Lill M. Vramo: ‘Mind the Gap’: Localising Global Trade of Fair Trade Products through The Social Life of Things
National Institute for Consumer Research (SIFO)
Through an empirical study of a trading relationship between a Bangladeshi company and a Norwegian company, I explore ethical challenges related to a long - distance trade relationship. By ‘long - distance’, I mean spatial, cultural and socioeconomic distances. The distance is part of a general rupture between production and consumption that is found in world economy today. A distance that leads to abstract relations between producers and consumers, also fuelled by the processes of abstraction that characterize the ways in which suppliers and consumers are made apparent to each other.
My approach, inspired by Arjun Appadurai and Igor Kopytoff’s biographic approach, traces things made of thread and woven material from their design in Norway via production in Bangladesh, and finally to their sale as special products in a Norwegian Fair Trade Shop. The trade aims at helping people in the South through fair trade. As an ideal type, fair trade is both an alternative and a corrective to free trade, and carries connotations of being better and more ethical than other trade. As a lengthening of the idea of fair trade, ideas of political consumption and the ethical consumer exist. I discuss how the different distances relate to the trade’s aim of helping people in the South and the idea of political consumption. The different distances in the value-chain make it impossible for consumers to be ‘fully informed’, a fact that makes trade with ethical aims an arena where trust in the company is essential.
The ‘information deficit’ linked to the cultural and social distances between Bangladeshi producers and Norwegian consumers is, as I show, distances and ruptures that make fair trade shopping a potentially more meaningful way of shopping. Fair trade shopping can transcend individual dilemmas related to shopping. I argue that fair trade is experienced and practised as a ‘normative add-on’ to shopping, as well as a ‘normative add–on’ for actors involved in such trade in the Norwegian context.
The paper explores the different distances in relation to cultural production of meaning and value and show how the textile products, the work process and ideas of trade are culturally and locally embedded both in their production and in their consumption context. My paper challenges the ideas that trade and work has a universal meaning, and show how good and ethical intentions can have effects that are not experienced as unambiguously ethical in another cultural context.