University of Vaasa - Vaasan yliopisto

market with year-on-year sales growing 51% and topping the £140m mark”, and
retained this position ever since.
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France is similar to the UK in terms of level of economic development, has been
involved in the FLO from the beginning and has a market of similar size to that of
the UK. However, even Fairtrade activists in France concede that the Fairtrade
movement lags behind that of the UK: “bien que la France soit encore loin derrière
ses voisins européens comme l’Angleterre par exemple (…)” (Although France is
still far behind its European neighbours, like the UK, for example).
Contrasting cases of retailers from France and England were selected, using
newspaper articles as our data source. In the UK we selected Tesco (UK’s largest
grocery and general merchandising retail store) and Traidcraft (and more specifically
Traidcraft plc, a specialised retailer of Fairtrade products); for France: Carrefour
(Tesco’s equivalent) and Artisans du Monde (ADM – Traidcraft’s equivalent).
Retailers were selected both for their significant involvement in the Fairtrade market
in England and in France as well as for their opposed retailing philosophies: both
Tesco and Carrefour are considered mass market retailers while Traidcraft and ADM
are specialised retailers, only selling Fairtrade products. The rationale behind
choosing contrasting cases is the production of context rich conclusions. However,
while ADM is the closest equivalent to Traidcraft in France it is also worthwhile
pointing out that ADM’s and Traidcraft’s structure are fundamentally different.
Traidcraft is built around two entities: The Traidcraft charity (“Traidcraft
Exchange”) and the trading company (“Traidcraft plc”). Traidcraft Exchange ensures
its values are respected by Traidcraft plc. ADM, however, is an “association” staffed
mostly by volunteers. This difference needs to be noted as the goals of a trading
company and an association might differ significantly.
Method
Data Collection and Analysis
Newspaper articles were collected on-line, with the same method being followed for
both France and the UK. In the UK, 2006 was a pivotal year because Marks &
Spencer converted all its tea and coffee to Fairtrade, leading the way to an increasing
competition among retailers. The number of articles available for this year is almost
14 times what was available in 2000 and kept on rising until 2008, when they then
dropped again. The period 2005-2007 allows us to compare the period before and
after this event. In France, Carrefour introduced a variety of Fairtrade products,
including teas, coffees and fruit juices under their own label, “Carrefour Agir
Solidaire” (“Carrefour Solidarity Act”). In both countries, there was a spike in
interest in Fairtrade in the period under analysis, as measured by the number of
newspaper articles published on the topic (see Appendices 1a and 1b).
A search on Factiva was therefore conducted for this period for Tesco, Traidcraft,
Carrefour and ADM. Articles that were related to our topic of interest were then
selected. We eliminated the following articles: those less than a 100 words as they
were not context rich, in which there only was an accumulation of very short daily
news, in which only the name of the searched retailer was mentioned without any