Ethical Consumption

Social Value and Economic Practice

James G. Carrier, Peter G. Luetchford, James G. Carrier, Peter G. Luetchford

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857453433
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Commercio e tariffe

Increasingly, consumers in North America and Europe see their purchasing as a way to express to the commercial world their concerns about trade justice, the environment and similar issues. This ethical consumption has attracted growing attention in the press and among academics. Extending beyond the growing body of scholarly work on the topic in several ways, this volume focuses primarily on consumers rather than producers and commodity chains. It presents cases from a variety of European countries and is concerned with a wide range of objects and types of ethical consumption, not simply the usual tropical foodstuffs, trade justice and the system of fair trade. Contributors situate ethical consumption within different contexts, from common Western assumptions about economy and society, to the operation of ethical-consumption commerce, to the ways that people's ethical consumption can affect and be affected by their social situation. By locating consumers and their practices in the social and economic contexts in which they exist and that their ethical consumption affects, this volume presents a compelling interrogation of the rhetoric and assumptions of ethical consumption.

Section II

ETHICAL CONSUMPTION CONTEXTS

The second set of chapters in this volume pursues a point made in the Introduction. That is the observation that even though ethical consumption is concerned with the relationship between economy and society, it is a practical activity that is shaped by the context in which consumers exist. These chapters consider a variety of such contexts and their effects on people’s ethical consumption, and so help answer the question posed at the end of the introduction to the previous set of chapters: why and how do people become ethical consumers, and with what results?

The first chapter in this section investigates a variety of motives for ethical consumption, motives that reflect people’s personal and social situation. Tamás Dombos’s ‘Narratives of Concern: Beyond the “Official” Discourse of Ethical Consumption in Hungary’ begins with an important point. Organisations encouraging ethical consumption present images of it and of the people who practice it that can be as problematic as the images of producers considered in the preceding section. Those images are contained in what Dombos calls the ‘official discourse’ of Hungarian organisations advocating ‘conscious shopping’, as ethical consumption is called in that country, a discourse not materially different from what is found in most of the rest of Europe and North America. These images turn out to look a lot like the market transactors of much economic thought. In that discourse, ethical consumers are fairly autonomous individuals who may be concerned for their locality and the people in their lives, but are not defined by them in any significant way. They are enlightened in the sense that they are sceptical about the claims made by corporations for what they sell and about the will and ability of governments to bring about change. Accordingly, in the official discourse individuals rationally select purchases in light of their concern for the environment and trade justice. From what Dombos presents in his chapter, however, few ethical consumers in Hungary fit that image.

In contrast to the uniform image in the official discourse, Dombos describes five people who represent in relatively pure form the motives and contexts common in the people that he studied. In doing so, he shows that people’s decision to be ethical consumers and the values that concern them range from a desire for taste and distinction to a virulent Hungarian nationalism. Thus, while they are concerned to protect the social realm from the incursions of the economic, they value different aspects of the social.

There is another point that Dombos makes that deserves mention. As he explains, Daniel Miller (2001) has argued for a distinction between the morality and the ethics of shopping. The former is concerned with the well-being of the shopper’s immediate social circle, especially the family; the latter is concerned with the well-being of distant people, of the sort that buying Fairtrade-certified products is supposed to help, or the well-being of the environment in some abstract sense. Miller argues that the dictates of morality, prime among which is thrift, trumps the dictates of ethics, which require greater spending. What Dombos says indicates that we ought to be careful not to read more into this distinction than Miller may have intended. The immediate social circle, the Us of Miller’s morality, is a fluid group. As some of Dombos’s cases demonstrate, it can include those well beyond the household, those who might seem distant strangers at first glance.

This blurring of Us and Them appears in the next chapter in this section, Giovanni Orlando’s ‘Critical Consumption in Palermo: Imagined Society, Class and Fractured Locality’. It describes people who are ‘critical’ consumers, the Italian equivalent of ‘ethical’ consumers, and shows how their ethical consumption is shaped by their context, especially the political economy of Palermo, and of Italy more generally, since the 1960s and 1970s.

In the eyes of many, that city has been dominated by an alliance between the Christian Democrats and the Mafia. The result was the creation of a city with a corrupt, clientelistic system that saw the enrichment of those on the top, the impoverishment of those on the bottom and indifference to the condition of the city itself. Seeing the city and its government, and indeed the Italian government, in this way, the people Orlando describes saw no point in conventional electoral politics. Instead, like some of the Hungarians that Dombos described, in their despair they embraced critical consumption as the only way to effect change.

In embodying the relationship between history and people’s ethical consumption, Orlando’s Palermo shoppers find echoes in those who frequent the Fair Shop that Lill Vramo described in her chapter. As she notes, Fair Shop’s advocacy of ‘Trade, not aid’ reflects the changing historical situation of Norway, especially the public concern that the country’s previous generosity had turned into foolish giving to crafty recipients. With aid thus tainted, trade has to be made more fair. The ethical consumption that both Orlando and Vramo describe, then, is affected in important ways by the history of a place and of the people who live there.

I said that Orlando’s chapter echoes Dombos’s in warning us against too facile an interpretation of Miller’s distinction between a morality and an ethics of shopping. That is because the people Orlando describes saw much of the Palermo middle class as Us, concerned for the city and repulsed by its corruption. The fact that the vast majority of those people were unknown is immaterial, just as it is immaterial that the fierce Hungarian nationalist that Dombos describes had no knowledge of the vast majority of the Hungarians who were her Us. For both, ethical consumption was a way to support an Us, even if only an imagined one, that is much more extensive than the circle of family and close friends.

The chapters in this section that I have described thus far indicate the ways that people’s historical situations influence their decision to consume ethically. The remaining chapters in this section are concerned with a different aspect of the context of ethical consumption. That is the social corollaries and consequences that such consumption has for ethical consumers. These can affect how people practice ethical consumption and, indeed, whether they continue or abandon it. The first of these chapters describes Swedish ethical consumers. It is Cindy Isenhour’s ‘On the Challenges of Signalling Ethics without the Stuff: Tales of Conspicuous Green Anti-consumption’.

Isenhour is concerned with ethical consumers who think it important to consume less and, like Dombos, she presents a set of cases that illustrate different forms of that consumption. For many of the people she describes, the shift to reduced consumption is also a shift to a more prestigious form of consumption. For some, that means selecting only the items that have the least adverse effect on the environment. For others, that means searching for secondhand items that are fashionable. For yet others, that means buying the highest quality model of the item that they want. With these tactics, these people can consume ethically while demonstrating that their reduced consumption is a matter of choice rather than necessity. Put differently, and in the words of Isenhour’s title, it is a way of ‘signalling ethics without the stuff’.

As she describes, this is especially important for middle-class Swedes because their cultural norms encourage high levels of consumption, particularly of household goods. While Sweden may be unusual in the strength of those norms, the problem that these ethical consumers face is likely to appear generally. Wherever people signal their social standing through the objects that they possess, those who want to reduce their consumption risk signalling a reduced social standing. The tactics Isenhour describes serve to assert social standing through the quality and rarity (and cost) of possessions rather than the quantity. Isenhour’s chapter shows, though, that this does not always work. As one of the people she describes complained, people ‘think that you are poor or that you’re not well educated, that you don’t have nice taste or that you are not successful’. And as she notes, those with a deep and long-term commitment to an ethic of consuming less are likely to withdraw from many of their old social networks. They find new friends who share their ethic or find themselves with fewer friends.

Isenhour’s chapter points to the way that people’s adoption of ethical consumption can carry social costs. Some of the Hungarian ethical consumers that Dombos discusses experienced these costs as well, either in conflicts with other members of their circle or in a reluctance to talk about their ethics for fear of alienating friends and acquaintances. And if the social cost is high enough, of course, people will abandon their ethical consumption. This is what happened to some of the people described by Peter Collins in the next chapter in this section, ‘Ethical Consumption as Religious Testimony: The Quaker Case’.

As indicated in the Introduction, Collins’s chapter is important because it shows how something that looks very much like modern ethical consumption, the modest consumption of Quakers, can rest on principles and values, and can seek ends, that are very different. These Quakers are not saving the world, they are focused on the bit of God that is in everyone; they are not responding to threats to the environment or distant others, they are heeding biblical injunction. As well, they are not the autonomous individuals of the official discourse that Dombos describes: their consumption is not a spontaneous reflection of their own volition. Rather, it is defined and enforced by the Quaker movement as a whole: failure to conform means expulsion. Here, then, modest consumption is not an individual choice, but instead rests on an elaborate social mechanism of the sort alien to many of the images and much of the rationale of ethical consumption.

I said that Collins’s chapter provides another instance of what Isenhour describes, the social costs that ethical consumption can entail. For some of the Swedes that she describes, those costs included a degree of social isolation. For some of the Quakers that Collins describes, there was much more involved than loneliness. Those are what he calls the ‘dynastic’ Quakers, prosperous merchants and manufacturers around the middle of the nineteenth century. As Collins describes, these people operated at a disadvantage. The rules of Quaker consumption prevented their participation in many of the social activities undertaken by their non-Quaker fellows: the hunts, the balls, the dinners and so on.

In one sense the result may have been the sense of isolation that Isenhour describes, but there was more to it. That is because the social events were the frame in which valuable information circulated and useful acquaintances could be made. They were, in other words, important for the continuing prosperity of these dynastic Quakers, their businesses and families. As Collins notes, many of those Quakers found the price too high to pay. They abandoned their faith and so freed themselves to live more easily the lives that their social equals expected of them.

Isenhour and Collins describe one aspect of the context of the practice of ethical consumption, its social corollaries and particularly its social costs. The final chapter in this section also describes those corollaries and costs. However, it does not address the effects of the signals that ethical consumption can send. Instead, it describes the social effort and tension that can follow from the decision to consume ethically and from the decision to produce things for ethical consumers. That chapter is ‘Reinventing Food: The Ethics of Developing Local Food’, by Cristina Grasseni.

Like Orlando, Grasseni is concerned with critical consumers in Italy, but her focus is on the north of the country rather than on Sicily, in the south. As I indicated, her chapter attends to both the makers and the purchasers involved in ethical consumption. The makers are those involved in the production of cheese that is considered ‘authentic’, and hence suited for ethical consumption. Echoing and extending the points made in the Introduction about ethicality, she shows how the production of authentic, traditional Alpine cheese is no simple reproduction of ancestral practices. Such a cheese has to be recognised, its authenticity and its tradition made legible, which means in practice that it has to be certified in one way or another so that it can be slotted into what Grasseni, invoking Michael Herzfeld (2004), says is a global hierarchy of value.

As she describes, this is a process in which social, economic and political interests come to bear. They do so in ways that are likely to be invisible to ethical consumers, and they can illuminate the complexities and compromises that lurk behind the ‘ethical’ in ethical consumption. Which is more important, the well-being of the goatherds who historically have made the cheese or the well-being of the dairies in the broader, declining region in which they live? One definition of ‘authentic’ points in the first direction, another points in the second. Who is entitled to use the traditional name, those who happen to be the main cheese-makers when certification is being sought or others whose historic claim is equally valid even if they make little of that cheese now? Again, different answers benefit different groups of people, both of whom merit support.

Grasseni’s description of consumers raises similar issues. In part that is because the groups of people she describes take their consumption very seriously indeed. They are not content with a certification that what they buy is Fairtrade, organic or the like. Rather, they seek to locate and inspect the sources of what they buy. The result is that these groups have to do a lot of work finding sources that they like, arranging orders, collecting foodstuffs, storing and distributing them. This reflects what they want their consumption to be. However, it means that there is the risk of tension in these groups, the risk that they will divide into those who do the work and those who reap the benefit.

For Grasseni’s Alpine cheese-makers, ethical consumers, dairy owners and provincial officials, producing and acquiring something that is identifiable as ethical requires a lot of time and attention, as well as the balancing of conflicting legitimate interests. The people and the effort that she describes are different from Isenhour’s Swedes and Collins’s Quakers. However, all three chapters agree on one point. The official discourse of ethical consumption, which shares with the economic realm a focus on autonomous individuals, is deceptive. The decision to become an ethical consumer and the effects of that consumption, like the creation, recognition and acquisition of ethical items, all locate ethical consumption in a web of social relationships, whether intended or not, desired or not. Moreover, if Orlando’s palermitanos and some of Dombos’s Hungarians are any indication, that consumption is intended to extend and strengthen those webs. The household Us that is taken to be the focus of Miller’s moral consumption, like the market actor of the economic thought that ethical consumption often invokes, seems far less significant than it appears at first glance.

Bibliography

Herzfeld, Michael 2004. The body impolitic: artisans and artifice in the global hierarchy of value. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Miller, Daniel 2001. The dialectics of shopping. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chapter 5

NARRATIVES OF CONCERN: BEYOND THE ‘OFFICIAL’ DISCOURSE OF ETHICAL CONSUMPTION IN HUNGARY

Tamás Dombos

The last few years have brought a significant increase in ethical consumption in Hungary. When a group of activists decided to start a promotional campaign for fair-trade goods in April 2005, they had to drive to Vienna, pack the boot of the car with fair-trade coffee and tea and drive it back home. Today there are several wholesalers dealing with fair-trade products, which are widely available (Fairvilág Szövetség n.d.). Organic goods have been available in specialised farmers’ markets and shops since the middle of the 1990s, and by 2009 organic consumption had become fairly common, as shown by the increased role of supermarkets in the distribution of organic food (Szente 2004) and by the introduction of own-brand organic products in large supermarket chains. The growing prominence of consumption as an arena for advancing social and political causes is also shown by the number of consumer boycotts called for during the past decade (Gulyás 2007: 114) and the spread of alternative food networks (Kiss, Simonyi and Balázs 2009).

That increased availability of ethical products and growth of c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Section I. Producers and Consumers
• Section II. Ethical Consumption Contexts
• Conclusion
• Notes on Contributors
• Index