Ethical consumerism

Ethical consumerism (alternatively called ethical consumption, ethical purchasing, moral purchasing, ethical sourcing, or ethical shopping and also associated with sustainable and green consumerism) is a type of consumer activism based on the concept of dollar voting.[1] People practice it by buying ethically made products that support small-scale manufacturers or local artisans and protect animals and the environment, while boycotting products that exploit children as workers, are tested on animals, or damage the environment.

The term "ethical consumer", now used generically, was first popularised by the UK magazine Ethical Consumer, first published in 1989.[2] Ethical Consumer magazine's key innovation was to produce "ratings tables", inspired by the criteria-based approach of the then-emerging ethical investment movement. Ethical Consumer's ratings tables awarded companies negative marks (and overall scores, starting in 2005) across a range of ethical and environmental categories such as "animal rights", "human rights", and "pollution and toxics", empowering consumers to make ethically informed consumption choices and providing campaigners with reliable information on corporate behaviour. Such criteria-based ethical and environmental ratings have subsequently become commonplace both in providing consumer information and in business-to-business corporate social responsibility and sustainability ratings such as those provided by Innovest, Calvert Foundation, Domini, IRRC, TIAA–CREF, and KLD Analytics. Today, Bloomberg and Reuters provide "environmental, social, and governance" ratings directly to the financial data screens of hundreds of thousands of stock market traders.[3] The nonprofit Ethical Consumer Research Association continues to publish Ethical Consumer and its associated website, which provides free access to ethical rating tables.

Although single-source ethical consumerism guides such as Ethical Consumer, Shop Ethical,[4] and the Good Shopping Guide[5] are popular, they suffer from incomplete coverage. User-generated ethical reviews are more likely, long-term, to provide democratic, in-depth coverage of a wider range of products and businesses.[6] The Green Stars Project[7] promotes the idea of including ethical ratings (on a scale of one to five green stars) alongside conventional ratings on retail sites such as Amazon or review sites such as Yelp.

The term "political consumerism", first used in a study titled "The Gender Gap Reversed: Political Consumerism as a Women-Friendly Form of Civic and Political Engagement" from authors Dietlind Stolle and Michele Micheletti (2003), is identical to the idea of ethical consumerism. However, in this study, the authors found that political consumerism as a form of social participation often went overlooked at the time of writing and needed to be accounted for in future studies of social participation.[8] However, in "From Ethical Consumerism to Political Consumption", author Nick Clarke argues that political consumerism allows for marginalized groups, such as women, to participate in political advocacy in non-bureaucratic ways that draw attention to governmental weaknesses. [9] Political consumerism has also been criticised on the basis that "it cannot work", or that it displays class bias.[10] The widespread development of political consumerism is hampered by substantial mundane consumption, which does not afford reflective choice, along with complexities of everyday life, which demand negotiations between conflicting moral and ethical considerations.[11]

  1. ^ Giesler, Markus; Veresiu, Ela (2014). "Creating the Responsible Consumer: Moralistic Governance Regimes and Consumer Subjectivity". Journal of Consumer Research. 41 (October): 849–867. doi:10.1086/677842. S2CID 145622639.
  2. ^ "20th Birthday!". Ethicalconsumer.org. Retrieved 2013-08-18.
  3. ^ Lubber, Mindy S. (6 May 2009). "Is ESG Data Going Mainstream?". Harvard Business Review. Blogs.hbr.org. Retrieved 2013-08-18.
  4. ^ "Shop Ethical". Retrieved 2019-05-11.
  5. ^ "The Good Shopping Guide". Retrieved 2019-05-11.
  6. ^ "Ethical Consumerism, Part 5: Why we need User-Generated Ratings". greenstarsproject.org. 22 April 2018. Retrieved 2019-05-11.
  7. ^ "The Green Stars Project". Retrieved 2019-05-11.
  8. ^ Stolle, Dietlind; Micheletti, Michele (2003). "The Gender Gap Reversed: Political Consumerism as a Women-Friendly Form of Civic and Political Engagement: An Exploratory Study in Canada, Belgium and Sweden. Work in Progress" (PDF). umanitoba.ca. Retrieved 2018-12-14.
  9. ^ Clarke, Nick (November 2008). "From Ethical Consumerism to Political Consumption: From ethical consumerism to political consumption". Geography Compass. 2 (6): 1870–1884. doi:10.1111/j.1749-8198.2008.00170.x. Retrieved 29 April 2023.
  10. ^ Haydu, Jeffrey (2014). "Consumer Citizenship and Cross-Class Activism: The Case of the National Consumers' League, 1899-1918". Sociological Forum. 29 (3): 628–649. doi:10.1111/socf.12107. JSTOR 43653954.
  11. ^ Jacobsen, Eivind; Dulsrud, Arne (2007). "Will Consumers Save The World? The Framing of Political Consumerism". Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics. 20 (5): 469–482. doi:10.1007/s10806-007-9043-z. S2CID 154330638. Retrieved 2023-04-25.