The Practice of Fair-Trade Support

Abstract

Calls for individuals to change their consumption behaviours in order to tackle social problems like global poverty and climate change have become increasingly prevalent within contemporary society. The last chapter revealed how a diverse array of institutions, from the government to NGOs, the media, educational institutions and grassroots activist movements, are constructing citizens as co-responsible for global trade injustices and encouraging them to take action by altering the ways they consume and handle everyday goods. Although a great deal of these calls to action rest on the assumption that the key to changing consumption behaviour lies in the provision of the ‘right’ types of information that will enable the ‘citizen-consumer’ to choose wisely, we have already seen how infrastructures of provision and social conventions are shaping the ‘do-ability’ of fair-trade consumption acts. One example discussed was Fairtrade Towns where fair-trade options have been made the standard choice because of the actions of committed fair-trade supporters who together are promoting and celebrating the fair-trade movement; another was fair-trade promotional periods where fair-trade options are highlighted with the aid of creative point of sale displays and price reductions that are likely to destabilise consumers from their established routines and encourage them to reflect on the qualities of consumer goods. Indeed, social-scientific consumer research has for a long time demonstrated how consumption is a highly complex, dynamic and multi-relational social phenomenon, which cannot be understood as a matter of purely individual choice (Halkier, 2010; Miller, 1998; Sassatelli, 2006; Shove, 2003; Warde, 2005). These studies have challenged the neoclassical idea of the consumer as a powerful, rational, utility-maximising actor, and have instead highlighted the range of economic, cultural and social processes that can influence everyday consumer behaviour. This chapter builds upon this tradition of social science research by applying tools from a practice-theoretical perspective (Halkier, 2010; Warde, 2005) to the empirical analysis of the experiences of fair-trade supporters living within a British Fairtrade Town.