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The Fair Trade consumer as a citizen-consumer: civic virtue or alternative hedonism?
Abstract
This paper aims to explore Fair Trade consumer orientations by focusing on the ‘citizen-consumer’ dimension. Those who buy Fair Trade products are often regarded as consumers who are motivated by social responsibility and an altruistic spirit. However, some studies show that such consumers are not necessarily altruistic or political, but rather hedonistic and individualistic. In order to examine what kinds of people purchase Fair Trade products, we analyse the Fair Trade consumer's attitude using social survey data from Japan. The result of this analysis demonstrates that the variables concerning ‘alternative hedonism’ (creativity, quality of products, post-materialism) have positive effects on response in purchasing Fair Trade products. On the other hand, the variables concerning ‘civic virtue’ (dedication to the public interest, altruism, social support) have no significant effect on it. This result shows that Fair Trade consumers do not always internalise the movement's principles, but pursue their individual lifestyle in different ways. In other words, consumers' ‘little narratives’ are not an obstacle to the realisation of ‘grand narratives’, but rather a condition of the latter.
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Humphery explains that ‘Soper points to the way in which enjoyment of affluent consumption has become compromised by its unpleasant byproducts (noise, pollution, stress, health risk, excessive waste and esthetic impact on the environment) and has thus promoted revisions in thinking about the good life’ (Humphery, 2011, p. 46).
These items were not constructed by factor analysis but were presumed as the features of civic virtue and alternative hedonism in relation to the formulations in prior researches. Therefore, it should be noted that the two categories cannot be called latent variables or factors in a strict sense, but are merely theoretical constructs called ‘ideal types’ in sociology.
Logistic regression is the statistical technique used to predict the relationship between independent variables and the dependent variable where the dependent variable is binary. In this table, Exp(B) expresses odds ratios. Odds ratios can be easier to interpret than the coefficient so these values are used as indicators of the effects of variables.
As mentioned above, this analysis was aimed at examining the effects of the six independent variables. Organising the independent variables into two categories depends on each theoretical framework of consumer citizen theory and citizen-consumer theory.
The concepts of ‘grand narrative’ and ‘little narrative’ derive from the postmodern theory of French philosopher Lyotard (1979). Postmodern theorists, including Lyotard himself, used these two concepts as polar opposites. However, this paper regards these two concepts as alternative aspects of the same thing; in other words, people play grand narratives as their own little narratives in their subjective worlds. This means that Fair Trade consumption is an altruistic consequence based on personal motivation. This perspective implies that social justice and freedom of the individual can stand at the same time in Fair Trade and serves as the turning point for understanding the dynamics of Fair Trade.
This is one form of the relationship between producers and consumers commonly described as win-win. In essence, all trade is based on such a symbiotic mechanism. As long as Fair Trade is not aid but trade, producers receiving fair compensation do not constitute a zero-sum situation in relation to consumers enjoying their own lifestyle. Rather, they are conditional on each other. In other words, the gap between the movement's ideas and consumers' motivations is not a contradiction of or obstacle to Fair Trade, but a condition for it (Hatayama, 2016).
Since this paper has focused on analysing consumers' actual situations, the normative problem surrounding the citizen-consumer needs to be examined in further detail in a separate paper.