Is Fair Trade a fair tool for implementing CSR in different contexts?

The paper is based on a study of how a Swedish Fair Trade textile company interplays with other organizations such as business customers, Fair Trade suppliers in India and NGOs and how they act for changing the situation in India regarding to social and environmental issues. The paper discusses how the idea of Fair Trade is interpreted by the actors and how they translate Fair Trade into practical actions in relation to the contexts of Sweden and India. The study shows that the diffusion and translation process of Fair Trade and sustainability issues in India is dependent on actions driven by the actors’ contextualized values and norms. The Swedish actors focus on Western management models such as standards and certifications since they see control and legitimacy as important. The Indian Fair Trade supplier adapts to the standards and certifications and utilizes them for making business outside India. This adaption could also been seen as postcolonial coercive forces that maintain asymmetrical power relations when Swedish and European customers also make their own controls of the suppliers compliance to the CSR standards. A Fair Trade paradox could be seen as the Swedish Fair Trade companies in the Indian context are forced to make business in the profit maximizing logic, a logic that they as change agents for Fair Trade try to change due to its utilization of workers.Organisering av Samhällsentreprenörskap i Sverig

Societal Entrepreneurship contextualized : The dark and bright sides of Fair Trade

The paper is based on a study of how the Swedish Fair Trade textile company Oria interplays with other organizations such as business customers, Fair Trade suppliers in India, and NGOs, and how they act as societal entrepreneurs to change the situation in India as regards social and environmental issues. The aim is to understand how different organizations and companies acting in different contexts like Sweden and India work to change the business society according to the idea of Fair Trade. Both dark and bright sides emerge from the results of the actors’ behaviour. The study shows that the societal entrepreneurship processes of Fair Trade in Sweden and India are dependent on actions driven by the actors’ contextualized values and norms. The Swedish actors focus on Western management models such as standards and certifications, since they regard control and legitimacy as important. The Indian Fair Trade supplier adapts to the standards and certifications, but the dark side of his adaption could be explained as postcolonial coercive forces. A brighter side is the supplier’s ability to understand and combine the possibilities in both the European and Indian contexts. A challenging perspective on societal entrepreneurship is expressed in the Fair Trade paradox and is shown by the identity dilemmas the CEO of the Fair Trade company Oria struggles with in her daily practice of entrepreneurship.Organisering av samhällsentreprenörskap i Sverig

The Challenge of being a fair trade soci(et)al entrepreneur

This paper is based on a study of how the CEO of a Fair Trade textile company in Sweden handles and develops her Fair Trade business and which challenges and dilemmas she meets in her interplay with suppliers, customers, and NGOs in different contexts such as Sweden and India. The combination of having a vision of changing poor working conditions in India and also make a living on her business raises some dilemmas for the soci(et)al entrepreneur. Some dilemmas regard her own life situation, business matters and others her possibility to make change for Indian workers. The dilemmas show that also in relation to a non-profit context and the business/market context the actors in Sweden and India and their actions are dependent on which values and norms they are familiar with and driven by. This results in a Fair Trade paradox and the Swedish soci(et)al entrepreneur is in the Indian context  forced to make business in the profit maximizing logic, a logic that she tries to change with the help of the Fair Trade idea.Organisering av samhällsentreprenörskap i Sverig

The Discursive Construction of Entrepreneurial Identities : Solving Dilemmas and Moving Forward as Identity Practices

Becoming an entrepreneur seems to be an endless topic in entrepreneurship research. In other words the question posed (often implicitly, but sometimes explicitly (e.g. Burns, 2005) is: can one become an entrepreneur, or are we born to be entrepreneurs? This is the story line that seems to have imbued the entrepreneurship discourse as one of the basic assumptions that works as a back-drop in writings on entrepreneurship, and is consequently often generally taken for granted. Moving away from the idea of the “born-to-become” entrepreneur there is a claim for other epistemological standpoints (e.g. Jennings et al., Lindgren and Packendorff, 2009). As well there has been some interest regarding how entrepreneurs are socially constructed (e.g. Goss, 2005), by different discourses in society (Berglund, 2006), a process that can be described as both complex and multi-faceted, going beyond notions from ‘entrepreneurial’ discourses (Watson, 2000), and which not always construct the heroic figure that is depicted by the entrepreneurship discourse (Kets de Vries, 1986, Shepard and Haynie, 2009). In this paper we aim to develop knowledge on the discursive construction of identity when it comes to an entrepreneurial setting that is multi-faceted. From following an entrepreneur on her journey in developing a business that could both be described as traditional (commercial) entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship (fair trade) it is obvious that becoming an entrepreneur does not come from any prescribed recipe. On the contrary, entering an entrepreneurial route is followed by a number of identity dilemmas. Thus, we will elaborate on some examples considering how the CEO of Oria is challenged by different dilemmas when she combines the social part and the commercial part of her entrepreneurship in constructing an entrepreneurial identity. First we will discuss entrepreneurship from different logics.Organisering av Samhällsentreprenörskap i Sverig

The Reduced Expression of the HADH2 Protein Causes X-Linked Mental Retardation, Choreoathetosis, and Abnormal Behavior

Recently, we defined a new syndromic form of X-linked mental retardation in a 4-generation family with a unique clinical phenotype characterized by mild mental retardation, choreoathetosis, and abnormal behavior (MRXS10). Linkage analysis in this family revealed a candidate region of 13.4 Mb between markers DXS1201 and DXS991 on Xp11; therefore, mutation analysis was performed by direct sequencing in most of the 135 annotated genes located in the region. The gene (HADH2) encoding l-3-hydroxyacyl-CoA dehydrogenase II displayed a sequence alteration (c.574 C→A; p.R192R) in all patients and carrier females that was absent in unaffected male family members and could not be found in 2,500 control X chromosomes, including in those of 500 healthy males. The silent C→A substitution is located in exon 5 and was shown by western blot to reduce the amount of HADH2 protein by 60%–70% in the patient. Quantitative in vivo and in vitro expression studies revealed a ratio of splicing transcript amounts different from those normally seen in controls. Apparently, the reduced expression of the wild-type fragment, which results in the decreased protein expression, rather than the increased amount of aberrant splicing fragments of the HADH2 gene, is pathogenic. Our data therefore strongly suggest that reduced expression of the HADH2 protein causes MRXS10, a phenotype different from that caused by 2-methyl-3-hydroxybutyryl-CoA dehydrogenase deficiency, which is a neurodegenerative disorder caused by missense mutations in this multifunctional protein