consumption and especially Fair Trade has increased significantly during the last two decades. While there is a growing body of research on this particular segment of consumerism, the role of the specific ethicality of Fair Trade both as opposed and relating to the morality of ordinary shopping and other practices of ethical consumerism has not yet been examined. But, I propose, the phenomenon of Fair
Trade consumerism cannot be understood without reference to a morality of everyday life that is negotiated in, reproduced, affirmed and challenged by practices of consumption.
The study will thereby highlight yet un-researched aspects of Fair Trade consumerism that are specific to this particular form of ethical consumerism and therefore close a gap in our understanding of ethical consumerism in its complexity. This will facilitate both self-reflection within the fair-trade movement and the debate on international social justice in general. The empirical study of any aspect of ethical consumerism promises to yield insights into everyday concepts and boundaries of social justice, the interrelations of market and morality, normative structures opposing the market, embedding the market and/or emerging from the dominant role of the market in contemporary societies (Bode/Zenker 2001). It contributes to a better understanding of the question to what extent markets really are ‘morally free zones’ (Hausman 1989, cf. also Sznaider 2001).
In order to establish the sources of the operative lay moralities an internationally comparative approach will be applied, comparing accounts from the UK and
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Germany, adding a qualitative perspective to understanding the moral plurality of capitalisms. This will also contribute to an understanding of how nationally specific economies of morality relate to the moral constitution of consumer selves.
Many studies locate Fair Trade as an alternative in the global agro-food system (e.g.
Renard 1999), in the global market generally (Brown 1993, cf. also Leclair 2002,
Murray/Raynolds 2000, Raynolds 2000, Rice 2001, Talbot 2004: 203ff.) and in trying to determine the efficacy of alternative trade as a means for improving the lot of producers in the Third World (also Fisher 1997, Murray, Raynolds et al. 2003). Often the question whether Fair Trade helps to establish more direct links between producers and consumers and thereby acquires a de-alienating potential is raised (e.g.
Bryant/Goodman 2004, Fisher 1997, Raynolds 2000, 2002, Hudson/Hudson 2003), while the centrality of consumer choice is emphasised in overviews like that of
Blowfield (1999) and Moore (2004). Possible ethical motives are explored mainly on the level of moral theory/philosophy (Sugden 1999, Boda 2001, Sorell/Hendry 1994,
Barnett, Cafaro et al. 2004), while Davies and Crane (2003) empirically study processes of ethical decision making within a Fair Trade company.
With Fair Trade retailing transcending the confines of alternative marketing networks and entering the supermarkets (‘mainstreaming’), there has been an increased interest in the marketing aspects of Fair Trade. Studies in this field are mainly based on the examination of practices of alternative trading organisations (e.g. Bode/Zenker 2001,
Humphrey 2000, Zadek et al. 1998) and of advertising (Bryant/Goodman 2004,
Low/Davenport 2005, Varul 2006b, Wright 2004). There is also is an increasing number of quantitative marketing studies, mainly exploring market potential (e.g.
Bird/Hughes 1997, Cowe/Williams 2001), consumer preferences (e.g. Levi/Linton
2003, Strong 1996), and social class (Howard/Willmott 2002, Strong 1996). Shaw and
Clarke (1999) try to determine other influencing factors such as information and normative others, while Shaw and Shiu (2002) test the influence of the factor ‘self-
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identity’ on ethical consumption. Further, there are a few commercial marketing studies (e.g. Giovanucci/Koekoek 2003, for an overview cf. Tallontire et al. 2001) that also focus on market size, consumer preferences, and consumers’ class background.
Very few studies explore ethical consumer motives and justifications. Gould (2003) offers a highly personal introspective view, stressing the psychological benefits of a good conscience and the feeling of connectedness. Newholm (2000, 2005) notes ethical and hedonistic motives while otherwise focusing on the inevitable inconsistencies of ethical consumption and stresses the need to not only look at the buying decisions but also the intentions and mentalities behind them and their expressions. Shaw and Clarke (1999) use focus group discussions to highlight factors contributing to ethical consumer choice and also hint to possible additional benefits and arising conflicts. Theoretically developing some distinctive ways of how ethicality is instilled on products, Crane (2001) points out that there is no empirical research about what actually is perceived as ethical in Fair Trade products. Barnett, Cloke et al.
(2005), in the most profound research on ethical consumerism so far, look at practices of consumption in relation to discourses produced by organisations. Their concern, however, is mainly with questions of ‘being ethical’, the construction of
‘ethical subjects’ in general rather than what is ethical about Fair Trade in particular.
The notion of ‘ethical consumerism’ seems to be a contradiction in terms, since market and morality classically and commonly are viewed as stark opposites
(Marx/Engels 1979: 464) with morality being sought out in the contestation of certain goods’ commodity status (Radin 2001), in the blocking of certain exchanges
(Walzer 1983: 97ff.). The money mediation of modern life leaves a moral vacuum but, as Simmel (1990) also observed, this vacuum needs to be filled by a stylisation of life, by consumers finding ways of ethical self-determination. While there always have been more everyday (Miller 1998, Zelizer 1994) and more official (e.g. Hilton 2003)
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efforts to recast the market citizen as a moral agent it is only after the move from
‘productionism’ to consumerism in the 1980s (Abercrombie 1990) that the ethicality of shopping behaviour could become a field of constant displays of ethical stances and scrutiny. The construction of contemporary citizens mainly as commoditychoosing consumers (Gabriel/Lang 1995, Slater 1997: 24f.) is a construction of free subjects and as such invites the problematisation of freedom in an ethos (Foucault
1987: 117), the substitution of the abolished prescribed identity by a seemingly freely chosen lifestyle.
While initially positioning itself in a field of tension between radical politics and commercial enterprise, operating ‘in and against the market’ (Brown 1993: 156) some contemporary proponents happily celebrate Fair Trade as ‘entirely a consumer choice model’ which ‘operates within the larger free trade model of unregulated international commerce’ (Nicholls/Opal 2004: 31). In this perspective, ethicality is introduced through acting upon free action of consumers defined as choosers. Barnett, Cloke et al. (2005) take this as a starting point and look at how ethical consumer campaign groups, trading companies, and consumers themselves establish practices to constitute themselves as moral agents. Beyond (or rather, before) all deontological or consequential reasoning, a crucial function of ethical behaviour is the self-reassurance and expression of an ethical character, the possession of a sense of justice. The use of
Fair Trade produce as a ‘badge of social belonging’ (Zadek et al. 1998: 32ff.) in symbolic class struggles (Bourdieu 1979), therefore, is not only to be seen as a practice of distinction by ‘conspicuous compassion’ (West 2004), claiming moral superiority of one’s own lifestyle over what is perceived as mainstream (Shaw/Clarke
1999: 116), but also part of ethical consumerism’s ethicality.
Central for the self-perception as ethical subject is not just the sense and expression of a will to behave, act, and shop in an ethical way, but also a sense of responsibility in a more causal way – i.e. the construction of the consumer as powerful (Johnston
2002, Renard 2003: 92). Here it will be important to find out if and how consumers locate themselves in a perceived world society, which is essential in determining how
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they actually perceive of themselves as ‘acting at a distance’ (Barnett, Cloke et al.
2005, cf. also Rose/Miller 1992: 180, Haskell 1985), in a ‘nascent international moral economy’ (Fridell 2003).
The ethical content of ethical consumerism has, so far largely been taken for granted and therefore never been examined in its own right. Going beyond ‘translating abstract ethical values into practical conduct’, Barnett, Cloke et al. (2005: 32) propose to look at consumer ethics as ‘ways in which practices articulate specific ethical competencies’, as techniques of ‘ethical selving’, both as a search for inner consistency and as ethical self displayed towards and negotiated with others.
Fair Trade consumerism is to be understood through both an ‘approach from character’ (Campbell 1990: 42) and an approach from (morally) ‘conspicuous consumption’ (Veblen 1994), which can be shown to feed back into each other (Varul
2006a). While demonstrating how consumers and campaigners use Fair Trade ethics in the construction of moral subjectivities, Barnett, Cloke et al., too, do not analyse the actual ethicality of ethical consumerism itself. The proposed study will respond to the ‘acknowledged need for considerably more research with ethical consumers’
(2005: 33)
For the construction of ethical subjects the inner logic of the articulated ethical claims as well of those tacitly implied by the ethical practice cannot be arbitrary. Due to the committing nature of social action (Winch 1958: 50) they are central in the formulation of expectations regarding future behaviour, the accountability of action as enforcing its reflexivity. What Garfinkel (1984: 4) calls the ‘rational accountability of practical actions as an ongoing practical accomplishment’ entails the expectation of accountability which in term operates as quasi-panoptical enforcement of consistency in observed practice. This underlines the importance of legitimacy too easily dismissed in the Foucauldian tradition (Fraser 1993). In order to understand the everyday ethicality of Fair Trade consumerism one has to go beyond the behavioural
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dimension and hermeneutically access actors’ accounts, recognise their versions of it as authentic forms of lay normativity (Sayer 2004).
It is essential to explore the moral sources of ethical reflection as they follow from actors own accounts. Moral theories are of interest insofar, and only insofar, as they successfully try to articulate profane concepts (Taylor 1989) to uncover what could be called a ‘moral grammar’ (Rawls 1999: 42) by really acknowledging the significance of lay moral judgements (Miller 1999: 42ff.). As a dissenting yet highly plausible ethical concept, Fair Trade must be understood to both emerge from and negate the culturally self-evident legitimacy of contemporary capitalist market societies in a dialectical way. As Pitkin (1972: 175ff.) argues, the notion of “justice” is rooted in practice not in a purely affirmative way but as pointing beyond the very practice it is a part of. Therefore I suggest looking for concepts of justice in commercial exchange and consumption as emerging from the practices of commerce and consumption themselves (cf. Warde 2005: 140). In referring to each other in a negative way, competing subcultures of consumption also refer to, or rather constitute, a shared moral background (Douglas 1997).
The study will centre on the ethical value of practices and products, acknowledging that due to both their cultural contextualisation and their intrinsic properties, moralisation cannot be arbitrary but builds on already established meanings. For example it will be crucial to acknowledge the moral significance of visual design, packaging and displayability (i.e. not only the fact of conspicuousness but also the phenomenological nature of it, the concrete ‘commodity aesthetics’ [Haug 1986]), the moral significance of the specific goods involved (e.g. recognising the identity relevance of food and drink, cf. Atkinson 1983, Beardsworth/Keil 1997, Lupton
1996)
Fair Trade consumption, as a practice of choosing, buying, using, and disposing (on significance of the latter cf. Hetherington 2004) that does explicitly refer back to the market, invokes an ethics of the market of one kind or another (or a multitude of
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ethicalities) but at the same time is an explicitly dissident practice offers an excellent opportunity to study everyday ethics of consumptions in a state of being transformed.
One possible account of the social morality of Fair Trade shall be outlined in the following, which is informed by a study of the literature, an interpretation of Fair
Trade promotional material (Varul 2006b), and theoretical considerations (Varul
2005a). Of course, it is very much possible that other ethical motives are of equal or more relevance, which will have to be tested out in the research itself.
Fair Trade is distinguished from other forms of ethical consumerism in that it is not only the pursuit of a specific moral or political aim by employing the purchasing power of the informed consumer but makes the market relations themselves subject of an ethical practice (Raynolds 2000, Bryant/Goodman 2004). An attempt is being made to lay open unequal relations of exchange and remedy them by a commitment to paying a fair price. This fair price, basically, is determined by setting as minimum or floor price the cost of production and reproduction, rather than the result of the mechanism of supply and demand (Nicholls/Opal 2004: 41). While ‘detailing the social conditions and costs of production’ (Raynolds 2000: 298) the Fair Trade movement is still struggling to finally determine what a ‘truly fair price’ should be
(Renard 1999: 497), but there seems to be a consensus that somehow ‘a price can be assigned to the product which takes some account of hours and artistic skill involved in the product, with a bit added for the cause of Third World development.’ (Brown
1993: 162). This application of a classical labour value theorem draws on consumers’ everyday experience of the market (Varul 2005a, 2005b), where our ‘belief in a just world’ (Lerner 1980) tells us that we get – on average – what we deserve in terms of labour input. Fridell (2003: 6) points out that it is an inarticualate assumption of Fair
Trade that commercial relations within what is viewed as an overall privileged North are, indeed, fair.
An essential aspect in this move into liberal market morality – the slogan being ‘trade not aid’ – is that this rather than charity with its paternalistic implications (Godelier
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1996, Heldke 1992) is supposed to be a way to preserve producers’ dignity
(Nicholls/Opal 2004: 30). This recognition aspect of market exchange is linked to the exchange not being motivated by charitable considerations, sympathy etc. but mainly by naked self-interest (Varul 2005b). One focus of the research will be to see how ethics of aid, charity, and ethics of recognition are negotiated by ethicalising consumers (also cf. Wright 2004). An analysis of the Traidfair catalogue (Varul
2006b) has shown that (as already indicated in the organisation’s name) this is a central field of tension in Fair Trade morality. Against this background the
‘mainstreaming’ of Fair Trade products with its stronger emphasis on product quality
(Levi/Linton 2003, Strong 1997) and use value for the consumer is not only to be seen as a concession, endangering the ethical value and offering mainstream businesses the opportunity to clean wash their images (Low/Davenport 2005: 495), but also a consequence of the claim to an equal market relationship itself.
One element of this commercialisation is the commodification not only of the product itself but also images of their producers where there again is a tension between an emphasis on solidarity, by alluding to the political romanticism of the
Third World solidarity movements of the 1980s, and a post-colonial imagery (cf.
McClintock 1995, Ramamurthy 2003) of authentic peasant producers utilising images of peasant producers to create a ‘warm glow’ (Leclair 2002: 954) for the morally and financially superior northern consumer – which, according to Wright (2004) threatens to cass the recognition gained in self-interested market exchange. This hints to another possible field of moralisation of consumption: a variant of the romantic ethic of consumerism (Campbell 1987) that may be more complex than the polemics suggests and therefore, too, is to be further pursued in the research.
Methodology
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Anglo-German comparison
Both the UK and Germany are major markets for Fair Trade goods (Low/Davenport
2005: 497). There are, however, significant differences in their approaches. In the
UK the Fair Trade market is much less of a niche market with the vast majority of
Fair Trade coffee being sold through major high-street retailing chains. While this segment has grown dramatically in Germany, most Fair Trade coffee is still sold through specialised retailers like Third World shops (Giovannucci/Koekoek 2003).
While perceivedly part of an anti-globalisation movement, Fair Trade can also be understood as – if alternatively – itself globalising, trying to establish an international consumer democracy (Waridel 2002: 21ff.) and referring to a nationally not specific market ethics. However, capitalist societies are instituted in quite different ways (as all economies are embedded [Granovetter 1985], moral economies, cf. Booth 1994), and the UK and Germany in particular have come to represent distinct models of capitalism (Lane 1995), entailing distinct modes of accounting for economic action
(e.g. Ahrens 1997), economic ethics (Crouch/Marquand 1993), ideas of distributive justice (Mau 2004), and historical approaches to the assessments of what constitutes the value of labour (Biernacki 1995). Studying Fair Trade consumerism against this background creates the opportunity to accentuate the researcher’s position as a stranger in the field, to assess in how far this pointedly global consumer ethics really is globally uniform and to comparatively study concrete market moralities, their inner social logic, rather than merely contrasting different opinions on matters ethical as survey-based studies tend to do (e.g. MORI 2000)
Eventual differences could link back to such diverse sources as a stronger desert and contract basis of the German welfare state (Offe 2000) as opposed to a more liberal and utilitarian welfare state in the UK (Esping-Andersen 1990) or, for instance, to the higher awareness of a colonial past in Britain while the memory of German colonialism has largely been suppressed.
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Promotional Material and Product Packaging
The analysis of these is indispensable for the assessment of the ethical meaning consumers can give the product. The guiding assumption is not that the consumer is manipulated by advertisement and seductive product and packaging design but that these offer the consumer a range of possible interpretations (Nava 1997). Material will include advertisement (like the recent campaign by Divine chocolate), information material like FairComment, the newsletter of Fairtrade UK, catalogues such as
Traidcraft’s Fair Trade Catalogue, and Fair Trade goods such as Cafédirect soluble coffee
– for all these there are German equivalents which will be analysed alongside them.
Consumer Interviews
In each country there will be 30 in-depth interviews with fair-trade consumers, defined as people who buy from the whole range of Fair Trade products currently available. These will be approached via Oxfam shops and their German equivalents
(Dritte-Welt-Läden)
Interviews will last approximately two hours each, will be semi-structured and aim at mostly narrative accounts. Questions will cover the following areas:
- Biographical integration: Accounts of when and how the decision to switch to Fair
Trade products was made and how this relates to relevant life events
- Social integration: Interviewees will be asked to recount and assess consumption behaviour of their family, friends, colleagues etc. Experience shows (Varul 2004) that such accounts are most likely to produce morally laden anecdotes.
- Practical integration: Interviewees will be asked to account for their shopping behaviour, where and what they buy, how they consume, display, dispose of the product.
- Interviewees will be confronted with Fair Trade products and asked to assess the ethical and aesthetical properties of these. Do they – and if so: how do they –express,
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reflect etc. the subjectivity of the consumer? In reverse they will also be confronted with specimens of, say, Nescafe or Maxwell House and asked what those represent for them (given that moral judgements tend to be much more concrete and specific in rejection, cf. Douglas 1997, Shklar 1990, Durkheim 1938: 65ff.)
- Interviewees will be asked how they see themselves in relation to the producers, what they know about their lives and how they establish the fairness of their mediated exchange relation.
All interviews will be tape-recorded and fully transcribed.
As the proposed study is concerned rather with the structure and inner logic of ethical and other motives than with their prevalence, it is more important to have fewer but therefore longer interviews than the other way round. A minimum size of around 30 in each country is nevertheless desirable in order to obtain a rudimentary mix of more average and exceptional cases. The exceptionality of cases will be determined by consulting the existing quantitative research and by a qualitative assessment of the interviews.
Analysis and interpretation will follow the methodology of structural hermeneutics as developed by Oevermann (1983, 1986, see also Flick 1998: 207ff., Gerhardt 1988).
This approach has been chosen as most apt to fulfil the requirement of ‘making sense’ by articulating the moral sources as postulated by Taylor (1989: 8f.). It aims at reconstructing the structure of meaning in given accounts, i.e. stating by which
‘generative rules’, which values and attitudes, tactics and strategies, a given text can be best explained. One proceeds by sequentialising the text bracketing out any knowledge of the following sequences, and generating as many hypotheses about these rules as possible which subsequently are verified or falsified by the following sequences. The method as such is open to the incorporation of other qualitative approaches like discourse analysis or semiotics in order to generate hypotheses. In a highly intensive process of interpretation structural hermeneutics tries to combine creative methods of producing innovative conclusions – especially by means of a
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logic of abduction (Peirce 1992) – with the principle of falsifiability (Popper 1959).
The target is to produce what Taylor calls ‘the best account’ in a way that comes as close as possible to a stage where the continuation of the text becomes predictable.
The principal investigator has successfully applied this methodology in a study on health consumerism as a moral practice (Varul 2004). It is particularly suited to unravel tacit moral subtexts and explicate unarticulated and unquestioned assumptions.
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