The terminology employed to explore consumption ethics, the counterpart to business ethics, is increasingly varied not least because consumption has become a central discourse and area of ...investigation across disciplines (e.g. Graeber, 2011). Rather than assuming interchangeability, we argue that these differences signify divergent understandings and contextual nuances and should, therefore, inform future writing and understanding in this area. Accordingly, this article advances consumer ethics scholarship through a systematic review of the current literature that identifies key areas of convergence and contradiction. We then present the articles in this Journal of Business Ethics Symposium and analyse how these articles fit within the interdisciplinary themes. Subsequently, we develop a transdisciplinary theoretical framework that encapsulates the complexity and contextual nature of consumption ethics. We conclude by outlining how genuinely transdisciplinary research into the intersection of ethics with consumption may develop.
Posterscapes Chatzidakis, Andreas
City (London, England),
06/2018, Volume:
22, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The photo essay that follows this introduction tells a story of solidarity in the streets of Exarcheia, a small neighbourhood in central Athens with disproportionately large historic and political ...significance. Known, rather sensationally, as the 'world's only anarchist neighbourhood' (Vradis and Dalakoglou 2011) and as the centre of 'anarchist renaissance in Europe' (Arampatzi and Nicholls 2012), Exarcheia has long been the stronghold of Greek urban resistance: including, among others, the 1973 polytechnic uprising against the military junta and the December 2008 riots. Like the rest of Athens, however, Exarcheia has been more recently subjected to, and challenged by, the Greek crisis (e.g. The Economist 2015), the biggest economic contraction ever recorded in a contemporary Western economy during peacetime.
Gendering consumer ethics Chatzidakis, Andreas; Maclaran, Pauline
International journal of consumer studies,
July 2020, Volume:
44, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Consumer ethics research has greatly enhanced our knowledge of the social and environmental consequences and considerations of consumption choices. We argue, however, that gender theory introduces ...important aspects of ethical enquiry currently overlooked. To build our argument, we undertake a critical literature review that assesses current gender theory and related applications in gender and consumption research. In doing so, we offer a conceptual pathway that elucidates the intersection of gender with consumer ethics in relation to three distinct levels of understanding; socio‐economic, embodied‐affective and representational. Although fundamentally intertwined, for our current purposes, these are analytically distinct. Implications and avenues for future research into gendering consumer ethics are discussed.
This short commentary introduces some key threads of feminist critique to the economy and market-centrism that foreground processes of care, intimacy and interdependency that are currently largely ...invisible and undervalued. In so doing, we propose that there are some common themes underpinning more radically progressive feminist understandings of the economy that can unsettle some of our discipline's taken-for-granted assumptions about the role and nature of markets and consumption. First, they do so by resisting the subordination of our human economic activity to market activity, second, by foregrounding vulnerability and interdependence rather than individual (consumer) agency and sovereignty, and third, by questioning the reduction of our values to market value.
Despite the reasonable explanatory power of existing models of consumers' ethical decision making, a large part of the process remains unexplained. This article draws on previous research and ...proposes an integrated model that includes measures of the theory of planned behavior, personal norms, self-identity, neutralization, past experience, and attitudinal ambivalence. We postulate and test a variety of direct and moderating effects in the context of a large scale survey study in London, UK. Overall, the resulting model represents an empirically robust and holistic attempt to identify the most important determinants of consumers' support for the fair-trade movement. Implications and avenues for further research are discussed.
Care, in all its permutations, is the buzzword of the moment, its meanings draining away in its constant evocation. Here, we briefly expand on older and newer meanings of care in the wake of ...Covid-19. These include the increasingly blurred boundaries between what has been traditionally understood as "care work" versus "essential work"; desperate attempts by corporations to promote themselves as 'caring'; and the adoption of reactionary rather than progressive models of 'care' by populist leaders such as Trump, Johnson, and Bolsonaro. We then argue that we are in urgent need of a politics that recognises our mutual interdependence and vulnerability. Rejecting the extensive carelessness so evident today, our model of 'universal care' calls for inventive forms of collective care at every scale of life. We envisage a world in which genuine care is everywhere -from our most intimate ties to our relationship with the planet itself.
Research into consumer ethics has grown considerably over the last two decades. However, most studies adopt either a psychological or a socio-cultural approach and there has been little in the way of ...bridging the two together. Accordingly, we draw on Kleinian psychoanalysis as a means of advancing an explicitly psycho-social understanding of consumer ethics. Following an emerging tradition that conceptualizes moral dilemmas as questions of care, rather than abstract principles of moral and environmental justice, we conceptualize consumer care as a capacity that for its extension across difference and distance is subject to a variety of biographical, inter-subjective and institutional-level processes. Subsequently, we attempt to redress forms of theoretical reductionism noted in both psychological and socio-cultural accounts of everyday morality in consumption. We corroborate a more nuanced, mid-ground conceptualization that neither precludes nor overstates the possibility of consumer agency while also locating agency in inanimate objects. Finally, we offer a methodological contribution by introducing a psychoanalytic (Kleinian) approach to analyzing textual and visual data.
While research has examined the plight of vulnerable workers, the role of consumers who drive demand for slave-based services and products has been largely neglected. This is an important gap given ...both historical evidence of the effectiveness of 18th and 19th century anti-slavery consumer activism and recent attempts to regulate slavery through harnessing consumer power, such as the UK’s Modern Slavery Act 2015. This article draws on data from in-depth interviews with 40 consumers, to identify their understanding of modern slavery, before revealing the neutralising and legitimising techniques they use to justify their (in)action. Our findings contribute to, and extend, neutralisation theory by exploring its applicability in this unique context. We also position techniques of legitimisation as central to understanding how modern slavery is tolerated through a variety of discursive and institutional factors.
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