Buying into Fair Trade: Culture, Morality, and Consumption

Acknowledgments

>> vii Acknowledgments All authors are asked why they chose to write about their selected topic. I tell my colleagues that I chose to write about fair trade because I wanted a case study to explore culture, morality, and markets. This answer seems to satisfy them, but it is really a bit of a lie. I chose to study the fair-trade movement because of a series of meaningful moments throughout my life. When I was young, my mom worked for Bell Atlantic and had to both sell products to customers and listen to their many complaints. I remember her telling me some of the strategies she had to use to defuse their anger. My dad often worked at home selling supplies for a fire safety company. I remember listening to him tell jokes and talk politely in a loud voice over the phone. I also remember him hanging up, cursing, and screaming after many of these same calls. I distinctly remember my excitement playing a stock market game in the sixth grade where we were taught to make “educated gambles” about which stocks would become profitable. (The team that won took the riskiest strategy by putting all its money on one stock.) In college, I remember the C that I “earned” in my undergraduate microeconomics course. Although I had a great professor, I could not accept all the assumptions in economics about rational consumer behavior . I ended the course by writing a mediocre paper on Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and then switched my major to sociology. After college, I accepted a job as a financial planner. I quit after my first day, in part because I didn’t want to wear a suit and because my boss said that I would have to change my haircut in order to attract more customers. In all these instances, shared meanings (or culture) profoundly shaped economic decisions. My mom was trained to talk in a soothing voice to her irate customers, my dad hid his backstage personality from his customers while trying to make a sale, the shared understandings about mergers helped a sixth-grade team win the stock market game viii > ix At the University of Pennsylvania, I was fortunate to have found a network of friends and scholars who read many early drafts of this book: Silke Roth, Adair Crosley, Jamie Fader, Stefan Kluseman, Jacob Avery, Chuck Bosk, and Simone Polillo. I was incredibly lucky to share similar research interests with Frederick Wherry. Fred’s constant prodding to “just write it,” along with his insights into economic sociology, greatly aided this book. The sociology department provided summer funding through the Gertrude and Otto Pollack Summer Research Fellowship , which allowed me to travel to Nicaragua. Although I feel as if I have been working on this project for a lifetime, this book would still be “in progress” if not for the ethnographic training, financial support, and gracious colleagues that I found at the University of Pennsylvania. Many others spent time reading chapters of this book. Bryant Simon spent countless hours reviewing the manuscript at both early and late stages of development. Bryant was always able to see through my murky ideas and point me in a clear direction. Debbie Becher, Patricia Tevington , and Susan Clampet-Lundquist also read drafts of these chapters and provided very helpful feedback. Maria Kefalas helped me rethink and rewrite much of chapters 1 and 3. I found moral support and mostly maintained my sanity through working alongside great friends such as Meredith Rosner, Cathy Van de Ruit, Lijun Yang, Carolanne Saunders, Allesandro Pratesi, Evelyn Patterson, Faye Glass, Phil Anglewitz, and Rachelle Brunnn. Although I worked on this book at the University of Pennsylvania, the seeds for many of the ideas in it were planted at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. I benefited greatly from the ideas of colleagues and mentors such as Joya Misra, Rick Fantasia, Sarah Babb, Agustin Lao-Montes, Jonathan Woodring, Suzanne Model, and Brian Kapitulik. Joshua Carreiro read many of the chapters in this book and provided much-needed critical insight. Many others gave their time and effort to this book. Cindy Blohm and Amy Van Stauss read numerous drafts and greatly aided in the copyediting of the manuscript. My sister, Pamela Lowe, took most of the pictures that appear in the book. Laura Wall Starke generously sent me her transcriptions of Paul Rice’s talk at a fair-trade conference in Philadelphia . My parents spent many...