Ethical Markets and Economic Development

This chapter traces how the modern fair-trade movement helps to produce a neoliberalised version of social order. But its understanding of ‘neoliberal’ governance differs from many others’. The authors do not describe the imposition of a single order of value, e.g. ‘market value’ that cannibalises all other values. Rather, they describe it as an approach to governance that purposefully evades a shared consensus to address questions of value via the subjective evaluative techniques imaginatively associated with the sovereign consumer. As such, the social groups that coalesce around a fair-trade label do not take the form of ‘publics’ associated with a democratic polity. Nor do they take the form of unions among producers, labourers, and consumers that once served as the normative foundation of previous political imaginaries. Instead, they are contingent and thin social formations subject to ongoing competition and change that can forge loose and temporary alliances with other collectives—specifically corporations and their associated supply chains.

Corporate governance · Economics · Fair trade · Law and economics · Management · Normative · Order (exchange) · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Polity · Sovereignty · Subject (documents) · Value (mathematics) · Global trade, sustainability, and social impact · Law