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Precarious production: Globalisation and artisan labour in the Third World
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In this paper, the authors provide an overview of recent literature and studies of Third World artisans in the context of economic globalisation and demonstrate that globalisation has intensified the precarious existence of artisan communities through increasing global competition, the mass production of craft goods, and shifting trends in fashion, cultural taste and aesthetics.Abstract:
This article provides an overview of recent literature and studies of Third World artisans in the context of economic globalisation. Drawing upon recently published research conducted in various countries in Central America, Asia and Africa, it demonstrates that globalisation has intensified the precarious existence of artisan communities through increasing global competition, the mass production of craft goods, and shifting trends in fashion, cultural taste and aesthetics. Both government and non-government efforts at supporting artisans are criticised for providing limited and ineffectual programmes and policies. Moreover, recent consumer trends like 'fair-trade' shopping are likewise only piecemeal and limited in terms of the long-term support they can give to struggling artisan communities. When artisans survive, they do so mainly on the periphery of both global and local capitalist economies; this is a situation that has rarely changed over the decades. In various ways, and in specific regional conte...read more
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Has the medium (roast) become the message
Will Low,Eileen Davenport +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine the ethics of marketing both fair trade products and the movement's message of change, as fair trade shifts from a distribution system that relied on alternative distribution channels to one that is increasingly reliant on the commercial mainstream.
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Postcards from the edge: maintaining the ‘alternative’ character of fair trade
Will Low,Eileen Davenport +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that the pressures for fair trade to substantially increase market access for marginalized producers in the global South and subsequently move fair trade out of niche into mainstream markets is reshaping the boundaries of the movement, and suggest that going mainstream carries with it the danger of appropriation of more convenient elements of fair trade by the commercial sector and loss of the more radical edges.
Journal ArticleDOI
Mainstreaming fair trade: adoption, assimilation, appropriation
Will Low,Eileen Davenport +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that the mainstreaming of Fair Trade into commercial distribution channels has not led to its principles being embedded in conventional trade, and suggest ways in which elements of the movement have maintained their original counter-hegemonic character, taking Fair Trade beyond the current discourse of individuals "shopping for a better world" and into realms of collective decision making about consumption, through the "alternative high street".
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The Impact of Fair Trade on Social and Economic Development: A Review of the Literature
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore the outcomes of Fair Trade for producers, artisans and their organisations, including market relations, institutional development, economic development and reductions in poverty, social development, gender equity and sustainable development.
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CONSUMING THE CAMPESINO: Fair trade marketing between recognition and romantic commodification
TL;DR: The authors reconstructs the everyday moral plausibility of fair trade consumerism by linking it back to an analysis of the moral grammar of capitalist consumer culture and understanding it as both an actualization and development of this moral grammar.
References
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Artisans and cooperatives : developing alternative trade for the global economy
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a collection of case studies from the Americas and Asia that address the interplay among subsistence activities, craft production, and the global market, and show that people can and do employ innovative opportunities to develop their talents, and in the process strengthen their ethnic identities.
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Commodity Production and Ethnic Culture: Otavalo, Northern Ecuador*
TL;DR: In this article, the authors analyze economic and cultural changes in the textile artisan communities of Otavalo, a Quichua-speak-speaking region of Ecuador, and argue that the Indian culture is essentially a peasant culture, with its production of use rather than exchange values, institutions of reciprocity, and the principles of authority rooted in ceremonial spending.
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Flexible production, households, and fieldwork: multisited Zapotec weavers in the era of late capitalism.
TL;DR: In this paper, a set of ethnographic practices more appropriate to the increasingly nonlocalized nature of the lives of those whom anthropologists study that at the same time captured and helped to configure the limits of their ill-defined social geographies.