Fair Trade, Veblen and The Social Constructivist Underpinnings of International Political Economy

In recent years, the fair trade movement has grown into an impressive global effort to reform socio-economic interactions between producers and consumers of various com-modities. Interestingly, the rational actor based mainstream of International Political Economy (IPE) has had little to say about this new phenomenon. The fair trade concept aims at the transformation of consumer behavior by raising awareness for moral and ethical implications of consumer choices. The paper argues that fair trade cannot be well explained by the mainstream’s rationalist ontology, which assumes that human beings constantly try to maximize their personal welfare. Instead the proposed paper argues that fair trade opens up a venue to explore the social constructivist underpinnings of global capitalist market relations. By combining Veblen’s evolutionary institutional per-spective on capitalism with recent social constructivist contributions, the paper investi-gates fair trade’s efforts to reconstruct otherwise impersonal market relations as funda-mentally social and politically charged relations based on qualitatively different socio-economic bonds between consumers and producers