Making a difference: ethical consumption and the everyday.

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.

[1]  Dorothy Sheridan,et al.  Writing to the Archive: Mass-Observation as Autobiography , 1993 .

[2]  Danny Miller,et al.  A Theory of Shopping , 1999 .

[3]  C. Barnett,et al.  The Political Rationalities of Fair-Trade Consumption in the United Kingdom , 2007 .

[4]  Charlotte Opal,et al.  Fair Trade: Market-Driven Ethical Consumption , 2005 .

[5]  D. Shaw,et al.  Identifying fair trade in consumption choice , 2006 .

[6]  Isabelle Szmigin,et al.  Empowerment, waste and new consumption communities , 2006 .

[7]  Michele Micheletti,et al.  Political virtue and shopping , 2003 .

[8]  Paul Cloke,et al.  Consuming Ethics: Articulating the Subjects and Spaces of Ethical Consumption , 2005 .

[9]  Marylyn Carrigan,et al.  Do consumers really care about corporate responsibility? Highlighting the attitude—behaviour gap , 2000 .

[10]  Helene Cherrier,et al.  Ethical consumption practices: co‐production of self‐expression and social recognition , 2007 .

[11]  Sarah McNicol,et al.  Investigating non-use of libraries in the UK using the mass-observation archive , 2004, J. Libr. Inf. Sci..

[12]  Len Tiu Wright,et al.  Fair Trade marketing: an exploration through qualitative research , 2006 .

[13]  P. Bourdieu.  Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste* , 2018, Food and Culture.

[14]  M. Goodman.  Reading fair trade: political ecological imaginary and the moral economy of fair trade foods , 2004 .

[15]  Alistair Black,et al.  In the public eye , 2002, J. Libr. Inf. Sci..

[16]  R. Caruana.  A sociological perspective of consumption morality , 2007 .

[17]  Dorothy Sheridan.  Damned anecdotes and dangerous confabulations: Mass-Observation as Life History , 1996 .

[18]  Gill Valentine,et al.  Eating In: Home, Consumption and Identity , 1999 .

[19]  J. Labelle.  A Recipe for Connectedness , 2004 .

[20]  C. Barnett,et al.  THE CONSUMER : DOING POLITICS IN AN ETHICAL REGISTER , 2022 .

[21]  Iván Risueño.  Michele Micheletti: Political virtue and shopping. Individuals, consumerism and collective action. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2003 , 2004 .

[22]  Eric J. Arnould,et al.  Should Consumer Citizens Escape the Market? , 2007 .

[23]  Eileen Davenport,et al.  To boldly go…exploring ethical spaces to re-politicise ethical consumption and fair trade , 2007 .

[24]  M. Varul.  CONSUMING THE CAMPESINO: Fair trade marketing between recognition and romantic commodification , 2008 .

[25]  Matthew Adams,et al.  What Can Sociology Say About FairTrade? , 2008 .

[26]  G. Holt,et al.  Introduction: from local food to localised food , 2007 .

[27]  Terry Newholm,et al.  Case Studying Ethical Consumers’ Projects and Strategies , 2005 .

[28]  M. Goodman,et al.  Consuming narratives: the political ecology of ‘alternative’ consumption , 2004 .

[29]  Nick Lee,et al.  Purchase Decision-Making in Fair Trade and the “Ethical Gap" , 2006 .

[30]  J. Raisborough,et al.  Women's Leisure and Auto/Biography: Empowerment and Resistance in the Garden , 2007 .

[31]  April Linton,et al.  A taste of trade justice: marketing global social responsibility via Fair Trade coffee , 2004 .

[32]  M. Geuens,et al.  Vlerick Leuven Gent Working Paper Series 2005/30 EXPLICIT AND IMPLICIT DETERMINANTS OF FAIR-TRADE BUYING BEHAVIOR , 2006 .

[33]  P. Spiegel,et al.  Political Virtue and Shopping , 2005 .

[34]  B. Cova.  Community and consumption , 1997 .

[35]  Isabelle Szmigin,et al.  Shopping for a better world? An interpretive study of the potential for ethical consumption within the older market , 2004 .

[36]  Gokcen Coskuner-Balli,et al.  Countervailing market responses to corporate co-optation and the ideological recruitment of consumption communities , 2007 .

[37]  C. Wright.  Consuming lives, consuming landscapes: interpreting advertisements for cafédirect coffees , 2004 .

[38]  K. Soper.  Re-thinking the `Good Life` , 2007 .

[39]  Elena Fraj,et al.  Ecological Consumer Behaviour: An Empirical Analysis , 2007 .

[40]  J. Chrzan.  Slow Food: What, Why, and to Where? , 2004 .