Title:
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Exploring and articulating ethics in consumption : a multi-method analysis of the ethics of consumption
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With the reinvigoration of cultural and social geography in the 1980's, alongside the Moral Turn of
the 1990's, moral questions in consumption have become commonplace in geography (Smith 2000).
The moral turn also coincided with increased public protests against companies engaged in unethical
or unsustainable production practices (McGregor 2006). Today, consumers have access to a wide
range of products, or 'devices' (Barnett et a/ 2005), that are considered to be 'ethical' in terms of
their production, through which consumers may express their morals, such as fair trade, organic,
and locally produced goods. In more recent years, these Ethical Consumer discourses have been
opened up to critique. However, ethical consumption still remains vastly under-theorised in relation
to many other aspects of consumption studies and human geography, and little is known about how
ethics in consumption form and how they are translated into consumption practices.
Similarly, ethical consumption has previously been researched only in terms of shopping habits and
market projections, and not as an everyday grounded practice. More research is needed that
manages to capture these 'lived' elements of everyday consumption, which currently remain to be a
'black box'. By addressing the grounded, real-life nature of consumption, we might be able to think
beyond the monetary values of products, to explore how consumption practices are connected to,
and create, a variety of moral geographies, and how everyday practices are intertwined with these
moral networks. One way is by recognising the ethical decisions that people make in their everyday
consumption choices, and how these values are related to wider global issues.
This thesis therefore aims to identify; how consumers incorporate their morals into their
consumption choices and decisions; the impacts of education, family practices and marketing
strategies in shaping consumption; and whether 'ethical consumption' can be disentangled from
'ordinary consumption'. To do this, the research adopts an innovative methodological approach,
using a multi-sited, three-pronged research design. This includes ethnographic research with families
from 2007-2009, focus groups and lesson observations in three schools, and interviews with thirteen
companies, to effectively and thoroughly explore the ethics of consumption in narrative and
practice. Using these data, the research explores where morals come from, how they are influenced
and by whom, the ways in which ethics are expressed on a daily basis, and how morals are
performed as a means of fulfilling ethical responsibilities. Therefore, this thesis contributes to
discourses surrounding ethics, consumption, ethical consumption, care, responsibility and
accountability. It is argued that geographers need to reassess and reconfigure how to address ethics
in consumption, since current ethical consumer discourses are prescriptive and limiting, and are
laden with assumptions, judgements and class distinctions. This thesis creates an argument for an
ethics of consumption, rather than ethical consumption, which recognises the importance of
everyday ethical decision-making, and consumption as a behaviour that goes hand-in-hand with
moral debates.
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