Fair trade in Spanish public opinion. Profiles and orientations

Abstract

In the last few years Sociology of Consumerism has proposed the emergence of a sense of «citizenship through consumption». This idea has been built up after the creation and development of alternatives such as fair trade (together with responsible consumption, recycled product trade or sustainable development) and the emergence of the so-called «new consumers», with values of a more reflexive nature such as solidarity, social responsibility, multiculturalism and ecology. Starting from the data of the study number 2419 carried out by the Centre of Sociological Investigations (CIS) in 2001, the research that we present has thought about, in the first place, to study consumers of trade fair products profile, a practically unpublished task for the Spanish social science in spite of the two decades of antiquity of this movement in our context. Secondly, we check empirically the habitually accepted «global orientation» of the consumers of fair trade products.