Schools in the UK teach pupils about Fairtrade as part of Religious Education, Personal and Social Education, Citizenship, Geography and so on. There are also Fairtrade Schools, where the whole school, including staff and parents, is committed to promoting the brand. It is argued here that promoting this commercial brand to schoolchildren and using the schoolchildren to press adults to buy a product amounts to indoctrination using criteria of intent, methods of teaching and the subject matter. This conflicts with educational (...) goals. It is also shown to be akin to the criminal offence of Unfair Trading: the methods used in teaching used would be unacceptable in normal commercial marketing. A completely separate criticism, based on a wide range of research evidence, is that the schools mislead by giving false information and by suppression of relevant information, again akin to the criminal offence of Unfair Trading. The question of who has the responsibility for preventing such actions is considered. (shrink)

The Fairtrade movement is a group of businesses claiming to trade ethically. The claims are evaluated, under a range of criteria derived from the Utilitarian ethic. Firstly, if aid or charity money is diverted from the very poorest people to the quite poor, or the rich, there is an increase in death and destitution. It is shown that little of the extra paid by consumers for Fairtrade reaches farmers, sometimes none. It cannot be shown that it has a positive impact (...) on Fairtrade farmers in general, but evidence suggesting it harms others is presented. Many of the weaknesses are due to an attempt to impose political views on farmers and others. Secondly, the unfair trading criteria require that sellers do not lie about their product, nor withhold information that might alter the decisions of a substantial proportion of buyers. It is argued that the system only can exist because of the failure of the Fairtrade industry to give the facts on what happens to the money and what it can be proved it achieves. This unfair trading compromises the reputation of charities in general. Much of the trading may constitute the criminal offence of Unfair Trading in the EU. (shrink)

The most recent restatements of stakeholder theory formulate that approach in terms of the distribution of value: “A stakeholder approach to business is about creating as much value as possible for stakeholders, without resorting to tradeoffs” (Freeman et al. 2010: 28). This formulation marks a shift from earlier work, which included a procedural dimension—a requirement that stakeholders participate in organization decision making. The present paper pushes back against this shift: it argues that orienting the stakeholder approach around the participation requirement (...) provides for a different moral logic, one not available to (now) conventional stakeholder theorizing (without that requirement), and one that may be more compelling to many. This argument requires critical re-examination of the moral arguments offered in the most recent restatements of the stakeholder approach. (shrink)

While most studies on stakeholder engagement focus on high-power stakeholders (typically, employees), limited attention has been devoted to the engagement of low-power stakeholders. These have been defined as vulnerable stakeholders for their low capacity to influence corporations. Our research is framed around the engagement of low-power stakeholders in the coffee industry who are, paradoxically, critical resource providers for the major roasters. Through the case study of Lavazza—the leading Italian roaster—we investigate empowerment actions addressed to smallholder farmers located in Brazil, India, (...) East Africa, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. We contribute to the theoretical discussion around engagement and empowerment by developing a framework linking together areas of empowerment (defined in the literature) and specific empowerment actions (emerging from our interviews). Our insights shed light on how organizations can design empowerment strategies leading to more effective stakeholder engagement and how empowerment actions can contribute to turn low-power stakeholders into active business partners. We demonstrate that moving from a traditional competitive view of corporate–stakeholder relationships to a stakeholder theory view based on a logic of cooperative partnerships reinforces the idea that stakeholder engagement and empowerment are both entangled with the value creation process. (shrink)

Interest in ethical aspects associated to product acquisition and consumption is a growing trend among consumers. In this context, the concept of “product with ethical attributes” has arisen to refer to products with explicit social and environmental characteristics. However, one of the factors that most hinders the purchasing of these products is certainly price. Given the difficulty of reducing price, the question that arises is the extent to which other product attributes can attenuate the negative impact of price on perceived (...) value. We assume that the special benefits associated to this type of products are, at a different level, attenuators of the relationship between price and perceived value. Focusing on Fair Trade organic coffee, hypotheses are tested regarding survey data from 407 customers. They were interviewed in an actual purchasing scenario. The models are tested using conventional Structural Equation Models and the Latent Moderated Structural Equation method. The results obtained shed some light on a highly generalised belief that the marketing of these products can only be improved by reducing their price. However, although a price reduction could be desirable, albeit complicated in this product category, its effects could be reduced by acting on other variables such as the ethical aspects, quality and healthiness of this product category. (shrink)