Making a difference: ethical consumption and the everyday

Abstract

Our everyday shopping practices are increasingly marketed as opportunities to 'make a difference' via our ethical consumption choices. In response to a growing body of work detailing the ways in which specific alignments of 'ethics' and 'consumption' are mediated, we explore how 'ethical' opportunities such as the consumption of Fairtrade products are recognized, experienced and taken-up in the everyday. The 'everyday' is approached here via a specially commissioned Mass Observation directive, a volunteer panel of correspondents in the UK. Our on-going thematic analysis of their autobiographical accounts aims to explore a complex unevenness in the ways 'ordinary' people experience and negotiate calls to enact their ethical agency through consumption. Situating ethical consumption, moral obligation and choice in the everyday is, we argue, important if we are to avoid both over-exaggerating the reflexive and self-conscious sensibilities involved in ethical consumption, and, adhering to a reductive understanding of ethical self-expression.

The Sustainable Seafood Movement Is a Governance Concert, with the Audience Playing a Key Role

“…A shopper who trusts certain labels, such as Fair Trade, can thus be helped by those labels, at least in terms of being relieved of the work of finding out the ethicality of products. However, not all shoppers believe the claims behind the labels, and some indeed see ethical branding as just cynical marketing [47]. Even with ecolabels, consumers still need to weigh up between products, and that decision-making must be repeated for each item in the shopping basket.…”

“…Qualitative investigations into the ethics of shopping have revealed that rather than some consumers having ethical concerns and others not, in addition to the environmental and social conditions of production concerns more commonly thought of for ethical consumption, shopping always has ethical dimensions, such as caring for one's family, demonstrating thrift, even asserting national identity and political values [47,[49][50][51]. Two consumers making polar opposite choices about what to buy may both have an ethical framework underpinning their choice [51].…”

“…With the most recent wave of ethical consumerism starting in the late twentieth century, market researchers have been trying to work out how consumers who are susceptible to ethical marketing shop. They found the ethical consumer to be an elusive subject and attempts to type shoppers in terms of personality and demographics to predict their commitment to environmental conservation in shopping behaviour have not been very successful [30,47]. The reasons for the inability to identify shoppers who will reliably buy products marketed as green include: (a) there is large variation between types of green consumers; (b) social and environmental ethics do not always trump other values such as quality and price; (c) some green consumers are more committed than others; (d) different types of green consumers respond to different sources of information about the ethicality of products; (e) people may have an ethical concern for one product type but not others; and (f) consumers' ethics regarding shopping may change over their lifetime [21,30,48].…”

“…The higher cost of products labelled as socially and environmentally responsible conflicts with a thrift ethic. A fair trade organic cotton shirt is incompatible with reducing one's ecological footprint by buying less [38,47,50]. Survey and interview research with consumers on their values around seafood in the USA found that in addition to sustainability, other concerns consumers have while purchasing seafood include price, nutritional value, and concerns about antibiotics and other additives [29].…”

A greater share of the stomach?

“…in supporting either local food and/or Fairtrade products imported from other countries. Consumers may struggle when making ethical choices whilst considering to support British products or international food products (Adams and Raisborough, 2010). Vermeir and Verbeke (2006) also found that limited information and/or more complex or contradictory information may result in uncertainty among consumers on what products to purchase.…”