Fanny Salignac

Reconciling Ethical and Profit-Seeking Behaviour? A Discourse Analysis of the Fair Trade Movement.

PhD Supervisors: Catherine Welch and Richard Seymour

Fairtrade can be understood in terms of its primary aim: reducing the gap between rich and poor countries via the creation of an alternative market that provides a fairer price and trading conditions for third world producers.

In both the academic and popular press, the Fairtrade phenomenon has been dominated by the debate between supporters of Fairtrade and critics who position themselves as supporters of free trade. Fanny proposes to go beyond this debate between free and fair trade by examining Fairtrade as a socially constructed discourse. In particular, she will focus on how retailers that participate in the Fairtrade movement construct their behaviour as fair using comparative case studies.

Fannys research aims at underlying the importance of the discursive context within which new institutions are built, enabling meaningful conclusions to be drawn as to how fair and just is the Institution Fairtrade. Her research proposes to enrich our understanding of firm behaviour and inter-firm linkages in international business, which until now has been dominated by traditional concepts of transactional and economic frameworks.