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This paper documents the case of La Verde, a producer cooperative in Andalusia, Southern Spain, whose members grow and sell organic fruit and vegetables. Fieldwork data reveal a range of assessments and practices with respect to just price. Historical experiences of working as day laborers, with little access to cash or other resources informs the members’ radical political views on money, prices, and markets. These ideas modulate exchanges at the local level, and in their political networks. However, working their own land and selling a prized product allows them to generate good market returns from private shopkeepers in cities. The paper proposes that for a price to be considered just, criteria for commensuration, or equivalence between a price and the perceived value of an object must adhere, but adjudications about this vary according to the relationship between exchangers. Rather than an objective just price, the paper considers assessments and judgments about the relation between prices and justice to be contextually defined, contested, and negotiated.

Ethical consumption exemplifies thinking locally and acting globally, and the political economy in which it exists makes its ethics problematic. This chapter uses ecotourism to illustrate two aspects of thinking locally in ethical consumption. One is the local institutions and practices that this form of consumption reflects, embodied in the Western commercial capitalism that provides what Westerners consume ethically. Ethical consumption extends the reach of that local capital and its logic. The second is the local understandings and values it reflects, embodied in the desires of ethical consumers and met by commodity producers and the institutions that influence them. Ethical consumption does not, however, only impose local institutions and values globally; but it also shapes local consumers, by portraying individual market choice as an appropriate vehicle for bringing about an ethical world, thereby diverting attention from other sorts of ethical action.

This chapter examines the commercial handicrafts market from Bali, Indonesia to the United States. Using ethnographic examples gathered from research among handicrafts producers, fair trade activists and handicrafts distributors I explore the influence of intermediaries (buyers, distributors, designers) in determining the cultural and economic value of ethnic handicrafts sold in the international marketplace. Over the past two decades, the village of Tegallalang has diversified its crafts industry to specialize in the mass-production of non-Balinese “ethnic art” (e.g., Native American dreamcatchers, Moroccan furniture, and African masks). While Balinese view the global handicrafts market as an opportunity to pursue cosmopolitan, modern, and middle-class identities, this chapter discusses how non-Balinese intermediaries regularly engage in forms of cultural capital that assert their dominance over handicrafts producers in the global South. The work of a Balinese fair trade organization is also examined in this chapter, and their efforts to redirect consumer attention away from the ethnocentric categories of authenticity and tradition and instead focus on workers’ rights and fair compensation.

The 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza factory building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, was the most deadly disaster in garment manufacturing history, with at least 1,134 people killed and hundreds injured. In 2015, injured workers and the families of those killed received compensation from global apparel brands through a US$30 million voluntary initiative known as the Rana Plaza Arrangement. Overseen by the International Labour Organization (ILO), the Rana Plaza Arrangement awarded payments to survivors using a pricing formula developed by a diverse team of ‘stakeholders’ that included labour groups, multinational apparel companies, representatives of the Bangladesh government and local employers, and ILO actuaries. This paper draws from anthropological scholarship on the ‘just price’ to explore how a formula for pricing death and injury became both the means and form of a fragile political settlement in the wake of a shocking and widely publicised industrial disaster. By unpacking the complicated ‘ethics of a formula’ (Ballestero, 2015), I demonstrate how the project of creating a just price involves not two sets of values (ethical and financial) but rather multiple, competing values. This paper argues for recognition of the persistence and power of these competing values, showing how they variously strengthen and undermine the claim that justice was served by the Rana Plaza Arrangement. This analysis reveals the deficiencies of counterposing ‘morality’ and ‘economy’ in the study of price by reflecting upon all elements of price as situated within political economy and history.

Building on an ethnographic study of ethical consumption discourses and practices among activists and entrepreneurs in Hungary this chapter looks at how actors reflect critically on the current state of the Hungarian society by contrasting it to an image of Western Europe as a locus of consumer consciousness, civic activism, and sustainable economic practices. Such an opposition allows for the expression of various hopes, desires, and frustrations about the seemingly never ending process of post-socialist transition and at once provide a chance to mediate the contradictions inherent in contemporary practices of ethical consumption. While ethical consumption might offer itself as a global phenomenon, it is always practiced in local contexts with their particular struggles, histories, and trajectories. This chapter tries to contribute to the literature on ethical consumption by tracing the various meanings and values that are being attached to it in a “newly born consumer society.”

Concern about the agro-industrial food system has generated movements, which reconnect producers and consumers, either through alternative distribution networks or through providing histories of each quality foodstuff. Although these movements share a romantic discourse, they have a range of objectives and a more complex relationship to the mainstream than first appears. The article analyses particularly the concept of authenticity, first in representations of food, then more widely as a value which links production and consumption. The material illustrates a wider analysis (in Graeber, Harvey) of the co-existence of monetary and non-monetary value in an economy dominated by the commodity form, and following from this sets out the different judgements, which have been made about the transformative political potential of these movements.

This chapter analyses the private financial sector's policy responses, lending practices and various forms of engagement with non-governmental organisations (NGOs), communities and institutional clients involved in controversial commodity industries. The chapter demonstrates that secrecy plays a constitutive role in this engagement. For investment banks, client-confidentiality is the ultimate limit to transparency. At the same time, NGOs campaign to make public and reveal links between investment banks and clients in commodity industries. The chapter also explores techniques within the financial sector for the assessment of social and environmental risk. The chapter argues that these techniques combine both practices of uncertainty and practices of risk. For civil society organisations, NGOs and local communities, these techniques remain problematic, and various campaigns question both the robustness of the financial sector's social risk screening methods as well as the sustainability of the investments themselves.

In recent years, with the advent of the phenomenon known as corporate social responsibility (CSR), transnational corporations have moved away from traditional modes of philanthropic largesse, to a focus on ‘community engagement’, partnership, empowerment and ‘social investment’. This chapter draws on ethnographic research, tracing the practise of CSR in a transnational mining company, from its corporate headquarters in London, to its mining operations on South Africa's platinum belt. It explores how the practices of corporate–community partnership – and the goal of ‘self-sustainability’ that the company propounds – project the company as a vehicle of empowerment as it strives to convert ‘beneficiaries’ to the values and virtues of the market with an injunction to ‘help yourself’ to a piece of ‘the market’ and share the opportunities that it offers. However, while the promise of CSR holds out this vision of mutual independence and self-sustainability, I argue that the practise of CSR reinscribes older relations of patronage and clientelism which recreate the coercive bonds of ‘the gift’, inspiring deference and dependence, on the part of the recipient, rather than autonomy and empowerment.