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Making a difference: Ethical consumption and the everyday

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The British Journal of Sociology 2010 Volume 61 Issue 2

Making a difference: ethical consumption

and the everyday bjos_1312 256..274

Matthew Adams and Jayne Raisborough

Abstract
Our everyday shopping practices are increasingly marketed as opportunities to
‘make a difference’ via our ethical consumption choices. In response to a growing
body of work detailing the ways in which specific alignments of ‘ethics’ and
‘consumption’ are mediated, we explore how ‘ethical’ opportunities such as the
consumption of Fairtrade products are recognized, experienced and taken-up in
the everyday. The ‘everyday’ is approached here via a specially commissioned
Mass Observation directive, a volunteer panel of correspondents in the UK. Our
on-going thematic analysis of their autobiographical accounts aims to explore a
complex unevenness in the ways ‘ordinary’ people experience and negotiate calls
to enact their ethical agency through consumption. Situating ethical consumption,
moral obligation and choice in the everyday is, we argue, important if we are to
avoid both over-exaggerating the reflexive and self-conscious sensibilities involved
in ethical consumption, and, adhering to a reductive understanding of ethical
self-expression.
Keywords: Ethical consumption; everyday; Fairtrade; Mass Observation; shopping;
local

Introduction

Public awareness of the human, ecological and environmental cost of con-

sumption has increased over the past few decades (Fraj and Martinez 2007). It
has been closely accompanied by the idea that consumers can improve matters
through ‘responsible’ consumer choices. While forms of what might be called
ethical consumption have a long history (for example the Co-operative move-
ment), the explicit marketing, accessibility and popularity of ‘ethical’ products
is unprecedented (Connolly and Shaw 2006; Low and Davenport 2007; Mayo
2005). Magazines, websites, campaigns and pressure groups dedicated to

Adams (School of Applied Social Science, University of Brighton) and Raisborough (School of Applied Social Science, University
of Brighton) (Corresponding author email: ma21@bton.ac.uk)
© London School of Economics and Political Science 2010 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online.
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,
MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2010.01312.x
 Making a difference 257

ethical consumption proliferate; as do labelling initiatives, supermarket’s own

‘ethical’ brands and opportunities to donate to charity as you spend. For some
commentators the ability to ‘make a difference’ through consumption is
steadily shaping up as a ‘new’ activism (Bryant and Goodman 2004: 344); with
others arguing that ‘good’ consumption is becoming the means through which
individuals frame otherwise insurmountable problems and participate in solu-
tions (Micheletti 2003).
Ethical consumption is a growth market. To take Fairtrade as an example, in
the UK, sales of products carrying the Fairtrade label topped £712.6 m in 2008;
a substantial year-on-year increase from £16.7m in 1998. Globally, Fairtrade
certified products surpassed £1.6 billion in 2007, a 47 per cent increase on the
previous year (Fairtrade Foundation 2009). This growth has led to a frenzy of
profiling work to identify the ethical consumer often via personality measures
and socio-demographics. It is a fair summary of the field to argue that aca-
demic attention in business, marketing and consumer studies has focused on
defining ‘the ethical consumer’, and exploring their ‘ethical awareness’ in
relation to purchase behaviour.
A focus on the consumer reflects a prevailing assumption in ethical con-
sumer research of the ethical consumer as a ‘fixed identity’ (Cherrier 2007:
332) who makes rational use of available information about free trade/
corrective solutions to consider the consequences of their purchase practices
(Fraj and Martinez 2007). This formulation persists but suffers from a ten-
dency to reduce questions of ethics in relation to consumption to an ‘indi-
vidual’s ability to cognitively process flows of information’ (Caruana 2007:
291). Critiques of this formulation stem from a growing awareness that it,
‘shows little resemblance to ethical individuals in the real world’ (Cherrier
2007: 322), and sets about placing ethical consumer practices within the com-
plexity of everyday life. This contextualization project offers great promise in
realizing the perhaps fragmented or heterogeneous aspects of ethical con-
sumption practice; yet a tendency to focus its empirical efforts on self-
defined ethical consumers restricts the ‘everyday’ to specific groups or
allegiances and, we argue, serves to marginalize wider questions about the
ways individuals regard and respond to the increasing alignment of ‘ethics’
and ‘consumption’.
Our aim is to add to this contextualization project, pushing the conceptual-
ization of ethics and consumption beyond the comfortable heuristics of
‘business-as-usual’ marketing models as applied to the doing of ethics. We
draw on a specially commissioned Mass Observation Archive (MOA) direc-
tive, a method long associated with exploring the everyday through the inter-
pretations of those who live it (Purbrick 2007), to specifically focus on how
individuals, regardless of ethical ‘credentials’, relate to and experience the
increasing call to ‘make a difference’ as they shop. Our findings suggests that
our correspondents negotiate understandings of the relationship between
British Journal of Sociology 61(2) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2010
258 Matthew Adams and Jayne Raisborough

ethics and consumption in practice in a complex and uneven co-mingling of

doubt, scepticism, positive regard and wider definitions of ethical practice,
which include an emphasis on ‘the local’.

Critique of the ethical consumer model

There is now a critical mass of work in the social sciences that problematizes
the assumption of a discrete ethical consumer who shops in prescribed, ratio-
nal, ethically-inflected ways by considering the social and cultural framing of
ethical practices in the domain of consumption (e.g. Barnett et al. 2005). Such
work marks a discernible shift towards the everyday and with this, a readiness
to trouble binary formulations of ethical consumption/non-ethical consump-
tion stemming from Miller’s original argument that ‘all consumer behaviour,
however ordinary and routine, is likely to be shaped by diverse values of caring
for other people and concern for fairness’ (Barnett et al. 2005: 17; Miller 1998).
Barnett and colleagues in particular are interested in ‘ways in which every-
day practical moral dispositions are re-articulated by policies, campaigns and
practices that enlist ordinary people into broader projects of social change’
(Barnett et al. 2005: 23). The process of ‘re-articulation’ has largely been
approached via the study of the rhetoric and semiotics of the promotion and
packaging of ethical consumption initiatives such as Fairtrade: For example the
Traidcraft product catalogue (Clarke et al. 2007a) and campaign organization
(Barnett et al. 2005); brand imagery and advertising (Bryant and Goodman
2004; Goodman 2004; Varul 2008; Wright 2004) and ethical consumer ‘How-to’
guides (Clarke et al. 2007b).Taken as a whole, this work critically maps the way
‘consumers’ are oriented towards very specific prescriptions and framings of
ethics in their consumption practices. The ‘governing’ of consumption – ‘an
array of strategies that aim to regulate the informational and spatial contexts
of consumer “choice”’ is thought of as ‘so many devices for turning oughts into
cans’ (Barnett et al. 2005: 31).
Researching the mediation of specific campaigns such as Fairtrade in this
way can tell us a great deal about normative articulations concerning the
relationship between ethics and consumption and how they manifest and take
presence in the everyday. But work focusing exclusively on ‘enlisting’ practices
of mediation do not provide any insight into how the attempts they make to
‘re-articulate’ ethical dispositions are regarded and taken-up by individuals in
everyday consumption practices. Studies of ethical consumption campaigning
may well point to the ‘generation of narrative frames in which mundane
activities like shopping can be re-inscribed as forms of public-minded, citizenly
engagement’ (Clarke et al. 2007b: 242) but analyses of people’s own accounts
of their consumption practices suggests that such re-inscription is not wholly
manageable or predictable (Newholm 2005).
© London School of Economics and Political Science 2010 British Journal of Sociology 61(2)
 Making a difference 259

There is relatively little qualitative exploration of people’s experiences of

ethical consumption outside of consumer and marketing studies, and what
there is tends to focus on self-identified ‘ethical consumers’ (e.g. Cherrier 2007;
Carrigan, Szmigin and Wright 2004). This means that ‘ethical consumption’
risks being regarded as a given object, foreclosing some of the discussion of the
dynamics of its normative mediation, and marginalizing some of the theoreti-
cal advances discussed above. Accordingly, in light of the critique of the ratio-
nal ethical consumer model, our starting point is not the already-formed
ethical consumer and the complexity of their consumption choices, but the
broader question of if and how people negotiate the various calls to be ethical
in their everyday consumption; to consider how people position themselves in
relation to dominant discourses, rather than assuming they are already
positioned. As such, our research addresses understandings of the relationship
between ethics and consumption in the everyday, rather than practices of
ethical consumption. Our discussion now shifts to our qualitative study of the
relationship between ethics and consumption: a specially commissioned Mass
Observation Archive (MOA) directive, entitled ‘Shopping and making a
difference’.

The Mass Observation Archive

The MOA has historically been used by social researchers as a tool for explor-
ing everyday realities through the eyes of the people who are living them. This
focus potentially allows us to place ethical consumption in the everyday lives
of a community defined by the social practice of writing (Purbrick 2007) rather
than any explicit commitment (or otherwise) to the phenomenon of ethical
consumption. This is an important corrective, because, to reiterate, existing
(largely consumer) research, mainly quantitative, has focused on pre- and/or
self-defined ‘ethical consumers’ making (or not) discreet product choices and
displaying related attitudes (Mintel 2004; Vantomme et al. 2006; Carrigan,
Szmigin and Wright 2004). Our aim is not to quantify the ethical consumer, but
rather to offer a more textured description of the practice of ethics.
The Mass Observation project in its current phase is distinctive in that a
panel of volunteers, known as ‘correspondents’ (about 500 in number recruited
through press, television and radio) respond to set ‘directives’1. The directives,
sent out four times a year, comprise of ‘prompts’ that encourage correspon-
dents to write about selected events or issues, for example ‘the death of Diana’
(Autumn 1997); 9/11 (Autumn 2001); and everyday routines and experiences
such as ‘last night’s dreams ‘ (Winter 1992). The prompts can suggest activities
such as reflecting on memories, keeping a diary, making a poster and so on.
In summer 2007 our specially-commissioned three-part Directive – ‘Shop-
ping and Making a Difference’ was distributed (Mass Observation Archive
British Journal of Sociology 61(2) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2010
260 Matthew Adams and Jayne Raisborough

2007). The first part asked correspondents to recall ‘shopping memories’ – of

their own and family member’s of boycotts and/or other ethical initiatives. The
purpose here was to contextualize current understandings of ethical consump-
tion in contexts both personal and historical. The second part asked correspon-
dents to record their views and feelings during a fairly substantial shopping
trip. They were encouraged to think about why they made the choices they did
(and by observing the practices of others, the choices they made), with refer-
ence not just to ethics, but health and politics too. In the final section we
prompted correspondents to consider ‘wider issues’ such as the extent to which
the things they buy reflect their own personal values.
There are methodological concerns about MOA data which tend to echo
general concerns about qualitative research as a whole: issues of representa-
tiveness and the degree to which the correspondent’s stories are ‘fictionalized’
(McNicol 2004). The panel is not representative of the general UK population
on several counts: women, people aged over forty years old, living in the
south-east of England and of white ethnicity are overrepresented (Black and
Crann 2002); though the MOA has made efforts to widen the socio-
demographics of its correspondents. That said, we could make too much of this
weakness. The MOA is not after all a questionnaire (Sheridan 1993) and it is
through the inconsistencies, contradictions, beliefs and ambiguities of each
personal story that the everyday may be glimpsed (McNicol 2004). In the
words of a long-time director of the Archive:
Through autobiography we may come to learn about people’s hopes and
fears, their individual choices in relation to wider social and political change,
their rational and unconscious motives for acting and, above all, the meaning
and significance which they give their daily lives. (Sheridan 1996: 166)
Qualitative approaches such as the MOA are essential in grasping the mean-
ings people deploy in relation to phenomenon like ethical consumption, and
provide an essential grounding for future qualitative and quantitative work.

Making sense of the directive

We received 262 responses to our summer directive ‘making a difference’. The

information provided by the MOA allows us only to say that 66 per cent of our
respondents were women, 34 per cent were men; 49 per cent were aged 60 or
older; 22 per cent were 45–59; 22 per cent were 30–44; 7 per cent under 29;
information about occupation and location was more piecemeal so is not
included here. To protect correspondent’s anonymity each response was
known to us only by a code (e.g. L1002) and gender; some correspondents also
provided age and occupation.2 This information could provide rudimentary
markers of social class. We consider class to be an important element in all
© London School of Economics and Political Science 2010 British Journal of Sociology 61(2)
 Making a difference 261

consumption practices, as a basis for distinction (Bourdieu 1984). We have

conceptualized the class dimensions of ethical consumption elsewhere (Adams
and Raisborough 2008). However, to read class directly from brief descriptions
of location and occupation we believe would generate at best speculative and
at worst misleading connections between class and consumption – this may be
one limitation of MOA data.
It was immediately apparent that our directive had generated enormous
diversity, not only in terms of questions selected and length and direction of
responses, but also how each of the prompts was interpreted. This is not
surprising as correspondents for the MOA are encouraged to write freely in
whatever medium or style they feel comfortable with and are not obliged to
respond to the directive in part or whole. Thus some correspondents related to
the prompts in a broad sense, resisting the direction of the directive: discussing
childhood memories of war-time thrift in relation to consumption, for
example. Others responded to the prompts much more systematically, provid-
ing detail on each and every issue. Within and across these differences we were
also struck by the extent of the variety of interpretations of, and commitment
to, ‘ethical consumption’.
In the face of such diversity, given our stress on the everyday, we were alive
to the danger of decontextualizing aspects of a correspondent’s response from
its wider and supporting narrative. What we have found useful is an adaptation
of Gordon, Holland and Lahelma’s (1998) three-stage process of qualitative
scrutiny. The first stage (thematic) refers to immersion in the data in order to
identify emerging themes. The second stage (interpretative) involves returning
to the data to interpret their content through those themes. The final stage
entails the extraction of illustrations and examples of those themes. We
adapted these stages by cross-referencing between emerging themes to best
capture, for example, correspondents’ shifts between support and ambivalence
for ethical consumption. Thus a three stage thematic analysis is useful analyti-
cal tool for MOA data, if we ensure that we returned to the data to embed
otherwise isolated themes in each correspondent’s full response.This approach
was considered the best fit with the key concern to explore the ways ‘ordinary’
people experience and negotiate calls to enact their ethical agency through
consumption in complex, perhaps even contradictory practices of the
everyday.
The directive oriented respondents towards reflections on how consumption
practice relates to ethics and personal values, and if and how consumption can
make a ‘positive difference’. Unsurprisingly, correspondents talked about
being ethical or ‘making a difference’ through consumption in terms of trying
to be or do ‘good’. Goodness was a broad category incorporating issues of
fairness, desert and commitment; but also allowed space for a fair degree of
cynicism and scepticism; for example suspicion of do-gooders, or a questioning
of how much ‘good’ was being done. Our analysis has allowed us to tease out
British Journal of Sociology 61(2) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2010
262 Matthew Adams and Jayne Raisborough

the different ways in which the correspondents used ‘goodness’; and we

present these, for the sake of conceptual clarity, as thematic headings
(‘commitment to being good’; ‘hard to be good’; ‘good but doubting’ and
‘closer to home’). However, it is important to note that these were embedded
in the flow of a correspondent’s story, each of whom wrote selectively in
response to prompts, often interrelating or presented in contradictory ways.
The nature of the MOA responses makes any kind of quantitative framework
for these thematic headings difficult to ascertain.A content analysis may reveal
quantitative patterns of, for example, descriptive variants on the use of ‘good’,
but this would not offer the kind of description we feel is necessary to explore
how people are making sense of ethics and consumption. All we would claim
is that we consider these categories to be a useful starting point for a critical
sociological interpretation of the ‘doing’ of ethics via consumption.

Commitment to being good

Here we consider examples of expressions of a commitment to being good,

which appears to readily fit with the notion of a discreet and rational ethical
consumer. A number of comments closely reflect the normative interpellation
that might be expected of Fairtrade promotional material, for example, and the
discourses of consumer activism (doing good via enlightened consumption
choices) in which calls to ethical consumption are embedded.
B3757 (Male, 21) is a prime example of the enlightened, reflexive consumer
who consistently purchases Fairtrade – he buys Fairtrade ‘as much as possible’
(committed), he thinks about it on ‘every shopping trip’ (pervasive reflexivity),
and takes an activist and expansive view of the importance of ethical consump-
tion: ‘everyone should be ethically effective by thinking of the bigger picture at
all times’. L1691 (Female, 63) articulately occupies a position of ethical
reflexivity. She sees shopping as ‘an activity in which the personal and political
are closely identified for me’ – but this is ‘increasingly complicated over the
years and requires a constant review and reappraisal of my attitudes and
values’. This high level of consumption-oriented reflexivity is further mirrored
in this respondent’s hierarchical listing of shopping priorities (health, value,
fairly traded, locality). L2604 (M, 68) ‘always buys . . . anything that helps the
grower or farmer receive a just reward for their efforts’. The fact that Fairtrade
has taken off is, he thinks, a result of ‘our consciences being made more aware
of ethical issues’. Such statements seem to clearly parallel the relationship
between expert knowledge and rational individual practices theorised in the
academic advocacy of the reflexive ethical consumer.
Many more examples abound, from detailed advocacy to brief statements of
support, e.g. B3631 (F, 31) lives in Birmingham and is ‘proud’ that Birmingham
is the biggest Fairtrade city in the UK; L1002 (F, 60) does try to ‘think’ about the
© London School of Economics and Political Science 2010 British Journal of Sociology 61(2)
 Making a difference 263

things she buys ‘which are not green or planet friendly’ (ethical reflexivity);
What we find in these accounts is a general awareness of the ‘bads’ of
globalization in terms of production, and an acceptance of solutions based
on the ‘goods’ of enlightened consumption via the exercise of individual respon-
sibility. However the hold of ethical consumption as a way of ‘doing good’ has a
broader reach. Our findings also suggest that ethical consumption can set up a
default ethical position, whereby ethical consumption of Fairtrade produce is
considered even by those who are indifferent to such purchases.Thus,B3019 (M,
61) and B3252 (M, 61) both buy, they say, on the grounds of taste alone, and the
rest does not bother them, but still define themselves as ‘selfish shoppers’. The
Fairtrade consumer is by proxy a more ‘selfless shopper’; the point of reference
to be negotiated remains the Fairtrade consumerist representation of ethics.
This section suggests a clear ‘fit’ between standard accounts of the ‘ethical
consumer’ and our correspondents’ experience. These accounts closely
resemble advocacy accounts of ethical consumption as the act of discreet and
enlightened consumer choice. If we were approaching self-identified ethical
consumers and attempting to elicit motivations, attitudinal dispositions etc.
that underpinned this self-identification, we might stop here. We could offer
support for mainstream consumer research, in which ‘consuming ‘ethically’ is
understood in both theory and practice to depend on processing knowledge
and information, and on explicit practices of acknowledged commitment’
(Barnett et al. 2005: 28). However, as Barnett and colleagues attest, even if this
is a partially successful interpellation of the normative ‘ethical consumer’, the
fit between ethics and normative frameworks may not always be straightfor-
ward: our correspondents indicated that different positions are available for
occupation in response to such demands.

Hard to be good

Whether or not there was an avowed commitment to ‘doing good’ via ethical
consumption, correspondents also indicated that in practice, ‘doing good’ was
complicated by a number of obstacles. There is a high correspondence here
between our findings and existing literature which in an aim to strengthen the
resolve of ethical consumers, has suggested that the cost, quality (e.g. taste) and
accessibility of goods may be impediments to increased sales of ethical goods
(Boulstridge and Carrigan 2000; Bekin, Carrigan and Szmigin 2006):
a typical shopping trip will be a balancing act between my social conscience
and the size of my purse. (F4090 (F, 35))
purchases are compromises [between ethics and cost]. (B3019 (F, 40))
to my shame, I don’t tend to buy fair-traded food. Its just too expensive. I
hate to say that. (N3588 (F, 46))
British Journal of Sociology 61(2) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2010
264 Matthew Adams and Jayne Raisborough

This leads some to argue that if goods are more readily available, competitively
priced and of equivalent quality, obstacles would be overcome (Linton, Liou
and Shaw 2004, Nicholls and Lee 2006; Wright and Heaton 2006). However our
findings also reveal ‘deeper’ everyday struggles, when confronted with ‘being
good’ in the context of consumerism and the accompanying range of choice
open to them. Significantly, these ‘obstacles’ are not so easily remedied by
market solutions. Here the data allows us to move away, in degrees, from the
straightforward interpellation of the committed, or potentially committed,
ethical consumer.
Hence G3752 (M, 51) expresses commitment to Fairtrade ‘nagging away at
the back of my mind’, but as well as being compromised by the ‘pragmatics’ of
his purchasing power, he reflects on the problem of ‘conflicting information’
and the difficulty of prioritizing claims made about health, fairness and so on.
Others display various degrees of commitment to ethical consumption inter-
mingled with conflicting and/or competing demands:
sometimes my priorities . . . are in conflict with one another e.g Fairtrade
goods are probably transported by air and we have to buy Fairtrade bananas
from the Co-op or Sainsburys as the local market does not stock them. Also
even Fairtrade coffee and chocolate are not particularly healthy. (L1691
(F, 63))
the whole global warming carbon emissions and buying out of season, not
paying the cost of harvesting certain commodities, has come home to roost,
Everyone is aware of how we got it wrong. (L1002 (F, 60))
Fairtrade is good for the soul, organic is good for the body. (A1706 (F, 61)
All these quotes suggest other concerns are potentially in conflict with
Fairtrade when they are attempting to register ethically on one’s reflexive
endeavours. These concerns were echoed throughout the respondents’ writing
where we find a complex overlaying of competing ethical demands for reflex-
ive engagement in terms of haulage, corporate power, health and Fairtrade.
Furthermore, such struggles commonly lead to a more or less explicit sense of
dissonance, guilt or tension in attempting to navigate a path through compet-
ing demands for consumer commitment:
in everyday life it’s sometimes hard to think of moral or ethical ways
to live, you have to question your every action which is hard. (C1832
(F, 60))
although I can make out the issues which form the pathways of the ethical
consumer maze, I am not always able to follow them, for it is sometimes hard
to see the wall that is built up by financial constraints or conflicting ethical
issues and there are misleading labels which lead me into dead-ends. (A3403
(M, 37))
© London School of Economics and Political Science 2010 British Journal of Sociology 61(2)
 Making a difference 265

To take a longer example from our data, F4090 (F, 35), describes in some
detail her shopping quandary regarding the purchase of bananas for her
family. Recent financial constraints on the family have limited her choice to the
‘value range’ of bananas in her local supermarket. After one trip, she noticed
on arriving home the bananas were from Cameroon. This worried her, because
as part of her social work training, she had learnt of concerns over the treat-
ment of young Cameroonian women. On her next visit, she searches for
alternatives and finds bananas from Costa Rica also in the ‘value range’.
However, she writes ‘Unfortunately I don’t know much about Costa Rica. It
could be just as bad as Cameroon but there is no way I can check everything
out. In some ways, this is why things like Fairtrade are good, because at least it
takes the worry out of your shopping choices’.
These responses offer support for Cherrier’s (2007) assertion that individu-
als can feel overwhelmed rather than empowered by ‘ethical’ choices.
However, in this example, ethical consumption allows a way through the
‘moral maze’, but does not necessarily equate to the reflexive processing of
knowledge. It is thus possible that rather than the ‘choice’ of ethical goods
being the outcome of enlightened and extended reflection on the production
process, in the face of such complexity, some correspondents end up opting for
Fairtrade by employing heuristics or ‘loose rules’ (Newholm 2005). Newholm
does not expand on the use of heuristics, though Thompson and Coskuner-
Balli perhaps offer some insight in their discussion of the ‘ideological allure of
simple choices’ (2007: 149). In a world of complex global trade dynamics and
ambivalent morality, even in the daunting context of ‘making a difference’,
heuristics such as the Fairtrade label may afford consumers feelings of ‘confi-
dence in outcomes, direct participatory involvement, and personal engage-
ment’ (2007: 150). Our data suggests that the common cultural equation of
Fairtrade with ‘doing good’ might suspend the requirement for reflexive effort
otherwise involved in negotiating through the complex demands noted above.

Good but doubting

Respondents suggest that even as they ‘do-good’ through ethical consumption,

they are not always entirely convinced that ‘good’ is being done and were often
sceptical of the ‘big business’ of ethical consumption. These concerns were
apparent in discussions centring on cost; a suspicion that supermarkets were
overpricing to service ‘some Mr Bigs’ in ‘creaming off the profits’ B3323 (M,
72), illustrates concerns about ‘middlemen’ (B89 (F, 76); D3664 (F, 25); F1589
(F, 75)) while others expressed confusion and worry when Fairtrade goods
were cheaper than similar products (for example A883 (M, 73); C41 (F, 48)), as
this seemed to undermine the purpose of Fairtrade. These doubts directly
relate to the mainstreaming of Fairtrade: a term that speaks to widening
British Journal of Sociology 61(2) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2010
266 Matthew Adams and Jayne Raisborough

accessibility and promotion of ethical goods, often through supermarkets. Thus

for some of our correspondents something happens to the ‘good’ of ethical
consumption when delivered through bigger businesses:
I have a friend who imports coffee and claims that Fairtrade is an entirely
cynical marketing exercise and very rarely if ever benefits those it is meant
to. (C4097 (F, no age provided))
Such comments present a stark contrast to Arnould’s claims that citizenship
and consumerism can increasingly be aligned unproblematically: ‘that success-
ful, progressive practices of citizenship ‘should’ take place through market-
mediated forms in our culture because these are the templates for action and
understanding available to most people’ (Arnould 2007: 105). Such responses
reflect Low and Davenport’s (2007) warning that ‘mainstreaming’ presents
ethical goods as merely another shopping choice. For some correspondents this
resulted in an ‘emptying out’ of their perception of Fairtrade, so that it was
merely a ‘brand’ (A3573 (F 45); L1002 (F, 60)), a ‘fad’ (L1696 (M, 90)) a
‘fashion’ (B1475 (F, 64)), and that newer products were ‘jumping on the Fair-
trade bandwagon’ (B1215 (F, 54)).
There is space here then to cast some doubt on conceptual models that
equate ‘good’ consumer practice with a straightforward ‘feel good’ factor. Thus
Soper argues that the ‘moral rewards’ of ethical consumption include ‘the
intrinsic pleasures of consuming differently’ (2007: 211); and relatedly ‘a dis-
tinctively moral form of self-pleasuring or a self-interested form of altruism:
that which takes pleasure in committing to a more socially accountable mode
of consuming’ (2007: 213). Soper’s account indicates a complex interaction of
self-interest and altruism, but it echoes the ‘feel-good factor’ often explicitly
associated with buying Fairtrade in promotional literature and consumer tes-
timony (Goodman 2004; Nicholls and Opal 2005). However, our data suggests
that shoppers weave complex lay knowledge of global problems; such as
perceived ‘bads’ of supermarket business with unease towards ethical con-
sumption itself. What we find is that this does not deter all consumers from
shopping ‘ethically’ but demonstrates the complexity of their motivations, and
understanding of their own ‘ethical’ actions. Claims to make a difference are
then far from idealized, but hedged by the hard ‘realities’ of global capitalism.
Although Fairtrade mobilizes consumer suspicion of corporate power by
positioning itself against free trade, in becoming mainstream it gains in size to
more closely resemble a corporation and, of course, has closer ties to some of
those corporations. Fairtrade has to navigate difficult terrain, positioned as it is
against free trade while located squarely within a market system. Conse-
quently it is in danger of being (mis)recognized as the very thing it defines
itself against, as evident in the unevenness of our responses. Thompson
and Coskuner-Balli (2007) concur in arguing that consumers are poten-
tially wary of global polit-brands – ‘shining beacons of socially responsible
© London School of Economics and Political Science 2010 British Journal of Sociology 61(2)
 Making a difference 267

capitalism’ – that promote themselves as agents of progressive social change

for the same reasons. The authors’ study of community-supported agriculture,
reported that their research participants turn away from corporate polit-
brands ‘and, instead, direct their politicized consumption choices toward non-
corporate, local alternatives’ (Thompson and Coskuner-Balli 2007: 149). Our
findings similarly revealed a turn towards the local. However this co-existed in
complex and fragmentary ways with expressions of support for ‘mainstreamed’
Fairtrade and supermarket-scepticism.We now turn to discussions of the ‘local’
in more detail.

Closer to home

Academic definitions of contemporary ethical consumption, despite varia-

tions, tend to assume that the phenomenon is based on relationships to distant
others (Cova 1997; Barnett et al. 2005). However, although distance was a
recurring theme of importance in our respondent’s writing, it was not always
articulated in ways which fit comfortably into such a conceptualization. Our
respondents persistently reframed ethical consumption in the spatial/
geographical terms of ‘the local’, emphasizing their commitment to purchasing
the ‘local’ production and/or the supply of consumer goods. A variety of
spatial/product markers complicated any simple reading of the local: ‘British
farmers’, ‘British goods’, ‘local shops’, ‘the high street’, ‘your own country’.
Similarly, justifications for articulating ethical consumption as a commitment
to closer rather than distant others, where discernable, were varied: regional-
ism, nationalism, environmentalism and communitarianism are not easy to
unpick, nor necessarily mutually exclusive, in accounting for such an emphasis.
Sometimes the emphasis on the closer as opposed to distant was an explicit
naming of shopping locally as ethical – or more ethical – than purchasing
Fairtrade items produced further afield:
I have endeavoured to shop ‘ethically’ ever since I grew up . . . British made
goods, British farm products, Local goods. British Car. (M2164 (F, 80))
When it comes to food I always buy British . . . to me that is being ethical
you should buy from your own country rather than boost the economy of
another. (F1634 (F, retired))
We have a primary duty towards our own people, culture and nation.
(M3190 (M, 49))
Most of the ‘making a difference’ shopping we do is to try and support
local/independent shops and try to limit our food miles and food waste . . .
we feel as though we are trying to contribute to the local economy and also
supporting good farming practices for the future. (O3259 (F, 42))
British Journal of Sociology 61(2) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2010
268 Matthew Adams and Jayne Raisborough

All [British farmers] deserve a better deal in our estimation . . . perhaps it is

time we thought of Fairtrade for them. (B1654 (M, 76))
In these five examples the first three suggest an implicit justification in terms
of nationalist and/or regionalist consumer ethics perhaps; the fourth is more
explicitly concerned with localized economic support, farming practices, and
environmental concerns relating to food transportation; the fifth is similar to
the first but explicitly applies the concept of Fairtrade to British farmers.
Whilst the welfare of others is a shared concern amongst our respondents then,
which others are deemed worthy of compassion in everyday practices of con-
sumption, and for what reason, varies enormously. In other responses there
was no explicit labelling of local shopping as an alternative form of ethical
consumption, but none the less a similar shifting of emphasis onto priorities
and practices which were marked by the importance of purchasing from those
‘closer to home’:
I support the local farmers more now than that of foreign countries . . . we
should look at our dying farming industries first . . . Fairtrade does not make
any difference to me now whilst I shop. However, I will always buy local
produce first . . . I feel we should look closer to home too. (L4047 (M, 37))
[What’s more important than Fairtrade] is buying locally to keep our small
shops open and to stop our town shops going out of business and the town
from becoming a wasteland . . . our fellow man in faraway places can’t
compete with this. (L1504 (M, 81))
The spatial and relational dynamics of emphasizing the ethics of shopping
‘closer to home’ has received little attention in academic literature concerned
with what is explicitly labelled as ethical consumption. Where it has, the local
seems to be relegated to a fallback position for those who would consume
ethically, narrowly understood, but lack the resources to do so. Thus for
Clarke et al. local shopping ‘indicates the degree to which the exercise of
‘choice’ is shaped by systems of collective provisioning over which consumers
have little direct influence’ (2007b: 239). Ascertaining the degree of ‘choice’
versus the degree of systemic collective provisioning is a complex conceptual
manoeuvre, particularly if we see the exercise of choice as a reflection of
class-based dispositions and prevalent in all action is ‘the logic of the con-
sumption of signs’ guiding consumption ‘choices’ (Arnould 2007: 98; Baud-
rillard 1988[1970]; Bourdieu 1984). The issue of genuine ‘choice’ aside, our
respondents did sometimes reflect that their choices were limited by access to
Fairtrade goods, but this seems to be an unnecessarily reductive understand-
ing of the meaning of ‘local shopping’ to some of those avowing an involve-
ment in it. Shopping ‘closer to home’ can be expressed as a political choice
with or against Fairtrade purchasing, and so can even be explicitly claimed to
be a form of ethical consumption.3
© London School of Economics and Political Science 2010 British Journal of Sociology 61(2)
 Making a difference 269

Work in the sociology of food on slow and local food movements raises
some fascinating parallel debates (e.g. Chrzan 2004; Holt and Amilien 2007). In
these food movements there is an explicit concern with how dominant food
production is ‘disconnected space from place, stretching the distance between
where food is produced and where it is consumed’ (Labelle 2004: 87), and we
see an emergence of another dimension of what we have referred to elsewhere
as a ‘politics of proximity’ (Adams and Raisborough 2008). As Labelle attests,
Local food is one of the most obvious examples reflecting proximity, though
locality has many meanings . . . local food can express proximity in direct
relations, like a farmer’s market, as well as through its introduction into
institutions and other regions, enabling connections over a range of
distances. (2004: 87)
That these connections, like those of Fairtrade, are always mediated, suggests
that future research tackles the politics of proximity across various food move-
ments to grasp the shifting dynamics of consumer culture, and the tensions
between universalizing and localized discourses of consumption-based ethics.
There is potential here for expanding our understanding of ethical consump-
tion and shifts in consumer culture more generally, by conceptualizing more
complex spatial and relational dynamics at the heart of the relationship
between ethics and consumption. It is possible that such shifts will culminate in
the ‘branding’ of the local in a similar way to Fairtrade is branded; for example
there are already a number of moves in mainstream supermarkets to region-
ally brand foods, and to include imagery of ‘local’ producers; some indepen-
dent retailers identify the ‘food miles’ of products and sourcing ‘locally’
appears to have rapidly increasing appeal in the logic of consumer signs.
If emphasis on the local is about than the politics of space and place, it is also
about issues of attachment and embodiment. People’s connection to their
locality in terms of consumption may be a reflexive route through the ethical
maze of consumption choices, but it also reflects, or perhaps reinstates, a more
directly relational dimension of everyday life. It rearticulates or ‘rembeds’ the
social relations of the individual, to use Giddens’s term, but not across ‘indefi-
nite tracts of time and space’ as he suggests (Giddens 1991: 18), at least not
exclusively. Rather than the place becoming a meaningless dimension of social
time and space, the mediated relationships understood as ‘closer to home’ are
in these responses imagined as a meaningful and purposeful attachment which
can be registered via forms of everyday consumption.

Conclusion

We started this paper by recognizing the increasing opportunities we have as

consumers to ‘make a difference’. Yet we have departed from assumptions
British Journal of Sociology 61(2) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2010
270 Matthew Adams and Jayne Raisborough

circulating in consumer and business studies of a fixed ethical consumer with

specifically directed and targeted ethical actions. Instead, we have considered,
via the MOA directive, lived experiences; both of the call to this particular
form of ethical agency and also to the varied ways that such a call, even when
responded to positively (making the ‘right’ choices), is understood and
actioned. The correspondents wrote of realities that were more complex than
formulations of a ‘fixed’ ethical consumer can allow. It is here that we argue the
MOA offers a means, through personal subjective accounts and ‘fragmented
autobiographies’ (Black and Crann 2002) to dislodge the certainty of
researcher defined categorizations and ‘categorical approaches’ more gener-
ally (Stanley 1988; Valentine 1999: 495). A focus on the personal narratives of
the MOA helps to contextualize ethical consumption within the wider socio-
cultural rhythms of everyday life, in ways that provide some insight into how
choices are recognized, rendered meaningful, and taken up.
This leads us to approach definitions of ‘ethical consumption’ and the con-
sumer with some caution. Barnett et al’s definition is encouragingly broad:
ethical consumption is ‘any practice of consumption in which explicitly regis-
tering commitment to distant or absent others is an important dimension of
the meaning of activity of the actors involved’ (2005: 29). There are two points
that our discussion allows us to unpack; the notion of ‘commitment’ and the
detailing of specific others. Our findings did demonstrate that many consumers
did have a commitment to, in their own words, ‘being good’ and making a
difference through their shopping decisions. As existing literature would lead
us to expect, this commitment was sometimes confounded by pragmatics of
cost, accessibility and at times, product quality. Yet, a focus on the obstacles
of ‘good’ purchase behaviour only allows us to speak of the opportunities/
possibilities of action, not of the nature and experience of commitment in
itself. Our data suggests that ‘commitment’ cannot be read as equivalent to
uncritical views of ethical consumption, nor an idealist view that ‘good’ is being
done. Despite many declaring a commitment to ethical consumption, the
MOA correspondents’ views on their own actions were far from clear cut –
with many expressing grave concerns about bureaucratic and business corrup-
tion; the sheer scale of global ‘bads’; and consumer culture. Others framed
commitment as something less explicit; apparently employing heuristics to
ease the process of deliberation involved in the contemporary consumption
choices of some. An ‘explicit registered commitment’ thus leaves little room
for doubt – or for a wavering, suspicious, ambivalent ‘consumer’ juggling their
choices amidst competing knowledge claims.
We have expressed these in terms of ‘doubts’ but this may not do justice to
seemingly constant variability, uncertainty and unevenness found in our cor-
respondents’ accounts. Of course one of the limitations of the MOA is that we
cannot probe more deeply; something which an interview based research
design might allow (Raisborough and Bhatti 2007). We can however, suggest
© London School of Economics and Political Science 2010 British Journal of Sociology 61(2)
 Making a difference 271

from our reading of the data, that ‘unevenness’ and ‘doubt’ are not always
unwelcome accompaniments to commitment that threaten to potentially
hijack or soften it. Instead, we get the view here that unevenness is a necessary
constituent to the ways that commitment materializes through dynamic epis-
temologies (knowledge of supermarket practices for example) that differently
assert the realities of global business and also, of any moderating ‘good’ action.
It is tempting to describe the MOA correspondents as ‘fragmented’ at least in
terms of their ethical consumption practice and/or ethical identities; but we are
reluctant to do so, as this serves to isolate what we see as component parts of
a coherent, liable to flux, but mostly uneven, biographical narrative. In sum,
our MOA correspondents do not ‘switch’ from one mindset to another – all
knowledges interweave and operate when they reflect upon ethical purchases
and all inform the experience of a commitment to ‘doing good’.
That the correspondents also referred to the ‘ethical’ in terms of the ‘local’
works to disrupt any formulation linking the ‘good choices’ here with the
livelihood of a producer ‘over there’ – ‘distant or absent others’. While a sense
of fairness resounded through many accounts, there was a keen sense that
commitment to a distant other should be matched, or secondary, to a commit-
ment to producers ‘closer to home’. As we have discussed above, a number of
respondents negotiated the dilemmas of ‘doing good’ by shopping ‘closer to
home’ and ‘doing good’ by buying labelled Fairtrade goods, usually produced,
in part at least, at some distance from the point of consumption. Thus once the
activity of consuming ethically becomes a heuristic, qualified by scepticism,
jostling amongst competing demands such as ‘the local’, its level of importance
as a ‘dimension of meaningful activity’ takes on a protean relativity to the
psycho-social context in which consumption takes place.
Consequently work on the phenomenon of ethical consumption that takes
ordinary individual’s accounts seriously must look beyond the mediation of
Fairtrade in campaigning and promotional materials, and engage with every-
day accounts of consumption and ethics. We acknowledge that we have made
only a modest contribution to this engagement here. However we strongly
believe that a more complex fit between social re-articulations of ethical
consumption, enlisting processes and individual articulations arises in our
study precisely because of the advantages of our particular approach: we
engaged directly with individual experiences; self-identification as an ethical
consumer was not a pre-requisite for selection and did not therefore ‘prime’
responses in any way; and our prompts allowed space for respondents to
work-up their own articulations of the relationship between consumption and
ethics. Thus whatever its limitations, we are convinced that the MOA provides
sociological insight into the everyday dimensions of a complex and growing
social phenomenon.

(Date accepted: February 2010)

British Journal of Sociology 61(2) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2010
272 Matthew Adams and Jayne Raisborough
Notes
1. For more information on the history
and practice of the Mass Observations
Archive see www.massobs.org.uk
2. We represent those codes here as, for
example L1002 (F, 60).
3. There is now a ‘Fairtrade for
British farmers’ campaign in the
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