Today's Pick: Ethical consumption

The UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) recently released a report measuring the success of so-called ethical consumption campaigns. The report, Ethical consumption: consumer driven or political phenomenon?, notes that “a great deal of the consumption people do they don’t do as ‘consumers’ exercising ‘choice.’” Accordingly, the most successful ethical consumption campaigns, such as Fairtrade, address people in their roles as members of a larger community rather than as individual consumers. The ESRC concludes that ethical consumption can be interpreted as “a political phenomenon rather than simply a market response to consumer demand.” In other words, the reign of the consumer might be over.

Broadly speaking, since the 1970s, neoliberal societies like Canada and the United States have placed their faith in the market rather than in government and valorized the individual consumer over the public-minded citizen. Meanwhile, opposition to the consumerist ethos has taken two main forms. First, organizations like Fairtrade try to make global supply chains more transparent, so that consumers are informed and aware about the products they are buying. Secondly (and, if the ERSC report is correct, more importantly), critics of consumerism emphasize that our identities as consumers are only a fraction of our broader identities as citizens, friends, parents, children, etc.

Interest in informed consumption and reclaiming/revaluing citizenship seems to be growing. On the web, resources for the informed consumer abound, including:

• Fairtrade: The Fairtrade Labelling Organization’s International website with information on Fair Trade certification and labeling initiatives.
• Ethical consumer: A UK non-profit organization that produces buying guides and corporate ratings.
• Kunkelfruit: Taking its name from Ben Kunkel’s 2006 novel Indecision, this wiki provides the entire production history or narrative for popular consumer products from toilet paper to Perdue chicken breasts to Starbucks’ Tall Nonfat Decaf Lattes.
• Strategic consumption: A Worldchanging article about the potential and limitations of ethical consumption.

In terms of moving beyond a consumerist paradigm, most work is still being done in academia. Kate Soper, a British academic, promotes the pleasures of post-consumerism, while closer to home, Canada’s own Josée Johnston and Darin Barney take critical looks at consumerism, citizenship and identity. The issue is slowly moving into the mainstream, too. Last year Alex Martin’s Little Brown Dress project received a lot of attention; this year, No Impact Man is conspicuously non-consuming in the New York Times.

There is no question that ethical consumption is on the rise with the downfall of the consumer.

The question is whether and how will this trend effect business models.