Ethical Consumption: Social Value and Economic Practice

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.

James G. Carrier is a Hon. Research Associate at Oxford Brookes University and Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at the University of Indiana. He has taught anthropology and sociology, and carried out research, in Papua New Guinea, the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as studying environmental conservation in Jamaica. His publications include Gifts and Commodities (Routledge 1995), Meanings of the Market (ed., Berg 1997) and Virtualism, Governance and Practice (co-ed. with West, Berghahn 2009).

Peter G. Luetchford is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sussex and has carried out field research in Costa Rica and Spain. He has published on ethics and the economy, including Fair Trade and a Global Commodity: Coffee in Costa Rica (Pluto Press, 2008) and he is co-editor of Hidden Hands in the Market: Ethnographies of Fair Trade, Ethical Consumption and Corporate Social Responsibility (Research in Economic Anthropology 2008).