The formation, governance and business models of Fair Trade: managing north-south relationships in commodity markets

Project details

Twin Trading anchored a business group including a number of well-known Fairtrade certified firms - Cafedirect, Divine Chocolate, Liberation Nuts, and Agrifair, as well as collaborating with the UK Government Department of International Development. The University of York has secured the archive of the late Robin Murray which is now available in the Borthwick Institute of Archives.

The PhD student will conduct historical archival research to contribute to the Fairtrade literature by investigating the management of long-term relationships between the different firms within the business group as well as with the different stakeholders. This will enable an exploration of the north-south relationships and how the companies initiated, developed, maintained and coordinated them over time.

There is potential to contribute by revealing the governance trade-offs inherent in the Fairtrade model, for instance by explicating the strategies used to compete with non-Fairtrade producers while maintaining the ethical integrity of the organisation. The student will have the opportunity to contribute a new and historically situated repositioning of the hybridity narrative, an important contribution to the social enterprise literature and ultimately to institutional theory.

The research will also contribute to the business history literature, by deepening understanding of an important contemporary business sector–itself a novelty in that field. There is also a related potential to explicate social value oriented entrepreneurial processes.

The student may also study the leadership style of Robin Murray and others as they built the businesses to demonstrate the approaches necessary to build commercial organisations with a social justice agenda. This allows for the potential to contribute to the business ethics literature by considering the strategies required to maintain and defend an ethical position in a dynamic business environment.

The supervisory team

Professor Bob Doherty is a leading Fairtrade scholar with publications on how Fair Trade works and their business models in leading journals. His 2021 REF Impact Case Study was titled, ‘Improving the Management of Fair Trade Social Enterprises’. His 2013 paper “Where now for fair trade?” in the journal Business History is one of the most cited business history articles.

Dr Kevin Tennent is a business and management historian with extensive experience of archival research. He has published relevant papers on it in Management Learning and the International Journal of Project Management as well as in the Edward Elgar Handbook of Historical Methods for Management. He also published a paper on social enterprise research in Public Management Review and has developed collaborative relationships in teaching and research with the Borthwick Institute over a number of years.

Professor Simon Mollan is a business and management historian with extensive experience of historical research in relation to business and economic development in the global south. He has published relevant papers in leading business history journals, including Business History, Enterprise and Society, Management and Organization History and Essays in Economic and Business History, where he has also served as editor-in-chief.