Consumer Versus Corporate Moral Responsibilities for Creating a Circular Fashion: Virtue or Accountability?

Abstract

Scholars in the fashion discipline have become more attentive to investigating how the fashion business can become more circular. In the past, many of the studies focused on identifying the supporting and/or hindering factors when creating a circular fashion (CF). Despite the insights these studies provide, their contributions are relatively limited in that many of them are exploratory in nature and skewed toward understanding CF from the stance of fashion companies who are situated at the supply side of the fashion economy. In contrast, little attention has been given to how consumers, on the demand side, perceive a CF. We employed a mixed-method approach using 332 respondents’ narrative data and empirically identified whether consumers attribute moral responsibility to fashion companies as well as to themselves for creating a CF and, if so, whether there are any nuanced differences in their perceptions of consumer versus corporate moral responsibilities for a CF.

Marketing Sustainable Fashion: Trends and Future Directions

“…Both consumers and companies are morally responsible for creating circular fashion. However, consumers assume that businesses are for creating circular fashion as they created the fast fashion problem [75]. Lack of suitable infrastructure and expertise, establishing reverse logistic schemes, consumer behavior, and communication of service propositions are some barriers to creating a circular fashion economy [76].…”

“…Older consumers are more involved in ethical consumption [88]. Most papers have taken women respondents as the target population, arguing that women tend to purchase SF more than the other genders [29,30,75,[102][103][104]. They are also more likely to rent clothing online [80].…”

“…SF pricing in such outlets could generate relevant theories for wider SF adoption. SF in emerging markets: Most of the existing research has been performed in developed economies whose social, cultural, and political settings differ from other nations' [29,30,75,[102][103][104]. The claims from the existing research cannot necessarily be generalized for developing or under-developed nations.…”

Communicating Moral Responsibility: Stakeholder Capitalism, Types, and Perceptions

“…In the last two decades, scholarly interests related to CMR have peaked in marketing [12] and management [59]. However, the question of how corporations' inconsistencies related to their promised and executed moral responsibilities affect their stakeholders' perceptions, specifically internal stakeholders, presented a research gap important to address.…”

“…Despite extensive research on general divergences of corporate communication and behaviors and their impacts, the literature to date largely focuses on external stakeholders and remains highly limited as regards internal stakeholders. While CMR inconsistencies compromise stakeholders' perceptions, commitments, and behavioral responses, most of these studies are oriented toward external stakeholders, specifically consumers [10,12]. Corporate hypocrisy, conceptualized as stakeholders' belief that corporations pretend to have virtuous character but act inconsistently with their publicly communicated moral personalities [13], has especially sparked a strong scholarly interest in understanding external stakeholders' reactions to CMR messages and action inconsistencies [10,14].…”