1,721,017 research outputs found
Faith in ethical consumption
No full textA chapter on faith in ethical consumption drawing on empirical research in Bristol, UK and including sections on: personal faith and virtue ethics in fair trade; churches as social networks for fair trade; and local evangelists for fair trade
The political ethics of consumerism
No full textThis article draws on research into the development and growth of ethical consumption in the UK to suggest why consumerism and citizenship are not necessarily opposed practices. Consumer-oriented activism offers important pathways to political participation for ordinary people. The organisations involved in this field embed consumer-oriented activism in wider programs of mobilisation, activism, lobbying and campaigning, enrolling ordinary people in active political engagement
The political rationalities of fair trade consumption in the United Kingdom
Full text linkThis article situates the analysis of fair-trade consumption in the context ofdebates about civic activism and political participation. It argues that fair-tradeconsumption should be understood as a political phenomenon, which, through themediating action of organizations and campaigns, makes claims on states, corporations,and institutions. This argument is made by way of a case study ofTraidcraft, a key player in the fair-trade movement in the United Kingdom. Thestudy focuses on how Traidcraft approaches and enrolls its supporters
The spaces and ethics of organic food
No full textInitial assessments of the potential for organic food systems have offered an optimistic interpretation of the progressive political andethical characteristics involved. This positive gloss has prompted a stream of critique emphasising the need to explore the ambiguities anddisconnections inherent therein. In this paper, we consider the case of Riverford Organic Vegetables,1 arguably the largest supplier oforganic vegetables in the UK, and suggest that existing debates assume too much about the ‘‘goods’’ and ‘‘rights’’ of organic food andleave important questions about the spaces and ethics of organic food. We argue that, in the case of Riverford, the space of organic foodproduction and distribution is neither the small, local, counter-cultural farm nor the large, transnational, corporate firm. Rather,simultaneously, the spaces of organic food production and distribution are the national network, the regional distribution system and thelocal farm. In addition, in the case of Riverford, the ethics of organic food exhibit few grand designs (of environmental sustainability, forexample). Rather, the ethics of organic food are best characterised as: ordinary, since they relate to concerns about taste, value formoney, care within the family and so on; diverse, since multiple practices steer the production and distribution of organic food; andgraspable, in that both vegetables and box have material and symbolic presence for consumers
The elusive subjects of neoliberalism: beyond the analytics of governmentality
Full text linkThis paper assesses the degree to which conceptualizations of neo-liberal governance and advanced liberal governmentality can throw light on contemporary transformations in the practices and politics of consumption. It detours through theories of governmentality, stories about consumption and shopping, and different variations on what we can learn from Foucault. We explore the degree to which aspects of Foucault's discussions of government and ethics can be put to work methodologically without necessarily buying into fully systematized theories of governmentality that have been built around them. The idea that organizations and networks might share rationalities through which they problematize and seek to intervene in specified areas of social life seems worth pursuing. So too does the notion of various modes of ethical problematization through which people come to take their own activities as requiring moral reflection. In neither case, however, can the analytics of governmentality provide a coherent theoretical account of how political processes of rule and administration work, or indeed of how they connect up with cultural processes of self-formation and subjectivity
Globalizing Responsibility: The Political Rationalities of Ethical Consumption
Full text linkGlobalizing Responsibility: The Political Rationalities of Ethical Consumption presents an innovative reinterpretation of the forces that have shaped the remarkable growth of ethical consumption. *Develops a theoretically informed new approach to shape our understanding of the pragmatic nature of ethical action in consumption processes. *Provides empirical research on everyday consumers, social networks, and campaigns. *Fills a gap in research on the topic with its distinctive focus on fair trade consumption. *Locates ethical consumption within a range of social theoretical debates -on neoliberalism, governmentality, and globalisation. *Challenges the moralism of much of the analysis of ethical consumption, which sees it as a retreat from proper citizenly politics and an expression of individualised consumerism
Fairtrade urbanism: the politics of place beyond place in the Bristol Fairtrade City Campaign
Full text linkUnderstandings of fairtrade, ethical trading and sustainability often assume arelationship involving disparate placeless consumers being stitched together withplace-specific producers in developing world contexts. Using an ethnographic study ofthe policy-making and political processes of the Bristol Fairtrade City campaign, wesuggest ways in which fairtrade consumption can become aligned with place. Thecampaign was a vehicle for enlisting the ordinary people of Bristol into awareness ofand identification with fairtrade issues. Citizens of Bristol were enrolled into a reimaginationof the city involving aspects of what Massey terms the politics of placebeyond place. The campaign also enlisted the jurisdictional governance of the localauthority, including the introduction of the fairtrade procurement practices. As a result,employees, residents and visitors became fairtrade consumers, knowingly orunknowingly, when visiting the canteens and restaurants of the local authority and othersignificant sites and institutions in the city. The Fairtrade City campaign can therefore beseen to have deployed ideas of place, fairness and local–global relations as scale framesof mobility through which to embed ethical consumption in place, and to governconsumption at a distance
Learning to be global citizens: the rationalities of fair-trade education
No full textThe ethics of everyday consumption has become a key concern for social and environmental justice campaigning by NGOs in the United Kingdom. Schools are a prominent site for such campaigns, where, alongside other 'controversial issues' and initiatives such as citizenship education, the problematisation of consumption practices has developed its own distinctive set of pedagogical devices. This paper questions the analytical framing of education as a space of neoliberal subjectification, in which 'critical pedagogy' is seen as the only legitimate form of resistance within theoretical models of domination - subordination and governmentality. The institutionalisation of fair trade education in schools in Bristol, a city in the southwest of England, is presented as an empirical case through which to consider how best to theorise the rationalities of consumption-oriented campaigning by NGOs. We discuss the consequences of problematising global responsibility where learnign is seen as a performative encounter between reflexive actors situated in particular sociocultural environments
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