Tapia Reyes, Alexandre
[UCL]
Lambert, Nicolas
[UCL]
Lejeune, Christophe
[UCL]
In an increasingly unequal world, a genuine consumer awareness of unfair commercial practices has been noticed over the last decade. This willingness to fight unfair commercial practice has been showed up in the outstanding increase of Fairtrade sales. But is this desire to combat unfair commercial practices linked to culture? This master thesis focuses on answering this interrogation. It concentrates on the culture and its impact on the consumption of Fairtrade products. To determine whether the culture has an impact or not, we firstly defined the different concepts, i.e. the Fairtrade movement, the concept of culture according to Hofstede and the World Value Survey. We can define their theory as such: Hofstede’s cultural dimension theory is based on the idea that a value can be assigned on six cultural dimensions. These are power (equality versus inequality), collectivism (versus individualism), avoidance of uncertainty (versus acceptance of uncertainty), masculinity (versus femininity), short-term orientation (versus long-term orientation), and restraint (versus indulgence). World value survey argues that there are two major dimensions of cross-cultural variation in the world. The first one being the traditional values against the secular rational values, the second one being survival values against self-expression values. In order to find evidence between the link of certain cultural dimension and the consumption of Fairtrade, we used statistical tools (Pearson's Linear Correlation, simple linear regression, multiple linear regression, Spearman's correlation). Although the results of Pearson's Linear correlation were convincing at first on 4 cultural dimensions (Power distance, Indulgence, Self expression and uncertainty avoidance). It turns out that among all the linear regression with those 4 cultural dimensions (single and multiple), only a single linear regression proves to be significant (the relationship between power distance and FT consumption). All in all, the statistical linear analyses made in this master thesis demonstrates that only the Power distance dimension (as described by Hofstede) is linearly related to Fairtrade consumption. Nevertheless, while the relation between certain dimension of the culture and the consumption of Fairtrade is not linear, we discovered that the relation between Fairtrade and 4 cultural dimensions tend to be monotonic. The Spearman correlation between each 4 cultural dimensions demonstrate a weak/moderate correlation and they are all significant.
Bibliographic reference |
Tapia Reyes, Alexandre. What is the impact of national cultural dimensions on the consumption of Fairtrade labelled products around the world?. Louvain School of Management, Université catholique de Louvain, 2021. Prom. : Lambert, Nicolas ; Lejeune, Christophe. |
Permanent URL |
http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/thesis:28131 |