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Papers by Journal of Consumer Ethics

Journal of Consumer Ethics, 2019

While the consumerist approach to what living well can mean permeates traditional media, the exte... more While the consumerist approach to what living well can mean permeates traditional media, the extent to which it appears in people's own depictions of the good life is unclear. As the unsustainability of the consumerist approach is increasingly evidenced, both in terms of environmental and social impacts, looking into which understandings of the good life resonate with people becomes essential. This article uses a sample of posts tagged #goodlife and variants originally collected in 2014-2015 on Instagram (a popular image sharing platform) to explore which understandings of the good life can be found on the platform. Using multimodal discourse analysis, it highlights two different user-generated understandings of the good life: 'working on future goals' and 'appreciating the present moment'. We argue that neither approach is directly or necessarily congruent with the traditional consumer good life. Yet their shared photographic codes with advertisements can contribute to their framing into the consumer good life. Additionally, the temporalities afforded by the platform and currently in place through social conventions may affect the type of narratives that are mediated. While the understandings derived from the analysis are not straightforward reflections of people's beliefs about the meaning of the good life, they constitute conversations that at once inform, and are informed by, users' beliefs about living well. The popularity of the platform makes these conversations crucial for anyone interested in desired lifestyles and their sustainability.

Journal of Consumer Ethics, 2018

Welcome to this special issue of Journal of Consumer Ethics themed around Food and Ethical Consum... more Welcome to this special issue of Journal of Consumer Ethics themed around Food and Ethical Consumption which has
been my pleasure to edit. Having studied food and ethical consumption for almost 30 years – covering issues related
to fairtrade food brands (Szmigin et al., 2007); farmers markets (McEachern et al., 2010), convenience and family
food consumption (Carrigan and Szmigin, 2006), sustainable tourist food consumption (Carrigan et al., 2017), and
most recently the role of generativity and family food sustainability (Athwal et al., 2018) – it is apparent that there is
signifcant interest and growing concern among researchers and campaigners about how we produce and consume
food, particularly in industrialised countries. Ideas about the ethics of food and consumption are contested, and ofen
controversial, but they are also important to everyone. What we eat shapes our physical and emotional selves, and
consumers or ‘citizens’ play multiple roles in our global food systems (Cura, 2017). Our food choices and understanding
of food systems emerge from a complex landscape that includes what constitutes ‘good food’, where it comes from, what
we should be eating, how to prepare and share it, and the politics of hunger, eating, getting, growing and wasting food
(Goodman et al., 2017; Paddock, 2017; Evans et al., 2017).

Journal of Consumer Ethics, 2018

In 2015, the UK Government passed the Modern Slavery Act which required most medium to large UK c... more In 2015, the UK Government passed the Modern Slavery Act which required most medium to large UK companies to publish a statement on their websites explaining what they were doing to combat any modern slavery that may be occurring in their supply chains. Since then, more than three thousand companies have produced statements, and civil society groups have begun to analyse and comment on what is emerging. The main purpose of this paper is to look at these analyses by civil society groups and to reﬂect on the extent to which they are helping to inform ethical consumers.
From the analyses featured in this article, only one third of companies required to report meet the legal minimum requirements and over a third of the estimated companies required to submit statements have failed to comply. Civil society organisations agree that the regulations need to be tightened to ensure all companies actively address this issue and a number of suggestions and campaigns have been forthcoming. In the section entitled ‘Upgrading the MSA’ below, we look at calls for the government to publish lists of companies required to report and to use its own procurement budgets to drive change.
Encouragingly, a consortium of civil society organisations have established a UK Modern Slavery Act Registry, and one organisation has published a report comparing companies supplying the same sectors. But more needs to be done to digest the data created by the MSA to make it practically useful to most consumers. We explore some options for developing a rating and suggest a simple score or traffic light system which might help ordinary people diﬀerentiate bad from good in this
complex environment.

Journal of Consumer Ethics, 2018

News stories from around the world about consumer ethics. It includes books, events, conferences ... more News stories from around the world about consumer ethics. It includes books, events, conferences and publications.

Journal of Consumer Ethics, 2018

Do Good: Embracing Brand Citizenship to Fuel Both Purpose and Profit is a new book published the ... more Do Good: Embracing Brand Citizenship to Fuel Both Purpose and Profit is a new book published the year by the American Management Association. Although its primary audience, as you can guess from the title, is intended to be corporate executives, it does contain insights into changes in consumer attitudes and behaviour. As the book’s author, Anne Bahr Tompson, explains in the extract below, these developments are a key element in driving the changes in business behaviour which are required for a sustainable future. “My research demonstrated that ‘real’ people define corporate social responsibility and corporate citizenship very diﬀerently than academics and experts do....As more consumers grow concerned with fairness and sustainability, more of us are seeking ‘relationships’ with brands that link us to a larger purpose that enriches our modern lives and sustains the planet...People don’t expect ‘perfection’ from brands: they respect brands that exhibit human traits and, as such, expect them to be somewhat ﬂawed—provided they’re transparent about their imperfections and working to improve them.”

Journal of Consumer Ethics, 2018

Review of Caroline Heldman (2017) “Protest Politics in the Marketplace: Consumer Activism in the ... more Review of Caroline Heldman (2017) “Protest Politics in the Marketplace: Consumer Activism in the Corporate Age by Dan Welch

Journal of Consumer Ethics, 2018

The Ethical Consumer Markets Report (ECMR) is a measurement of the size of the UK market for ‘eth... more The Ethical Consumer Markets Report (ECMR) is a measurement of the size of the UK market for ‘ethical’ products which has been published annually for 17 years. However, the researchers making choices about what to include and what not to include in the report have commonly faced some challenges and dilemmas.
This article explores just four of the many ‘datasets’ which make up the report to illustrate some of the problems faced: energy-saving light bulbs, organic food, ethical money and vegetarian food. According to researchers, one common problem
which ran though many of the datasets was deciding whether there was a need to understand motivation to define a purchase as ethical? The ECMR records annual sales of, for example, all organic food, all meat substitutes and all energy efficient light bulbs as ethical sales, despite the fact that some individuals may be choosing these items primarily for health or economic reasons rather than ethical ones.
One core challenge identified in this paper is that widening the boundaries of what constitutes an ethical purchase could make spotting smaller trends more difficult for researchers of the ECMR’s. Adding building societies to the definition of ethical money, for example, would lead to the size of the UK ‘ethical market’ nearly tripling overnight. The authors hope that exploring these problems can help shed some light on the phenomenon of ethical consumption itself and how its complexity does not always lend itself to the kind of simple measurement often found in annual indices.

Journal of Consumer Ethics, 2018

Consumer ethics have temporal dimensions. Practices once considered quite normal, even commendabl... more Consumer ethics have temporal dimensions. Practices once considered quite normal, even commendable have later become morally questionable. Consumption deemed ethical today might be judged defective in the future. This article investigates
two temporalities: the historical contexts of past ethical norms and some of the factors driving ethical change over time. A brief account of elephant ivory consumption from the ancient world to the early twenty-first century serves as a case study for better understanding these ethical temporalities.