# Mission Accomplished? Balancing Market Growth and Moral Legitimation in the Fair Trade Moral Market

Benjamin Huybrechts, Helen Haugh, Bob Doherty

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Benjamin Huybrechts, Helen Haugh, Bob Doherty. Mission Accomplished? Balancing Market Growth and Moral Legitimation in the Fair Trade Moral Market. Journal of Management Studies, 2023, 10.1111/joms.12925. hal-04133008

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# Mission Accomplished? Balancing Market Growth and Moral Legitimation in the Fair Trade Moral Market

Benjamin Huybrechtsª, Helen M. Haughᵇ and Bob Dohertyᶜ

ªIESEG School of Management, Univ. Lille, CNRS, UMR 9221 – LEM (Lille Economie Management), Lille, France;

ᵇJudge Business School, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom;

ᶜSchool for Business and Society, University of York, York, United Kingdom

## INTRODUCTION

Moral markets are markets articulated around a distinctive moral mission that contrasts with, and is perceived by audiences as morally superior to, the norms of conventional markets (Balsiger, 2021; McInerney, 2014). For example, in contrast to conventional international trading practices, fair trade was created with the aim of supporting small-scale producer groups in developing countries through payments of minimum prices and social premiums for community development, prefinancing, long-term trading contracts, and advocacy in favour of global ‘trade justice’ (Moore, 2004; Raynolds and Greenfield, 2015). As such, the moral mission encapsulates the distinctive values and purposes that are collectively articulated by pioneer organizations, i.e., organizations that contribute to founding the moral market through supplying the first morally distinctive products (Hedberg and Lounsbury, 2021; Lee et al., 2018b). As the market grows, its participants become more diversified, and the moral mission tends to be codified into norms and standards meant to facilitate recognition by external audiences and integration of new market participants (Reinecke et al., 2012; Weber et al., 2008). This work is typically performed by ‘market mediators’ such as certification initiatives and federative structures, which regulate the conditions of market participation while often also working to scale the moral market beyond the niche of pioneer organizations (Haack and Rasche, 2021; Lee et al., 2017; Nicholls, 2010).

*Address for reprints:* Benjamin Huybrechts, IESEG School of Management, Univ. Lille, CNRS, UMR 9221 – LEM (Lille Economie Management), Lille, France (b.huybrechts@ieseg.fr).

This is an open access article under the terms of the [Creative Commons Attribution License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
However, market growth may require adapting the moral mission and softening its
most constraining dimensions to allow more flexibility in market participation modes
(Haack and Rasche, 2021; Hedberg and Lounsbury, 2021; Lee et al., 2017; Lee et al.,
2018b). For example, as the microfinance market grew, its founding principle to lift the
poorest out of poverty through targeted microcredits was relaxed to enable the partici-
pation of commercial banks and allow them to charge higher interest rates (Hudon and
Sandberg, 2013; Wry and Zhao, 2018). As a result, market growth led to either the ex-
clusion or excessive indebtedness of the poorest groups that had initially been targeted,
prompting criticism from pioneers such as the Grameen Bank that the moral foundations
of the market had been violated (Yunus, 2011) and sparking an ‘ethical crisis’ in the
moral market (Hudon and Sandberg, 2013). Therefore, there is a trade-off in moral mar-
ket growth (Kim and Schifeling, 2022; Lee et al., 2017): while it enhances the breadth of
moral mission achievement, it is likely to jeopardize the mission’s ‘moral purity’, trigger-
ing opposition from pioneer organizations (Child, 2015; McCaffrey and Kurland, 2014).
Such opposition may initiate a negative judgement cascade and threaten the market’s
moral legitimation, i.e., the continued efforts to persuade audiences that the moral market
is offering a morally superior alternative to mainstream markets (Balsiger, 2021; Haack
and Rasche, 2021; White et al., 2012). Therefore, we ask: How can market growth be le-
gitimized in moral markets when such growth challenges the market’s founding mission?

To respond to this question, we adopt a ‘legitimacy-as-process’ perspective (Glozer et al., 2019; Suddaby et al., 2017) and illuminate the ongoing work that market media-tors deploy to balance market growth with moral legitimation. While prior research on moral market growth has predominantly examined how new participants are attracted into a moral market (Durand and Georgallis, 2018; Georgallis and Lee, 2020; Hedberg and Lounsbury, 2021), less attention has been devoted to how pioneer organization sup-port can be maintained despite the growth-oriented changes in the moral mission. Such support is particularly critical in moral markets in which pioneer organizations remain a cohesive group that guards the moral mission (Kim and Schifeling, 2022; McCaffrey and Kurland, 2014). In this article, we suggest that ‘mission work’, i.e., building per-ceptions of consistency between the founding mission and subsequent actions so as to maintain pioneer organization support and avoid ‘mission drift’ accusations (Battilana and Lee, 2014; Grimes et al., 2019; Smith and Besharov, 2019), is a critical capability enabling market mediators to balance market growth and moral legitimation.

To do so, we investigate how the global fair trade certification actor, Fairtrade International (FTI), grew the fair trade market from a niche of pioneer organizations to a large market of certified products traded by a variety of organizations including multinational corporations (MNCs). Specifically, we examine how FTI achieved market growth while convincing pioneer organizations that such growth was not incompatible with the founding mission of fair trade as ‘a trading partnership, based on dialogue, transparency and respect, that seeks greater equity in international trade’ (Moore, 2004, p. 331). Drawing from interviews, archival data, and insider field notes, our analysis explains how three types of mission work enabled FTI to address this challenge. First, in mission editing, the moral mission was gradually trimmed to attenuate the political dimension of the founding mission and foreground the narrower mission of improv-ing producers’ livelihoods, enabling wider market participation through more flexible
certification standards. Second, in mission moralizing, FTI mobilized an increasing set of moral claims to frame mission editing as consistent with, and necessary, to achieve the edited mission. Third, in mission stabilizing, FTI (re)assured pioneer organizations of mission continuity and emphasized their common fate as the moral market grew.

These findings contribute to the literatures on moral markets, moral legitimation, and mission work. First, our findings extend previous work on moral market growth beyond the strategies to attract new participants into the moral market (Durand and Georgallis, 2018; Georgallis and Lee, 2020; Hedberg and Lounsbury, 2021). Through shifting the focus to the relationship between a market mediator and pioneer organizations acting as the guardians of the market's morality, we demonstrate how market mediators exploit two features of moral markets to balance market growth and moral legitimation: the multidimensionality of the moral mission (Balsiger, 2021; Becchetti and Huybrechts, 2008) and the feeling of 'shared fate' among market participants (Hiatt and Park, 2022; Lee et al., 2018a). Second, we extend the understanding of moral legitimation as a continuous, recursive process (Suddaby et al., 2017) through illuminating how market mediators orchestrate moral legitimation on behalf of market participants throughout episodes of conflict and temporary truces (Glozer et al., 2019; Reinecke and Ansari, 2015). To do so, our longitudinal data highlight the capability of a market mediator to articulate an increasingly diverse set of moral claims as the market grows, thereby adding a temporal dimension to the understanding of moral claim plurality and extending it beyond the setting of multiple stakeholder dialogue (Reinecke et al., 2017; Scherer et al., 2013). Finally, by exploring mission work at the market level, we extend this notion beyond the well-documented organizational level (Battilana and Lee, 2014; Smith and Besharov, 2019) and support recent work that has emphasized mission accomplishment as a matter of audience perceptions (Grimes et al., 2019).

# THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

## Balancing Market Growth and Moral Legitimation in Moral Markets

Emerging from social movement advocacy against the perceived shortcomings of established markets (McInerney, 2014; Weber et al., 2008), moral markets are founded by pioneer organizations 'motivated by moral or normative considerations rather than only by the pursuit of economic interest' (Georgallis and Lee, 2020, p. 51). These pioneer organizations instantiate a mission that often comprises a bundle of moral dimensions (Balsiger, 2021; Becchetti and Huybrechts, 2008). Such moral mission stands in contrast with the norms of conventional markets (Arjaliès and Durand, 2019; Hedberg and Lounsbury, 2021) and enables moral market participants to offer products or services 'considered to be normatively superior' (Georgallis and Lee, 2020, p. 50). Examples of moral markets include ethical investment (Arjaliès and Durand, 2019; Child, 2015), organic production (DuPuis and Gillon, 2009; Lee et al., 2017), local food (Hedberg and Lounsbury, 2021; McCaffrey and Kurland, 2014), and community-based renewable energy (Huybrechts and Haugh, 2018; Mitzinneck and Besharov, 2019).
While instantiating their distinctive moral mission, moral market participants seek also to increase their impact and reach critical mass (Balsiger, 2021; Munir et al., 2021; Sine and Lee, 2009). According to Lee et al. (2017), the growth of a moral market beyond the niche of pioneer organizations is the main driver of its legitimation, i.e., the work to create ‘a sense of positive, beneficial, ethical, understandable, necessary or otherwise acceptable action in a specific setting’ (Vaara and Tienar, 2008, p. 986). Adopting this perspective, prior research on moral markets has mainly focused on pragmatic and cognitive legitimation, examining how new participants are attracted to the moral market to enable market growth and visibility (Durand and Georgallis, 2018; Georgallis and Lee, 2020; Hedberg and Lounsbury, 2021).

However, the survival of a moral market also depends on sustained moral legitimation, i.e., the work to maintain audience perceptions that a focal actor continuously pursues ‘the right thing to do’ (Suchman, 1995, p. 579). Moral legitimation differs from pragmatic and cognitive legitimation in its focus on morality and social appropriateness as opposed to, respectively, advancing self-interest and comprehensibility (Haack et al., 2021; Haack and Rasche, 2021; Suchman, 1995; Suddaby et al., 2017). Following Suchman (1995), morality may be conveyed through personal relationships, rigorous procedures, desirable outcomes, or structural characteristics of market participants. In moral markets, moral legitimation is paramount to the engagement of morally sensitive audiences such as customers and funders, who ground their support in the judgement that the market offers an alternative to mainstream markets and benefits particular groups (beneficiaries) or society as a whole (Dubuisson-Quellier, 2013; Lee et al., 2018b; White et al., 2012).

Yet, market growth may imply lowering the barriers to entry to attract ‘conventional’ businesses and trigger pragmatic and cognitive legitimation (Balsiger, 2021; Pozner et al., 2014). Such market growth enables commercial success and, to a certain extent, quantitative achievement of the moral mission (typically, the number of beneficiaries benefitting from the moral market) (Buchanan et al., 2022; Lee et al., 2017). However, it is likely to alienate the support of pioneer organizations if they perceive that market growth is achieved at the expense of the purity of the core moral values articulated at founding (DuPuis and Gillon, 2009; Hudon and Sandberg, 2013; Kim and Schifeling, 2022). For example, McCaffrey and Kurland (2014) document how the pioneers of the ‘local food’ movement in the USA resisted the harmonization of standards and actively sought to de-legitimize corporate ‘local food’ initiatives, even if such efforts could ultimately limit the growth of the moral market. Prior research has suggested that the concerns of pioneer organizations may not be an issue when, due to market growth, these organizations become a minority that can be ignored, or when some of them become ‘co-opted’ and champion market growth (Hedberg and Lounsbury, 2021; Lee et al., 2017; Munir et al., 2021). If, however, pioneer organizations form a cohesive and homogeneous group that guards the market’s moral mission (McCaffrey and Kurland, 2014), their support is critical to sustain moral legitimation and influence other audiences’ moral legitimacy judgements (Pozner et al., 2014; Weber et al., 2008; White et al., 2012). In this context, in order to encourage, or at least tolerate, market growth, pioneer organizations need to be convinced that this growth maintains some affinity to the founding moral mission (Kim and Schifeling, 2022; Lee et al., 2018b).
Following a ‘legitimacy-as-process’ perspective (Suddaby et al., 2017), sustaining pi-
oneer organizations’ support is likely to require enduring moral legitimation work
(Reinecke et al., 2017) that not only builds consensus but also addresses conflict (Luyckx
and Janssens, 2016; Suddaby and Greenwood, 2005). This challenge explains why moral
market legitimation is typically channelled through market mediators, i.e., organiza-
tions that receive a mandate from market participants to both regulate and scale the
moral market (Dubuisson-Quellier, 2013; Michel, 2020). Such organizations, for exam-
ple certification initiatives (Bartley, 2007; Reinecke et al., 2012) or federative networks
(Audebrand and Barros, 2018; Huybrechts and Haugh, 2018), endorse a collective
mandate to pursue market-level legitimation on behalf of market participants (Haack
and Rasche, 2021; Lee et al., 2017). Indeed, because of their collective commitment to
advancing a moral cause (McInerney, 2014), moral market participants rely on market-
level moral legitimation for their own organizational legitimation, since they would all
be affected by moral market de-legitimation (Balsiger, 2021; Siltaoja et al., 2020). This
resonates with the concept of ‘shared fate’, suggesting that organizations in the same
market category are ‘bound together by a sense of belongingness and equally experience
similar consequences’, such that ‘damage of collective reputation can affect all firms in
an industry’ (Hiatt and Park, 2022, p. 1; see also Lee et al., 2018a; Sine and Lee, 2009;
Weber et al., 2008). However, how market mediators can maintain a feeling of shared
fate with pioneer organizations when attracting new participants requires adapting the
founding moral mission is an intriguing question that has remained unanswered so far.
We suggest that ‘mission work’ is a critical capability that may enable market mediators
to resolve this puzzle.

Market Mediator Mission Work

Despite the importance of moral mission as a collective endeavour in moral markets,
mission has mainly been theorized as an organizational construct. An organization's
mission encompasses the core, recurring patterns of actions that reflect its values and
purposes (Selznick, 1957), serving as ‘a socio-cognitive bridge between [the organiza-
tion's] identity and its actions by specifying why the organization should exist and how
it should act’ (Grimes et al., 2019, p. 819). Because organizational mission is made
explicit and communicated to audiences, typically through a mission statement, it
also ‘establish[es] audiences’ expectations regarding what types of actions are appro-
priate [...] to undertake’ (Grimes et al., 2019, p. 820). When organizational mission
and subsequent actions are perceived to be inconsistent, such discontinuity is labelled
‘mission drift’ – a process that has been observed in social enterprises when they de-
viate from their founding social mission to pursue commercial strategies (Battilana
and Lee, 2014; Ometto et al., 2019) and more recently extended to describe discon-
tinuity between founding mission and subsequent actions in any type of organization
(Grimes et al., 2019).

While previous work has mainly examined mission drift at the organizational level,
we suggest that this construct can be usefully extended to the market level, specifically
in a moral market. To do so, we embrace a legitimation perspective whereby mission
evolution is not an objective reality but rather a matter of audience perceptions (Grimes
et al., 2019; Wry and Zhao, 2018) – in our case, the perception by pioneer organizations that moral market growth remains sufficiently aligned with the moral mission articulated at founding. Audience evaluations, nevertheless, can be influenced by how such alignment is communicated (Palazzo and Scherer, 2006; Scherer et al., 2013), as revealed in previous studies on the roles of discourse (Glozer et al., 2019; Luyckx and Janssens, 2016; Vaara and Tienar, 2008) and rhetoric (Harmon et al., 2015; Suddaby and Greenwood, 2005).

Grimes et al. (2019) theorized the construct of ‘mission work’ to describe the ‘symbolic and material efforts to manage impressions regarding divergence between organizational image and organizational action’ (Grimes et al., 2019, p. 822). Mission work addresses audience concerns about such divergence ‘by claiming strategic intent and offering arguments’ to justify the consistency of actions that appear to deviate from the founding mission (Grimes et al., 2019, p. 823). Despite the relevance of mission work to moral markets, we know little regarding how such work could be deployed by a market mediator as a moral legitimation capability enabling it to maintain the support of pioneer organizations while pursuing market growth. The analysis of how FTI managed fair trade market growth offers a promising setting to explore this process.

## METHODS

The research design is a historical case study constructed from rich empirical data (Eisenhardt and Graebner, 2007). The fair trade moral market was chosen as a particularly insightful case because of the tensions resulting from market growth-oriented decisions and the apparent success of FTI in handling these tensions, increasing sales of fair trade products without losing the support of pioneer organizations (Becchetti and Huybrechts, 2008; Gendron et al., 2009).

## Research Context

To foreground our analysis, we trace the history of fair trade market growth from the launch of product certification in 1988 to the achievement of widespread presence in the mainstream by 2020. From the early 1950s to the late 1980s, fair trade pioneer organizations and activists advocated a political ambition to achieve ‘trade justice’, namely for world trade to be based on fairer exchanges providing fair revenues, decent working conditions, and stronger bargaining power for small-scale producers (Child, 2015; Raynolds and Greenfield, 2015). Under the umbrella of the World Fair Trade Organization (WFTO, formerly known as the International Federation for Alternative Trade), pioneer organizations such as Equal Exchange and Divine Chocolate bought, imported, and sold products exclusively from small-scale producers in developing countries and under conditions reflecting their ambition to achieve greater trade justice (Anderson, 2015; Davies and Doherty, 2019). However, lacking internationally harmonized standards and selling through niche retail outlets such as church and world shops, fair trade remained a niche market (Becchetti and Huybrechts, 2008; Moore, 2004; Raynolds and Greenfield, 2015).
Fair trade market growth commenced when pioneer organizations and partner nongovernmental organizations launched country-specific certification standards designed to ensure that any product marketed as 'fair trade' actually complied with a set of principles, including minimum fair prices, payment of social premiums for community development, prefinancing, and long-term trading contracts (Gendron et al., 2009; Moore, 2004; Raynolds and Greenfield, 2015). Instead of relying on the credibility of each pioneer organization to infer compliance with moral claims, product certification enabled any type of business to participate in fair trade, even if for only a small proportion of its products (Becchetti and Huybrechts, 2008). The world's first fair trade certified product category was coffee, launched in 1989 by Max Havelaar (MH) in the Netherlands. After 1989, country-specific fair trade labelling initiatives were established for an increasingly broad range of food and non-food products.

After several years of continued market growth as a result of product certification, in 1997, 19 country-specific labelling initiatives, later called National Fairtrade Organizations (NFOs), collaborated to form Fairtrade International (FTI, previously 'Fairtrade Labeling Organizations International'). The different country-level certification standards were harmonized, and the term 'Fairtrade' (in one word) was introduced by FTI as a trademark for its certified products, while 'fair trade' (in two words) continued to refer generically to the moral market – therefore the latter term is used in this article. As a market mediator, FTI does not sell any fair trade products but assumes responsibility for setting certification standards and promoting market growth. FTI revenue is derived from licence fees paid by market participants (pioneer organizations, MNCs and also producer organizations). In parallel, FTI created the sister organization FLO-Cert, a technical unit to be responsible for independent monitoring of certification standards (Raynolds and Greenfield, 2015; Reinecke and Ansari, 2015).

By 2000, the range of Fairtrade certified products retailed in mainstream outlets had expanded to include a variety of food commodities, apparel, and linens. At that time, several major retail and food MNCs became interested in including fair trade products in their product ranges and own-branded products. During the 2000s, to respond to this interest, FTI took several decisions that gradually relaxed the founding principles and favoured a quantitative understanding of the social mission (i.e., increasing the volumes of sales and producer support) at the expense of the initial political project (i.e., working with the most marginalized producer groups to build an alternative to mainstream trading practices and advocate for trade justice). As a result of increased MNC participation, sales increased from 215 million euros (1999) to more than 11 billion euros (2019) (FTI annual report figures; see Figure 1).

Although the relaxing of the certification standards was critiqued by pioneer organizations, their protests were mainly voiced within the fair trade movement, with little evidence of loss of public support for fair trade (Anderson, 2015; Gendron et al., 2009). For example, market studies have found that consumer recognition of and trust in FTI certification have continually increased over time, with trust exceeding 90 per cent for people who recognize the FTI mark (GlobeScan, 2019). According to MSI Integrity (2020), FTI certification has also been found to enjoy stronger societal support than any other ethical certification, attributed to the core moral principles such as minimum commodity prices and stakeholder participation. Finally, despite disagreements, FTI has maintained productive relationships
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B. Huybrechts et al.

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1. Sales of Fairtrade certified products, 1989–2020. Sources: Combined NFO annual reports (1989–97); FTI annual reports (1997–2020).</figcaption></figure>

with pioneer organizations, whose licence fees still represent a notable part of FTI revenue. We suggest that maintaining such collaborative relationships and dialogue has been critical for FTI to sustain pioneer organization support and thereby market-level moral legitimation.

## Data Collection

Three data gathering methods were employed (Table I). First, 53 in-depth interviews were conducted with informants from three types of actors: 18 founders and senior managers of FTI and its member NFOs in eight different countries; 25 pioneer organization managers, including the founders and directors of the WFTO; and 10 MNC managers responsible for sourcing, manufacturing, and retailing fair trade certified products in different countries and sectors. The interviews were conducted in two rounds: a first round in 2013–14 and a second round in 2018–19, each coinciding with FTI decisions enabling fair trade market growth. Seven key informants who held the same position from the first to the second round were interviewed twice. The interview questions addressed FTI's engagement with the fair trade mission and certification standards, the discourse concerning changes to certification standards, and the relationships between FTI and pioneer organizations. The interviews ranged from 45 to 120 minutes, and all were recorded and transcribed verbatim. In the three types of organizations, informants were selected based on their engagement with the fair trade market and its moral mission. Informants were recruited until theoretical saturation (Strauss and Corbin, 1990), in that interviews were failing to furnish any new insights.
<table><caption>Table I. Data sources</caption><thead><tr><th>Source</th><th>Detail</th><th>Source descriptor</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Interviews (53)</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Founding members of National Fairtrade Organizations (NFOs) (2)</td><td>Netherlands</td><td>Interview 1</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>UK</td><td>Interview 2</td></tr><tr><td>Fairtrade International board and staff (7)</td><td>CEO</td><td>Interview 3, 4</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>Former CEO</td><td>Interview 5</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>Board chair</td><td>Interview 6</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>Board member</td><td>Interview 7</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>Former Board member</td><td>Interview 8, 9</td></tr><tr><td>Senior executives in NFOs (9)</td><td>Belgium</td><td>Interview 10</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>France</td><td>Interview 11</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>Germany</td><td>Interview 12</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>Italia</td><td>Interview 13</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>Switzerland</td><td>Interview 14</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>UK</td><td>Interview 15, 16, 17</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>US</td><td>Interview 18</td></tr><tr><td>Founders of pioneer organizations (4)</td><td>UK</td><td>Interview 19, 20, 21</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>US</td><td>Interview 22</td></tr><tr><td>Senior executives in pioneer organizations (16)</td><td>Belgium</td><td>Interview 23, 24, 25</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>France</td><td>Interview 26, 27, 28</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>Germany</td><td>Interview 29, 30, 31</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>Italy</td><td>Interview 32</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>Netherlands</td><td>Interview 33</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>UK</td><td>Interview 34, 35, 36, 37</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>USA</td><td>Interview 38</td></tr><tr><td>World Fair Trade Organization (WFTO, the federation of pioneer organizations) (5)</td><td>CEO</td><td>Interview 39, 40</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>Board member</td><td>Interview 41</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>Campaigner</td><td>Interview 42</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>European representative</td><td>Interview 43</td></tr><tr><td>Multinational corporations that produce and retail fair trade products (10)</td><td>Belgium</td><td>Interview 44</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>France</td><td>Interview 45, 46</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>Switzerland</td><td>Interview 47</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>UK</td><td>Interview 48, 49, 50, 51, 52</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>US</td><td>Interview 53</td></tr><tr><td>Participant observation (39)</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>NFO-FTI board meetings</td><td>15</td><td>BOARD, year, month</td></tr></tbody></table>

(Continues)
<table><caption>Table I. (Continued)</caption><thead><tr><th>Source</th><th>Detail</th><th>Source descriptor</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>WFTO conferences</td><td>5</td><td>OBS 1 to 24</td></tr><tr><td>Fair Trade meetings</td><td>13</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>International Fairtrade Town conferences</td><td>6</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Documents (180)</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Max Havelaar Netherlands</td><td>31 (1989–2020)</td><td>MHAR, year</td></tr><tr><td>FTI</td><td>21 (1999–2020)</td><td>FTIAR, year</td></tr><tr><td>WFTO</td><td>31 (1989–2020)</td><td>WFTOAR, year</td></tr><tr><td>FTI</td><td>18</td><td>FTIDOC 1 to 18</td></tr><tr><td>WFTO and members</td><td>37</td><td>WFTODOC 1 to 37</td></tr><tr><td>MNC Corporate Social Responsibility reports</td><td>15</td><td>MNCDOC 1 to 15</td></tr><tr><td>Webpages</td><td>FTI 14 pages<br>WFTO 6 pages</td><td>FTIWEB 1 to 14<br>WFTOWEB 1 to 6</td></tr><tr><td>Newspaper articles</td><td>7</td><td>PRESSDOC 1 to 7</td></tr></tbody></table>

Second, in their capacity as both former commercial director of a fair trade pioneer organization and campaigner (since 1998), and trustee of the largest NFO (since 2017), one insider author attended fair trade meetings and events. These included NFO and NFO-FTI board meetings (15) (BOARD, month, year), WFTO biannual conferences (5), meetings with fair trade actors (13), and International Fairtrade Town conferences (6) (OBS #; see also Supplementary Table SI). After participation in these events, the insider author wrote notes and summaries of the discussions that took place about decisions to adapt the certification standards (194 pp. of single-spaced text).

Third, to triangulate the data from interviews and field notes, we content analysed 180 documents from FTI, NFOs, the WFTO and its members, and MNCs (Supplementary Table SI). For FTI, 21 annual reports were analysed (1999–2020; FTIAR, year). To account for the years of fair trade product certification before the establishment of FTI (1997), we also analysed 31 annual reports of the founding NFO Max Havelaar Netherlands (1989 to 2020; MHAR, year). As space is limited and therefore every word is carefully chosen, the annual reports enabled us to examine how FTI adapted its mission and certification standards and justified these changes. In addition, we analysed 18 strategic documents containing mission-related information, for example, the FTI constitution, strategic plans, and position papers (FTIDOC #), as well as 14 webpages (FTIWEB #). For WFTO, we reviewed 31 consecutive WFTO annual reports (1989 to 2020; WFTOAR, year), 37 documents from WFTO and member pioneer organizations (WFTODOC #), and six webpages (WFTOWEB #). To triangulate the MNCs’ perspectives on their engagement with fair trade, we examined their recent CSR reports (2012 to 2019; MNC, year). Finally, we analysed seven press articles that mentioned specific growth episodes and in which FTI or pioneer organization representatives were quoted
<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>Figure 2. Data structure</figcaption></figure>

# FINDINGS

The findings are organized according to the three types of mission work theorized from the empirical data, which follow a recursive pattern articulated around each market growth-oriented decision. To demonstrate the data analysis and theorization, we present illustrative interview quotes, extracts from documents, and observation field notes.

## Mission Editing

To scale the moral market, FTI first re-interpreted the fair trade founding mission and adapted it to make it more compatible with, and even dependent on, market growth. This involved making successive growth-oriented decisions that increasingly attenuated the political mission to change international trading rules and foregrounded the social mission of increasing producers' revenues to improve their livelihoods. To do so, FTI introduced more flexible routes for businesses and MNCs to participate in the fair trade market.

*Mission trimming.* At founding, an important dimension of the fair trade moral mission was the political ambition to change the rules of international trade to provide more
<table><caption>Table II. Illustrative empirical data</caption><thead><tr><th colspan="2">I. Mission editing</th></tr><tr><td colspan="2">(Gradually abandoning founding principles to focus on a narrower, flexible mission and facilitate market access)</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td colspan="2"><strong>A. Mission trimming</strong></td></tr><tr><td>1. Attenuating political mission to change rules of international trade</td><td>'Initially it wasn't about another tuppence for the farmers [...], it was centrally about empowering, supporting producer ownership to change the structures of power in the economy.' (Interview 2, NFO founder)<br>'We focused on building a market that could grow to absorb the kind of volumes supplied by producers, which is the absolute priority [...] and indeed we probably spent less efforts in, you know, building some kind of political movement to advocate for changes in the terms of trade.' (Interview 5, FTI)</td></tr><tr><td>2. Foregrounding social mission to improve producers' livelihoods</td><td>'Creating higher benefits for more disadvantaged producers and workers is the aim of [FTI] and its member organizations. The main way to reach this goal is to sell more Fairtrade labelled products.' (FTIAR, 2007, p. 3)<br>'Increased Fairtrade sales are the biggest driver of economic improvement, enabling producer organizations to secure the revenues they need for workers to be paid a living wage and for farmers and artisanal miners to earn a living income.' (FTIAR, 2015, p. 5)</td></tr><tr><td colspan="2"><strong>B. Mission flexing</strong></td></tr><tr><td>3. Challenging rigid certification standards</td><td>'There is a particular model without which it is difficult to get into fair trade and this doesn't make sense to businesses. [...] People are often telling us regretfully that they can't hang around working with you guys, when someone else is offering something more flexible.' (Interview 5, FTI)<br>'I find it very rigid and unrealistic [...] to insist to the farmers out there that we won't work with you unless you join a co-op.' (Founder of NFO, quoted in PRESSDOC 2)</td></tr><tr><td>4. Multiplying avenues to market participation</td><td>'We've developed a new, additional way for businesses to work with us, called Fairtrade Sourcing Programs. It enables producers to sell more of their crops on Fairtrade terms, bringing greater impact to their farms and communities.' (FTIDOC13, p. 2)<br>'In order to bring greater benefits to producers and workers, we need to continue working closely with our commercial partners and be responsive to their needs. The pressing need to innovate [...] led to the adoption of new services to companies beyond existing standards and certification.' (FTIAR, 2016, p. 3)</td></tr><tr><td colspan="2"><strong>II. Mission moralizing</strong></td></tr><tr><td colspan="2">(Developing moral action and discourse to convince pioneer organizations that editing the mission to enable market growth is morally legitimate)</td></tr></tbody></table>

C. Relational claiming

Keywords for wordcount in annual reports: solidarity, empathy, friend*, personal, relationship

5. Showing empathy with producers

> 'The large coffee companies who despite the lowest ever coffee prices have not changed their own pricing structures, they are exploiting families who are facing poverty and this is inequitable.' (MHAR, 1992, p. 4)
> 
> 'Workers on farms and in factories are among the most vulnerable in the global trade system. [...] Many end up working long difficult hours for low pay, afraid to speak up for their rights for fear of losing their jobs.' (FTIDOC 13, p. 1)

(Continues)
<table><caption>Table II. (Continued)</caption><thead><tr><th colspan="2">II. Mission moralizing<br/>(Developing moral action and discourse to convince pioneer organizations that editing the mission to enable market growth is morally legitimate)</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>6. Stimulating personal relationships between producers and consumers</td><td>'Max Havelaar is an initiative that aims to directly connect consumers and producers. The interests of the consumers and small producers match each other well.' (MHAR, 1992, p. 2)<br/>'Consumers made a trip to coffee producers in the Dominican Republic in February, and when they were back they described the direct relationship using a slogan: "Max Havelaar is coffee with a face".' (MHAR, 1993, p. 3)</td></tr><tr><td colspan="2">D. Certification claiming</td></tr><tr><td colspan="2">Keywords for wordcount in annual reports: certify/certification, standard, monitor(ing), rigour(ous), guarantee</td></tr><tr><td>7. Setting and updating standards</td><td>'We are proud to have rigorous standards covering the whole supply chain, from producers to traders to final packaged products.' (FTIAR, 2004, p. 5)<br/>'We are the only leading certification scheme to have fixed guaranteed prices and premiums, set in close consultation with producers themselves.' (FTIAR, 2018, p. 7)</td></tr><tr><td>8. Monitoring processes</td><td>'It is one of [FTI]'s aims to guarantee that buying a Fairtrade product stays such a simple choice, based on a Fairtrade Label that consumers can trust. To reach this aim, [FTI] has a worldwide system of controlling and certification, which is one of the biggest on earth.' (FTIDOC 5, p. 2)<br/>'Plantations receive regular annual audits to check that their labour rights are respected.' (FTIWEB 7)</td></tr><tr><td colspan="2">E. Impact claiming</td></tr><tr><td colspan="2">Keywords for wordcount in annual reports: impact, revenue(s), livelihood(s), benefit(s), opportunity/ies</td></tr><tr><td>9. Ensuring increased revenues for producers</td><td>'Under influence of Max Havelaar the income of the farmers of the Mexican organisation UCIRI has increased from 280 to 580 dollars a year, in 3 years time.' (MHAR, 1992, p. 3)<br/>'Our farmers are telling us they want to sell more products on Fairtrade terms, so that they can achieve more change, more quickly. And there are still many farmers we haven't reached.' (FIAR, 2013, p. 2)</td></tr><tr><td>10. Demonstrating impact</td><td>'An independent producer impact research was commissioned by the board of Fairtrade International. Fairtrade Sourcing Partnerships will drive producer impact through increased market access and an improved Fairtrade producer support model.' (FTIWEB 10)<br/>'We published five studies in 2018, including a follow-up to a 2012 report on Fairtrade's impact on rural development. The study found that over a five-year period, Fairtrade empowered farmers by stabilizing their economic situation.' (FTIAR, 2018, p. 4)</td></tr><tr><td colspan="2">F. Participatory claiming</td></tr><tr><td colspan="2">Keywords for wordcount in annual reports: participat(ory/ion), multi-stakeholder, producer (co-)own(ership), co(−)op(erative), governance</td></tr><tr><td>11. Producer ownership</td><td>'The Fairtrade of the future is committed to continuing to put producers and workers first, ensuring they are in the driver's seat in this transformational phase.' (FTIAR, 2018, p. 3)<br/>'Since its beginning, Fairtrade has grown to represent over 1.65 million of these farmers and workers [...]. Producers now co-own the Fairtrade system, shaping global strategy and running operations across three continents.' (FTIDOC 15, p. 5)</td></tr></tbody></table>
<table><caption>Table II. (Continued)</caption><thead><tr><th colspan="2">II. Mission moralizing<br/>(Developing moral action and discourse to convince pioneer organizations that editing the mission to enable market growth is morally legitimate)</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>12. Multi-stakeholder governance</td><td>'Fairtrade International is a non-profit, multi-stakeholder association that [...] fosters sustainable livelihoods.' (FTIDOC 19, p. 2)<br/>'Our challenge now is to keep the personal trust of producers so that they continue to feel that Fairtrade Labelling is a system they own, where you have that balance of power among different constituencies.' (FTIAR, 2007, p. 3)</td></tr><tr><td colspan="2">III. Mission stabilizing<br/>(Re-engaging with pioneer organizations around new edited mission by emphasizing continuity and common fate)</td></tr><tr><td colspan="2">G. Displaying continuity</td></tr><tr><td>13. Recalling historical roots</td><td>'Fairtrade had a first mover advantage in certification. We are a household name because we did a lot of grassroots campaigning around the need for something like Fairtrade, which is related to trade justice [...]. Our entry into the market has been through that route.' (Interview 15, NFO)<br/>'Fairtrade was born from a grassroots movement for trade justice. For more than 25 years Fairtrade has worked with businesses and consumers to reduce poverty among farmers and workers, and spread the benefits of trade more equally. But we haven't forgotten our roots.' (FTIAR, 2015, p. 4)</td></tr><tr><td>14. Enforcing red lines</td><td>'There are some lines we drew, and one of them is that we wouldn't work with plantations on coffee.' (Interview 4, FTI)<br/>'The world will no doubt change significantly by 2030, but what won't change is our commitment to putting farmers and workers at the centre of everything we do.' (FTIAR, 2018, p. 4)</td></tr><tr><td colspan="2">H. Emphasizing common fate</td></tr><tr><td>15. Acknowledging pioneer organizations as partners</td><td>'Our partnerships with Fair Trade Organisations also remain highly relevant and crucial to our mission.' (FTIDOC 4, p. 5)<br/>'Fairtrade International is developing new ways of working with 100% Fair Trade organisations, stressing their point of difference and recognizing their unique roles.' (FTIDOC 7, p. 2)</td></tr><tr><td>16. Contributing to unified fair trade movement</td><td>'In many markets the mainstreaming of Fairtrade has been driven by the efforts of Fair Trade Organisations that fundamentally share our mission. The work of these organizations to create the consumer demand that is now attracting the interests of larger commercial actors is therefore closely connected to our efforts to develop Fairtrade certification.' (FTIDOC 4, p. 3)<br/>'Fairtrade International is part of the wider trade justice movement, alongside the World Fair Trade Organization [...]. This strategy will see us strengthening links with the wider Fair Trade movement.' (FTIDOC 15, p. 8)</td></tr></tbody></table>

fairness and empowerment for small-scale producers. This involved denunciating the exploitation of the poorest, most marginalized producer groups and integrating them into an alternative commercial circuit embedded in the 'trade justice' movement (Moore, 2004). For example, in 1989 Max Havelaar Netherlands stated that 'the free market is not capable of achieving economic justice, political freedom and equal chances
of development' and positioned fair trade as a practical alternative: 'a beacon of hope for the small-scale producers, [...] an accusation of traditional trade, and a great stimulus [...] to creating a solidarity economy' (Havelaar, 1990, pp. 2–3). Interviews with NFO and FTI founders also emphasized how the sales of fair trade products were imbued with the ambition of offering an alternative to mainstream international trade:

> ‘So obviously in the early days, we first had to say there was an issue with trade and multinationals, there was a problem and fair trade was the solution. Multinationals were just finding minimum regulations [...] around the world to create exploitation. And it was just completely shocking what was going on and people were trying to think, “there must be a better way to do trade and what we need is to create a new approach to trade where we could do things differently.”’ (Interview 6, FTI)

Over time, however, FTI took a set of growth-oriented decisions that each implied abandoning the moral principles that had initially translated the founding mission into practice. The first decision concerned the founding principle of specialization. At founding, all market participants had to be specialized fair trade organizations with an ‘active commitment [...] to “change the rules of international trade”’ (Havelaar, 1991, p. 8). The specialization principle, however, was abandoned in the early 1990s so that any organization, irrespective of their ethical profile, could import, process, or retail fair trade certified products. The pioneer organizations conceded this was a ‘necessary evil’ (Interview 36) to grow beyond a niche, and FTI agreed that the engagement with MNCs should be subsumed into the aim to ‘improve the bargaining position of disadvantaged producers’, as stated in the 1997 FTI constitution (FTIDOC 1, p. 1; see also Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International, 2001).

Shortly after establishment, FTI recruited professional commercial staff with responsibility for increasing the sales of Fairtrade certified products (OBS 1 to 5). FTI strategic documents and annual reports from the 2000s, as well as insider-author field notes, demonstrate reframing of the moral mission to focus on the social mission of increasing producer revenues and working towards more fairness within, rather than against, international trading rules:

> ‘In the market, competition rules and that is just as true for fair trade products. [...] We don’t mind if market prices become prevalent, as long as the costs for durable production are mirrored in those prices, so as long as the producers don’t suffer from it.’ (Interview 12, NFO)

In 2004, the second market growth-oriented decision concerned the founding principle that producers self-organize into democratically governed organizations, typically cooperatives (e.g., FTIDOC 1 and 2). Producer ownership and democratic governance were deemed fundamental to empowering producers to participate in strategic decision-making and receive a share of the profits. However, the requirement of producer ownership was abandoned when FTI developed certification standards for commodities such as bananas and tea, which were grown on plantations where producers were employed as hired workers. The new commodity certification standards were welcomed by MNCs because they enabled their existing plantation suppliers to secure
fair trade commodity certification and negated the need to create new supply chains with small-scale producers (e.g., MNCDOC 1–7; MNCWEB 4; PRESSDOC 2–4).

The third important market growth-oriented decision was made in 2013 when, in response to new demands by MNCs for flexibility in fair trade market participation, and competition from other sustainability standards, FTI introduced the ‘Fairtrade Sourcing Program’ (FSP). The FSP abandoned the founding principle that ‘all that can be fair trade must be fair trade’ (ATCB), thereby permitting non-certified ingredients to be used even if those ingredients were available with the Fairtrade certification. To illustrate, a Fairtrade chocolate bar might be manufactured from Fairtrade certified cocoa, but the sugar could be conventionally sourced even if Fairtrade certified sugar was available. This represented a further step in trimming the moral mission to foreground increasing producer revenues.

In 2018, the FTI board agreed to work with Mondelez and assist their in-house sustainability program, ‘Cocoa Life’. This represented a fourth market growth-oriented decision whereby the ‘take it or leave it’ approach to certification standards was abandoned. Until then, FTI worked on equal terms with all fair trade ‘licensees’ only to help them comply with FTI certification rules. Although the FTI-Mondelez collaboration was framed as distinct from and complementary with product certification (OBS 19 to 22; BOARD, 2018, June; FTIDOC 17), the decision constituted an additional breach with the historical approach and was later replicated with other MNCs. The same year, the FTI general assembly adopted a revised constitution (FTIDOC 18) that reflected the view that mainstream markets were no longer seen as a problem but rather a solution. FTI further endorsed the reframing of its own role from seeking to change the rule of international trade towards encouraging producers to become better equipped to access mainstream markets:

> ‘People who are [...] disadvantaged by conventional trading structures can develop the capacity to take more control over [...] their lives if they are better organized, resourced and supported, and can secure access to mainstream markets.’ (FTIDOC 18, p. 2)

*Mission flexing.* Across the four market growth-oriented decisions presented above, FTI translated mission trimming into more flexible certification standards to facilitate market access for MNCs. FTI board members asserted that standards needed to constantly evolve to exploit opportunities to increase sales and therefore producer revenues, even if this meant working with larger producer groups that were already well-established in international markets. FTI and NFO board members and staff depicted rigidity as problematic and mission editing as necessary, for example when deciding that fairly traded products could be sold in supermarkets:

> ‘[Since] more than 90% of food purchases happen in supermarkets, we could not remain restricted to specialized world shops. The big sales happen in supermarkets, so this is where we had to be to reach the big masses.’ (Interview 10, NFO)

The fear of not exploiting market growth opportunities was salient in all subsequent decisions, which implied that leaving the certification standards unchanged would negatively impact the social mission to increase revenues for small-scale producers. FTI managers
also feared that ignoring MNCs' demands for flexibility would lead these companies to favour adoption of other sustainability certifications or launch in-house ethical sourcing initiatives without FTI:

> 'Fairtrade is introducing Fairtrade Sourcing Partnerships because producers are not selling enough on Fairtrade terms, and current and prospective partners will not increase their Fairtrade sales under the current certification model.' (FTIDOC 7, p. 1)

> 'Rainforest [Alliance] is gaining ground because it is easy to work with, not because people think the standards are better. People are just taking the easiest route. People are often telling us regretfully that they can't hang around working with you guys, when someone else is offering something more flexible.' (Interview 8, FTI)

Importantly, FTI board members and managers emphasized to pioneer organizations that each market growth-oriented decision did not negate extant certification standards but rather introduced additional routes for market participation. For example, the FSP ingredient certification was introduced as a new commodity certification standard alongside the existing product certifications, for which the ATCB rule would still apply.

> 'It gives enough flexibility to really maximize sales. Businesses can choose to use the label in on or off pack communication channels [...]. This suits businesses who want to incorporate Fairtrade into their CSR strategies.' (FTIDOC 13, p. 4)

In brief, by challenging the rigidity of the existing certification standards and presenting the changes as additional ways for businesses to advance the mission of improving producers' livelihoods, FTI sought to legitimize the view of market growth as a requirement for, rather than an obstacle to, mission accomplishment.

## Mission Moralizing

The four market growth-oriented decisions were first resisted by certain pioneer organizations, because each of them represented a step further away from the political dimension present at founding:

> 'In the beginning of the movement [...] there was this long-term ambition to change industry and the way that international trade works [...]. And this long-term perspective has been diluted over time. I think the certification people have not set the bar high enough.' (Interview 35, pioneer organization)

However, consistently and somewhat surprisingly, the contestation by pioneer organizations was primarily voiced in letters to the FTI board and at meetings within the fair trade movement (e.g., OBS 15 to 18; 21), thus rarely reaching external stakeholders such as the media and customers. Moreover, disagreements were voiced intermittently at each mission editing episode, and they seemed to be followed by periods of
relative truce and tolerance of the successive growth-oriented decisions, as illustrated
in our data:

‘To some degree I buy that there are trade-offs between “you can be perfect and have a tiddly market share, or you can be slightly imperfect and have a majority market share”. And FTI has kind of said, “Look, we want a big market share because we want real impact.” I think it’s fair for them to go in that direction, at least to a certain extent.’ (Interview 37, pioneer organization)

We suggest that the limited and intermittent dissent can partly be explained by the in-
creasing combination of legitimation claims through which FTI sought to ‘moralize’ the
edited mission and frame market growth as necessary to achieve such a mission. Our
analysis highlights the use of an increasing diversity of justification discourse and under-
lying practices, which we categorize as relational, certification, impact, and participatory
claiming.

*Relational claiming.* At founding, the pioneer organizations and NFOs had aimed to build a powerful sense of affiliation and empathy between themselves, producers, and consumers. For example, NFO annual reports from the 1990s expressed empathy and solidarity with producers’ personal situations and willingness to create personal bonds with them as both a core dimension of fair trade’s moral legitimacy and a rationale for market growth:

‘We have been working closely with our friends in Haiti and Sierra Leone who have been suffering from military and political crisis. The extra income from fair trade has assisted the coops to rebuild their communities.’ (Havelaar, 1995, p. 3)

Although references to the personal situation of named producers remained present in
subsequent annual reports and documents, it became difficult to rely predominantly on
claims related to the personal relationships with producers and their direct connection
with consumers as fair trade grew and certification standards became more formalized.
The references to producers became increasingly generic (e.g., FTIDOC 11). Indicative
of this direction is the redesign of the Fairtrade certification logo. Shortly after found-
ing, FTI reviewed the disparate country-specific logos, such as the Max Havelaar coffee
farmer (Figure 3). FTI designed a new, more abstract logo that featured ‘a person with a
raised arm representing the optimism of producers’ (Fairtrade Labelling Organizations
International, 2009, p. 23). The redesign of the logo from a realistic portrayal of a farmer
to a highly stylized abstraction of a producer can be seen as emblematic of a standardized
fair trade mission that could be accessible to a broader set of market participants, includ-
ing MNCs.

*Certification claiming* In the 1990s, FTI complemented relational claims with justification claims anchored in its standardization and certification functions. Formalizing the relationship between sales revenue (the means) and producer revenue and impact (the ends), in the 1990s and 2000s FTI increasingly relied on its certification standards and procedures to convince
<figure><img src="image_5.png" /></figure>

1989

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /></figure>

1992

<figure><img src="image_7.png" /></figure>

2002

<caption>Figure 3. Evolution of the Fairtrade certification logo [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]</caption>

pioneer organizations that the aim of supporting small-scale producers was maintained despite the growth-oriented decisions. Shifting the moral legitimation of fair trade from the personal relationships with producers towards the certified products themselves, independent of the organization trading them, was instrumental in enabling market growth:

> ‘There has been a big change [...]. The roots of fair trade were very related to solidarity with producers and this feeling of buying fair trade out of guilt or charity for them. [...] And that message has evolved over time [...] and now we have a more diversified product offering [that is] standardized for different segments of the market.’ (Interview 4, FTI)

FTI staff increasingly employed certification claims to justify the market growth-oriented decisions, such as the FSP and support to in-house corporate sustainability schemes, suggesting that enforcing rigorous certification standards guaranteed compliance with the edited mission:

> ‘The Sourcing Program model is the result of almost two years of detailed research and consultation involving Fairtrade producers, partners, and consumers. Around 200 partners, including over 40 producer organizations around the world took part.’ (FTIDOC 9, p. 2)

Although FTI's technical expertise derived from its work on standard-setting and certification was acknowledged by pioneer organizations, the use of such expertise to legitimize mission editing was not wholly persuasive, requiring complementary claims. A few sceptical pioneer organizations asserted that mission editing contradicted FTI's role, although such criticism was voiced only in internal documents and on specialized websites, for example:

> ‘It is surprising [...] that the trend toward weaker standards and certification of plantations has been led by [FTI], the certifying agency that was charged with upholding fair trade standards.’ (WFTOWEB 6)

*Impact claiming* A third and increasingly rehearsed moral claim employed by FTI was that the market growth-oriented decisions had led to the dramatic increase in sales of
Fairtrade certified products and subsequent producer impact. In other words, while pioneer organizations might not have agreed with all aspects of the decisions, FTI hoped they would be persuaded by the consequences of the decisions in terms of positive impact on producers' livelihoods. Impact claiming became increasingly used in the annual reports and in documents explaining growth-oriented decisions, for example in the communication about FSP: 'Fairtrade Sourcing Programs mean more benefits for farmers, through another way to sell more on Fairtrade terms, [and] more opportunities for businesses to work with Fairtrade or to increase their commitments' (FTIDOC 12, p. 2). Similarly, when pioneer organizations complained about FSP in a joint letter to the FTI board (WFTODOC 25), the board chair downplayed the critiques in his response letter (FTIDOC 11) and insisted that FSP would dramatically increase sales, which would in turn increase producer incomes and social premium payments to communities. Insider field notes (OBS 15 and 16) record how FTI staff persuaded pioneer organizations that FSP was a necessary mechanism to increase sales of Fairtrade certified commodities, for example helping cocoa farmers to increase their revenues through the participation of chocolate biscuit manufacturers in fair trade. Regarding the in-house corporate sustainability schemes, FTI asserted that collaborating with large MNCs would better enable them to monitor impact on producer incomes and empowerment (FTIDOC 16; BOARD, 2017, September). As previously, pioneer organizations voiced their criticisms via meetings with NFOs and FTI (BOARD, 2017, December; OBS 20 and 21). FTI provided assurances regarding levels of MNC investment and associated increases in producer revenues, appeasing the main concerns of the sceptical pioneer organizations (BOARD, 2017, December).

FTI annual reports demonstrate the increase in the use of impact claiming (Figure 4) and the increasing validation of these claims with impact assessment metrics in order to 'prove that fair trade works on a [...] large scale' (FTIAR, 2009, p. 12). Impact metrics

<figure><img src="image_8.png" /><figcaption>Figure 4. Frequency of moral claims</figcaption></figure>
were integrated in all annual reports after 2009. Commencing in 2013, a separate annual
'Monitoring report' was co-created with producers and other stakeholders (e.g., FTIDOC
12). Communicating the quantitative and qualitative impacts of fair trade appeared to suc-
cessfully complement the other claims and help convince pioneer organizations that the at-
tenuation of the political mission could be an acceptable compromise in order to achieve the
edited mission (e.g., OBS 21 and 24). The documents and interviews with pioneer organiza-
tions suggest that FTI's impact claims were effective in overcoming some of their criticism:

'The hypothesis is that if you find a mechanism that supports multinationals to switch their commodities to fair trade, it will unlock substantial growth, [and] therefore increase impact. That's the hypothesis. I think there are some holes in it, but as a direction of travel I actually can't fault that hypothesis.' (Interview 29, pioneer organization)

*Participatory claiming* The fourth moral claim that became increasingly salient over time relied on participatory governance arrangements, first required for producer organizations and then applied by FTI itself. For example, after accepting plantations and abandoning the requirement of producer ownership for producer organizations, pioneer organizations expressed concerns that producers on plantations would not participate in decision-making and that this was contrary to the empowerment objective of fair trade (e.g., WFTODOC 17). FTI managed to keep the pioneer organizations onside through stipulating the establishment of worker associations at certified plantations (e.g., OBS15; 18; WFTOWEB 4).

FTI also redesigned its own governance structure in a participatory way to support its moral legitimation work. At founding, the FTI General Assembly was composed of NFOs, and while small-scale producers were consulted through General Producer Meetings (e.g., FTIAR, 1999), they did not have a formal input into FTI decision-making. In 2001, the FTI board adopted a multi-stakeholder governance structure that comprised NFOs, retailers, and producer representatives in a Stakeholders' Forum. In 2007, to respond to producer demands and demonstrate to pioneer organizations that producer interests remained central (e.g., OBS 8 and 9), the FTI General Assembly integrated the three main producer networks from Africa, Asia, and Latin America as co-owners of FTI. This meant that producer organizations on each continent voted for their representatives to participate in the FTI General Assembly and held seats on the board of directors. Participation of producers in FTI ownership was part of an increasing emphasis on participatory claims, which was salient in the annual reports (Figure 4) and in the communication around the most recent growth-oriented decisions.

In 2013, shortly after the launch of the FSP, the FTI board decided to increase producer ownership to 50 per cent, meaning that producer representatives held half of the seats in the FTI General Assembly (FTIAR, 2014). Instantiating the participation of producers in its ownership enabled FTI to confidently claim that any subsequent market growth-oriented decisions would be taken by, and therefore in the interest of, producers.

'So today Fairtrade International is 50% producer owned so on the board, 50% are producer network seats and so on. That has meant that there is stronger voice in the top-level decision making on decisions that get driven for producer impact.' (Interview 3, FTI)
Specific pioneer organizations still had concerns that producer voices were more diverse than the large, well-established producer organizations involved in FTI governance. Nonetheless, the fact that market growth-oriented decisions were now made by producer representatives who had been democratically elected by all producer organizations made the moral critiques more challenging to voice, especially in public.

In Figure 4, we depict the evolution of the four mission moralizing claims between 1989 and 2018, as identified in the annual reports. To trace this evolution, we examined the proportion of the use of keywords related to each claim (5) with regard to the total number of claim-related keywords in each report (20). While FTI initially relied on one dominant claim (relational and later certification claims), it increasingly employed a combination of claims including impact and participatory claims, which increased over time. Over the last decade, and in particular for the two most recent growth-oriented decisions, FTI managed to skilfully combine the four types of claims to (re)fuel the moral legitimation of fair trade after editing the mission in a way that increasingly attenuated the political ambition present at founding.

## Mission Stabilizing

After editing and moralizing the mission at each change episode, a third recurrent aspect of FTT's mission work was to stabilize the edited mission as a new basis for collaboration in the moral market. To counterbalance the mission editing episodes and reassure pioneer organizations that the remaining founding principles of fair trade were not at risk of being abandoned, FTI emphasized continuity with the roots of fair trade and some of its intangible principles and advanced the feeling of common fate to unite market participants.

*Displaying continuity.* After each market growth-oriented decision-making process, FTI deliberately sought to minimize the extent to which the mission of fair trade and its certification standards were actually changed. To do so, FTI and its member NFOs emphasized continuity with the social mission of improving producers’ livelihoods, which they reframed *ex post* as the sole founding mission:

> 'Despite our increased presence on mainstream markets, we will remain true to the spirit of our initiative: improving the position of the small farmers in the Third World. That position always remains our guiding principle.' (MHAR, 1993, p. 2)
> 
> 'We are not changing the rules. [...] Fairtrade Sourcing Programs mean [...] more opportunities for businesses to support producers.' (FTIDOC 7, p. 2)

Reiterating continuity despite the substantive changes made to the moral mission and its attendant standards, the FTI board also emphasized that there were red lines that would never be crossed (e.g., OBS 17 to 20; FTIDOC 18). We observed three red lines in our analysis. First, the principle of the minimum price that fair trade participants had to uphold even when market prices were falling. Second, the right for producers to decide on the use of the fair trade social premium to finance community projects of their choice. Third, that plantations and non-producer-owned businesses would be certified only for commodities where it was impossible to source from producer-owned organizations, such
as bananas and tea. FTI documents and interviews acknowledge that flexibility should
be bounded by some principles:

> ‘If we are to retain public support, we must be more dynamic and adaptable to the business environment, but we must also remain constant in our fight against poverty [...]. We can do both if we have clarity and agreement on our long-term goals and hold fast to our unchanging beliefs and values.’ (FTIDOC 5, p. 3)

The three red lines we noted were regularly asserted and tested, as illustrated in interac-
tions between FTI and Fairtrade USA (2011), Sainsbury's (2017), and Nestlé (2019). In
2010, Fairtrade USA (the national NFO) lobbied FTI for greater flexibility and launched
its own scheme called ‘Fair Trade for All’, in which it proposed to certify plantation
commodities, such as coffee and other commodities for which producer-owned suppli-
ers existed. The FTI board refused to endorse this action because it would cross one of
their red lines, a decision that most pioneer organizations supported (OBS 20 and 21;
WFTOWEB 4). Combined with other disagreements, this led Fairtrade USA to with-
draw from FTI in 2011.

Another significant test came in 2017, when Sainsbury's launched an in-house 'fairly traded' scheme for its own-branded tea and sought FTI endorsement. The FTI board refused because the administration of the fair trade social premium was to be retained in the Sainsbury's Charity Foundation and therefore did not meet the principle of producer autonomy to decide social premium use (BOARD, 2017, September). FTI organized consultations with pioneer organizations, activists, and producer networks to discuss joint advocacy campaigns targeted at Sainsbury's. African tea producer groups wrote an open letter to Sainsbury's board, denouncing the scheme as 'colonialist' (PRESSDOC 6), and Sainsbury's annual general meetings in 2017 and 2018 were disrupted by fair trade activists. Sainsbury's ultimately abandoned the 'fairly traded' scheme and in 2019 resumed buying Fairtrade certified tea (BOARD, 2019, April).

Finally, in 2019, Nestlé approached FTI to request a similar concession, i.e., per-
mission to divert fair trade social premium payments into an in-house sustainability
project, ‘Cocoa Plan’. FTI board members again agreed that Nestlé’s demands would
cross a red line (BOARD, 2019, June). FTI refused the request and rallied support
from pioneer organizations, activists, and Ivorian cocoa farmers to lobby Nestlé (OBS
17). Due to this pressure, Nestlé accepted that it would continue paying the Fairtrade
minimum price for its ongoing contracts, after which it finally abandoned Fairtrade
certification.

These three examples demonstrate how FTI navigated between introducing new certi-
fication standards to accommodate MNCs and ensure market growth, on the one hand,
and limiting flexibility to appease pioneer organizations' concerns and sustain moral
legitimation on the other. The refusal of FTI to accede to MNC demands was welcomed
positively by pioneer organizations because it signalled that a core part of the fair trade
moral mission was non-negotiable.

*Emphasizing common fate.* Beyond representing a notable part of FTI licensee fees, the strategic value of pioneer organizations was important for FTI. Indeed, through the
WFTO federation, the pioneer organizations acted as the guardians of the fair trade founding mission on behalf of morally sensitive audiences, including consumers and volunteers involved in the grassroots trade justice movement. Therefore, after making and justifying each market growth-oriented decision, the FTI board sought to strengthen their collaboration with pioneer organizations and rally their support for the edited mission. For example, after concentrating on fair trade mainstreaming in the late 1990s, in 2001 FTI worked with pioneer organizations to jointly launch the 'Fairtrade Towns' campaign and persuade towns and cities to advocate for, and purchase, fair trade products (OBS 3, 6 and 9). In 2004, after the decision to certify plantation-grown commodities, FTI and WFTO established a joint 'Fair Trade Advocacy Office' to campaign for European level fair(er) trade support and regulation. In 2009, building on their 1999 work on the definition of fair trade, FTI and WFTO developed a 'Fair Trade Charter' (WFTODOC 21) to codify their common values and principles. In 2018, after agreeing to support in-house corporate sustainability schemes, FTI worked with WFTO to update the Fair Trade Charter (WFTODOC 33). These actions enabled FTI to maintain connections with and respond effectively to pioneer organizations' concerns, leading to periods of relative 'truce' in between the growth-oriented decisions. Pioneer organizations acknowledged the mutual dependence and complementary roles between FTI and themselves, which further helps to explain their reluctance to publicly oppose FTI's market growth-oriented decisions:

> 'I think the two are consistent with each other. It did start off as an alternative model and then the certification came up as a solution for companies that can't be an alternative but maybe can have part of their ingredients as an alternative. I think that's not selling out that original vision. It's just creating a practical thing that's been a strong success. I see the two as being one [and] the same.' (Interview 43, WFTO)

In such stabilized truce periods, pioneer organizations continued to regret FTI's decisions to abandon some of the principles inherent in the founding mission, and full consensus was never reached. Nevertheless, most pioneer organizations agreed to move on and show a united face to external stakeholders, fearing that openly challenging FTI would threaten the moral legitimacy of the fair trade moral market as a whole and therefore their own organizational legitimacy:

> 'Some criticism is good, but it depends how you say it. Otherwise, you risk taking down the whole thing and then we all get into trouble.' (Interview 24, pioneer organization)

> 'It's tricky to explain without undermining the whole system, because the moment we go out and say, "FTI has lost its way", potentially the media run a very different story, which is "the whole fair trade movement has lost its way".' (Interview 36, pioneer organization)

To conclude, Table III summarizes how FTI performed the three types of mission work across the different market growth episodes.
<table><caption>Table III. Overview of findings</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>Inclusion of non-specialized businesses (1992-93)</th><th>Inclusion of plantations as producer organizations (2004-05)</th><th>Fairtrade sourcing program (2012-13)</th><th>In-house corporate sustainability schemes (2018-20)</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Mission Editing</td><td>Specialization abandoned: Market participants no longer need to be 100% fair trade-focused</td><td>Producer ownership abandoned: Producer organizations no longer need to be owned by them</td><td>ATCB rule abandoned: All ingredients no longer need to be fair trade even if fair trade certified available</td><td>FTI engagement uniformity abandoned: FTI support no longer needs to apply equally to all licensees</td></tr><tr><td>Mission trimming</td><td>Market opened to commercial businesses including MNCs and mainstream retailers</td><td>Market opened to non-producer-owned MNC suppliers, including plantations</td><td>Market opened to composite food products with only one fair trade ingredient</td><td>Endorsement of in-house corporate sustainability schemes</td></tr><tr><td>Mission flexing</td><td>Market opened to commercial businesses including MNCs and mainstream retailers</td><td>Market opened to non-producer-owned MNC suppliers, including plantations</td><td>Market opened to non-producer-owned MNC suppliers, including plantations</td><td>Market opened to non-producer-owned MNC suppliers, including plantations</td></tr><tr><td>Mission Moralizing</td><td>High</td><td>Medium</td><td>Low</td><td>Medium</td></tr><tr><td>Relational claiming</td><td>High</td><td>High</td><td>High</td><td>Medium</td></tr><tr><td>Certification claiming</td><td>Low</td><td>High</td><td>High</td><td>High</td></tr><tr><td>Impact claiming</td><td>Low</td><td>Medium</td><td>High</td><td>High</td></tr><tr><td>Participatory claiming</td><td>Low</td><td>Low</td><td>Medium</td><td>High</td></tr><tr><td>Mission Stabilizing</td><td>Recalling historical roots and enforcing red lines</td><td>Recalling historical roots and enforcing red lines</td><td>Recalling historical roots and enforcing red lines</td><td>Recalling historical roots and enforcing red lines</td></tr><tr><td>Displaying continuity</td><td>One movement with two market participation avenues</td><td>Fair Trade Charter FINE Definition Fairtrade Towns Fair Trade Advocacy Office</td><td>Collaboration initiatives with pioneer organizations</td><td>Updated Fair Trade Charter</td></tr><tr><td>Emphasizing common fate</td><td>One movement with two market participation avenues</td><td>Fair Trade Charter FINE Definition Fairtrade Towns Fair Trade Advocacy Office</td><td>Collaboration initiatives with pioneer organizations</td><td>Updated Fair Trade Charter</td></tr></tbody></table>

© 2023 The Authors. *Journal of Management Studies* published by Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
DISCUSSION AND CONTRIBUTIONS

We set out to explain how the delicate balancing of market growth and moral legitima-
tion can be achieved in moral markets. Our findings demonstrate how, in the face of
substantial changes to the moral mission to enable market growth, mission work enables
moral market mediators to ensure the support of pioneer organizations as key partners
in sustaining moral legitimation. Without such mission work, FTI's changes could have
led pioneer organizations to publicly voice critiques of mission drift, thereby negatively
affecting the perception of other audiences such as customers and funders and triggering
a moral de-legitimation process (Lee et al., 2017; Wry and Zhao, 2018). Based on our
findings, we theorize three types of mission work that are recursively mobilized to (re)
fuel moral legitimation after each market growth-oriented decision (see Figure 5). First,
mission editing aims to limit the de-legitimizing potential of the growth-oriented deci-
sions: while each of them is initially contested by pioneer organizations, the amplitude
of the contestation is limited by market mediator work to foreground the dimension
of the moral mission that is consistent with market growth (in our case, the quantita-
tive interpretation of the social mission) while downplaying the other dimensions of the
mission that are less compatible with market growth (in our case, the political project of
building an alternative to conventional trade). Second, the edited mission is then morally
(re)legitimized through combining an increasingly diversified set of moral claims aiming

<figure><img src="image_9.png" /><figcaption>Figure 5. A model of market mediator mission work</figcaption></figure>
to demonstrate the relevance of market growth to achieving the edited mission. Finally, the market mediator stabilizes the edited mission and engages pioneer organizations to maintain their support to moral market legitimation, enforcing red lines and emphasizing the common fate uniting all market participants. Through these three dimensions, mission work enables periods of relative truce to emerge around the edited, stabilized mission – until new opportunities for market growth through MNC participation lead the market mediator to make further growth-oriented decisions, leading to a new cycle of mission work. Therefore, as illustrated in Figure 5, mission work enables a market mediator to sustain moral legitimation over time through balancing the impulse to become more flexible towards MNCs with the pressure from pioneer organizations to uphold the founding moral mission. Below we explain how our findings extend knowledge on moral markets, moral legitimation, and mission work.

First, we contribute to the emerging scholarship on moral markets. Prior research on moral market growth has mainly focused on the ways in which new market participants are attracted into the market (Durand and Georgallis, 2018; Georgallis and Lee, 2020; Hedberg and Lounsbury, 2021). In this context, the attention to pioneer organizations has been limited to describing how they tend to be either co-opted or diluted in the process of market growth (Jaffee, 2010; Lee et al., 2017; Munir et al., 2021). In contrast, our work shifts the attention towards the interactions between the market mediator and the pioneer organizations as a critical relationship underlying the market's moral legitimation. More particularly, we highlight how market mediators can take advantage of two specific features of moral markets. First, the founding mission of moral markets is often multidimensional, with a bundle of moral concerns articulated to imbue market exchanges with moral worth (Balsiger, 2021; Becchetti and Huybrechts, 2008). Such multidimensionality enables market mediators to adjust the relative focus on constituent dimensions of the founding mission. Our findings show, however, that such relative focus is constrained by how market mediators set red lines that demarcate the extent of mission editing that pioneer organizations will accept if they are to sustain their support (McCaffrey and Kurland, 2014; Weber et al., 2008).

In addition, prior research has also noted the interconnectedness of organization- and market-level moral legitimacy judgements (Lee et al., 2017; Siltaoja et al., 2020), as captured through the notion of ‘shared fate’ (Hiatt and Park, 2022). While prior research has explored how shared fate is built by market participants themselves (Hiatt and Park, 2022; Lee et al., 2018a; Weber et al., 2008), our findings suggest that shared fate can also be intentionally cultivated by a market mediator as part of its mission work. Building shared fate appears critical to managing the diversity of market participants, including MNCs and pioneer organizations, and spurs the latter to support market growth even if mission editing contradicts certain principles of the founding moral mission.

Second, our analysis emphasizes the role of market mediators in orchestrating moral legitimation as a complex process comprising phases of conflict (Glozer et al., 2019; Luyckx and Janssens, 2016), which are inherent in mission editing to achieve market growth, and temporary truces (Buchanan et al., 2022; Reinecke et al., 2017; Reinecke and Ansari, 2015), which are necessary to maintain the support of pioneer organizations (see Figure 5). Through emphasizing continuity with certain dimensions of the founding
mission and presenting change as limited and unavoidable, mission editing tempers the risk of moral de-legitimation resulting from growth-oriented decisions (Georgallis and Lee, 2020; Lee et al., 2017). By doing so, our findings challenge the somewhat fatalistic perspective that changing the defining rules of a moral market necessarily triggers moral de-legitimation by pioneer organizations and, in cascade, by morally sensitive audiences (Jaffee, 2010; McCaffrey and Kurland, 2014; White et al., 2012).

Moreover, we extend previous work on moral ‘polyphony’ (Glozer et al., 2019) or ‘multiplexity’ (Reinecke et al., 2017) beyond the setting of divergent stakeholder voices (Palazzo and Scherer, 2006; Scherer et al., 2013) by documenting how a central, overarching orchestrator (the market mediator) articulates a diversity of moral claims over time. Market growth challenges the foundational anchoring of moral legitimation within personal relationships, requiring the employment of other types of moral claims, such as procedural claims, consistent with the role of market mediators as regulators of the moral market (Georgallis and Lee, 2020; Hedberg and Lounsbury, 2021), impact-related claims, consistent with the rise of impact discourse as a legitimation device (e.g., Nicholls, 2010), and participatory claims, whereby the market mediator anchors moral legitimation in its own structural characteristics (Battilana and Lee, 2014; Smith and Besharov, 2019). These findings document how moral claim plurality, previously theorized in the context of multiple stakeholder dialogue (Palazzo and Scherer, 2006; Reinecke et al., 2017; Scherer et al., 2013), can also be leveraged strategically by an actor (here, the market mediator) coordinating the legitimation efforts of multiple market participants over time. In this context, we highlight the importance of engaging with a ‘moral guardian’ (here, pioneer organizations) whose support is vital in ensuring positive moral legitimacy judgements from a broader array of external audiences (Haack et al., 2021; Haack and Rasche, 2021; Tost, 2011).

Finally, our findings extend our understanding of mission work and mission drift in two important ways. First, while prior research has adopted an organization-level focus (Battilana and Lee, 2014; Davies and Doherty, 2019; Ometto et al., 2019), we extend mission work to the market level. We emphasize how mission work helps a market mediator to coordinate legitimation efforts on behalf of market participants with different views on how the founding mission should evolve (Balsiger, 2021; Munir et al., 2021). We show how, when compared with individual organizations, the outcome of mission work may impact the moral market as a whole, thereby incentivizing all market participants to maintain their support (Pozner et al., 2014; Siltaoja et al., 2020). Moreover, by documenting mission work from a legitimacy-as-process perspective, we complement extant work that frames mission drift as a matter of audience perceptions (Grimes et al., 2019). Therefore, we contribute to shifting the view of mission drift from an objective to a subjective phenomenon, i.e., from considering what has objectively changed in the founding mission to understanding how the perception and legitimation of change can be influenced through skillful mission work.

**Boundary Conditions, Limitations, and Future Research**

Our findings are constrained by three important boundary conditions, which correspond to both limitations and opportunities for future research. First, our research has focused
on a moral market in which one market mediator has been the key player in regulating and developing the market in the context of a ‘unified’ configuration (Buchanan et al., 2022). Yet, other moral markets may have ‘bifurcated’ or ‘fragmented’ configurations (Buchanan et al., 2022) wherein two or more market mediators, respectively, co-exist (Reinecke et al., 2012); these configurations are found in moral markets such as organic food (DuPuis and Gillon, 2009) and ethical investment (Arjaliès and Durand, 2019). The mission work we have theorized here for one market mediator is unlikely to apply if several mediators co-exist. In this case, each mediator will have its own understanding of the moral mission (Buchanan et al., 2022), and pioneer organizations are likely either to ally with one particular mediator or to become diluted in an increasingly fragmented landscape (Bartley, 2007; Munir et al., 2021). Future research could examine how competing mission work is dealt with by different market mediators and how moral legitimation can be performed by each of them in such a complexified context, building for example on previous work on the co-existence of sustainability standards (Haack and Rasche, 2021; Reinecke et al., 2012).

Second, our work has focused on how mission work is managed when pioneer organizations position themselves as guardians of the moral mission and their support is therefore critical to sustaining moral legitimation (Balsiger, 2021; Lee et al., 2018b; McCaffrey and Kurland, 2014). However, this condition may not hold in other moral markets, for example when there are multiple market mediators as described above, or when pioneer organizations do not represent a cohesive group (Siltaoja et al., 2020; Yunus, 2011). In these cases, moral legitimation may not involve pioneer organizations but rather rely on the support of other audiences such as consumers, beneficiaries, governments, and the media, each of which may hold specific moral expectations (Palazzo and Scherer, 2006; Reinecke et al., 2017). For example, beneficiaries may voice concerns about the achievement of the edited mission, thereby undermining market mediator mission work (Gendron et al., 2009). Consumers may also form their own moral expectations and rely, for example, on consumer associations to assess the strength and relevance of moral legitimacy claims (White et al., 2012). As the fidelity with the founding moral mission will be less relevant to these legitimating audiences, building moral legitimation is likely to imply other types of legitimation claims and discursive strategies (Glozer et al., 2019; Suddaby and Greenwood, 2005). Future work could investigate whether and how moral market growth and moral legitimation can be balanced in this case and build on legitimation strategies that differ from mission work (e.g., Lee et al., 2017; Palazzo and Scherer, 2006).

Third, our findings and contributions are influenced by the nature of the fair trade moral market, in which it was possible to edit the mission and focus on the quantifiable social dimension of increasing producer revenues, which facilitated growth. In other moral markets where the mission is more difficult to standardize, or the dimensions of the founding mission are more intertwined, mission editing may be more complicated, as evidenced for example in local alternative food (McCaffrey and Kurland, 2014; Michel, 2020) or community-based renewable energy (Huybrechts and Haugh, 2018; Mitzinneck and Besharov, 2019). Future research might examine the salience and effectiveness of mission editing, moralizing, and stabilizing when the founding mission is less amenable to standardization. Future work could also compare
mission work across moral markets guided by different types of missions (see, for example, Child, 2015).

To conclude, although we have focused on a moral market founded to pursue a so-
cietally desirable moral mission, our work has implications for research on the moral-
ization of ‘conventional’ markets (Balsiger, 2021; Dubuisson-Quellier, 2013; Hedberg
and Lounsbury, 2021). In line with the theorization of mission work as relevant for
any type of organization (Grimes et al., 2019), future research could examine how, in
conventional markets, mission work is performed to build moral legitimacy in the first
place, and how this process differs from what we observe in markets that are defined
at founding by moral claims. Moral markets, as we have highlighted here, may serve
as emblematic cases to help us better understand mission work as an increasingly im-
portant moral legitimation capability that could potentially be deployed in any type
of market.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Our warmest thanks go to editor Christopher Wickert for his guidance along the process, and to the three anonymous reviewers who have provided us with very useful insights to improve this article. We would also like to thank the many colleagues who have brought helpful feedback and suggestions on earlier versions of this article: Roy Suddaby, Anna Kim, Royston Greenwood, Patrick Haack, and Andreas Rasche; and the participants in several research events including the “Working through Rhetoric in Management and Marketing” seminar at the School for Business and Society at the University of York, the STORM seminar at emlyon Business School, the ICOR seminar at IESEG School of Management, the Centre for Social Economy seminar at HEC Liège School of Management, and sub-theme 29 (“Values, Organizations and Institutions”) at the 34th EGOS Colloquium in Tallinn. Finally, our many thanks go to the interviewees and members of fair trade organizations who have shared their insights and helped us capture the evolution of the fair trade moral market.

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