Overview

For several decades, Fair Trade Social Enterprises have been pioneers in the conception and implementation of a still relatively new concept -- Fair Trade (FT) -- creating a movement which has challenged mainstream trading practices and offered development opportunities for disadvantaged producer groups in the South. Starting from a niche market aimed at convinced customers, FT has expanded and entered mainstream retailing outlets, growing in visibility and market share, while simultaneously experiencing internal debates and divisions. While pioneer Fair Trade Social Enterprises in the early years were largely nonprofit organizations relying on voluntary work, they have become increasingly diversified in terms of organizational models and strategies. Indeed, they've adopted diverse types of legal forms and governance models, experimenting with various and often innovative combinations of the multiple dimensions of FT: the commercial activity (trading of FT products), the social mission (support to producers), and the explicit or implicit political message (often expressed through education and advocacy). This book builds a typology of Fair Trade Social Enterprises based on their organizational models and strategies. This typology is built thanks to an empirical study including 57 Fair Trade Social Enterprises across Europe. Author Benjamin Huybrechts further examines how the different types of these combine the economic, social, and political dimensions of FT, and how they manage the possible tensions between these dimensions. Finally, Fair Trade Organizations and Social Enterprise proposes a range of theoretical approaches allowing for various interpretations of the diversity among them as well as the links between the organizational models and the strategies that these models enable.

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9780415517454

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Benjamin Huybrechts is an Assistant Professor and holder of the SRIW-Sowecsom Chair in Social Enterprise Management at the Centre for Social Economy, HEC Management School, University of Liege (Belgium). He holds a PhD in Economics and Management (University of Liege) and has been on a post-doctoral research stay at Said Business School (University of Oxford). He has published articles on Fair Trade and Social Enterprise in the Journal of Business Ethics (co-editing a special issue on Fair Trade), the Annals of Public and Co-operative Economics and the Social Enterprise Journal.

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