The past 70 years has seen the rise of a new type of actor that falls outside traditional conceptions of regulation and value. Fair trade organizations regulate production and distribution processes globally and provide the infrastructure for a market in which value lies in a product’s utility and conditions of production and terms of exchange. Fair trade emerged to address persistent economic, social, and environmental inequalities between global North and South. But what explains the rise of the fair trade market over this time period? Using time series regression analysis, I evaluate the claims of several theoretical traditions and use world society theory to inform economic sociology on understanding how social forces shape global markets. I find that only after a shift in world cultural norms do processes of unequal exchange become problematized so that moves toward liberalization in international trade are countered by movements toward regulation.
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