Mainstreaming and Its Discontents: Fair Trade, Socially Responsible Investing, and Industry Trajectories

• In Event: 307 - Regular Session. Economic Sociology: Markets, Movements, Metrics of Evaluation

Abstract

Over time, according to popular and academic accounts, alternative trade initiatives (such as fair trade, organics, forest certification, and socially responsible investing (SRI)) almost invariably lose their oppositional stance and go mainstream. That is, they lose their alternative, usually peripheral, and often contrarian character. In this paper, I argue that this is not always the case and that the path to going mainstream is not always an unproblematic one. I observe that while scholars have documented various aspects of specific alternative trade initiatives, little comparative work has been done to theorize their different trajectories. To advance the scholarship, I compare two alternative trade industries, fair trade and SRI, in order to provide an account of why going mainstream has been so hotly contested in the fair trade industry but not the SRI industry. The argument hinges on the observation that fair traders interact with and are connected to the communities impacted by their business decisions (i.e., mostly producers from the Global South) in a way that SRI professionals are not. The affective commitments that these interactions engender have proven instrumental in keeping a core group of fair traders committed to the movement’s original ideals. In the SRI industry, where similar commitments did not develop in the same way, mainstreaming has been largely uncontested.

Author

• Curtis D. Child, Brigham Young University