Encountering the fairtrade farmer: solidarity, stereotypes and the self-control ethos

Recent research in social psychology has identified a specific social representation, the ‘self-control ethos’, which is constituted through neo-liberal virtues of self-management, reliance and discipline. This functions to mark an ‘ingroup’ through its allegiance to core values and behaviours, from an ‘outgroup’, forged through a perceived ‘lack’ or rejection of those values and further, serves as a basis for the denigration of outgroups. However, recent developments in mainstream social psychological theories of stereotype content have developed a model of prejudicial intergroup relations as ambivalent, involving both negative and positive content. In this paper we maintain an emphasis on the self-control ethos but depart from an emphasis upon denigration to focus on a particular outgroup – the fairtrade farmer/producer. We argue that developments in social representations theory and mainstream social psychology can both contribute to a deeper understanding of this particular example of a cultural encounter apparently engendering social solidarity. Recent social psychological models of stereotype content contribute an important emphasis upon ambivalence based on perceived structural relationships in the representations of outgroups. However the self-control ethos allows an understanding of the visual, symbolic and affective work involved in making solidarity with a ‘distant’ outgroup a possibility. Finally we claim that although representations of fairtrade farmers/producers ostensibly become the vehicle for a progressive cultural encounter, the forms of solidarity it encourages require critical scrutiny.