Books on Fair Wages & Globalizing Responsibility
Posted: January 15, 2011 Filed under: Book | Tags: Consumer responsibility, Ethical consumption, Living wages, Political consumer, Wages 1 Comment »Before I am off into the mountains for one week (without snow …) I would like to recommend two books:
1. “Fair Wages” by Daniel Vaughan-Whitehead and published by Edward Elgar Publishing in 2010. The book is the result of a collaboration between the ILO and the FLA. Their web-site is an interesting source.
2. “Globalizing Responsibility. The Political Rationalities of Ethical Consumption” by Clive Barnett, Paul Cloke, Nick Clarke, Alice Malpass and published by Wiley-Blackwell in 2011.
I will later report more about the books.
Like this:
Myth of ethical consumer: What does it mean?
Posted: October 22, 2010 Filed under: Book, Clip | Tags: Consumers, Ethical consumption, Hannes Jaenicke, Myth ethical consumer Leave a comment »The actor Hannes Jaenicke is going to open the upcoming Utopia conference, which is a LOHAS-meeting in Berlin. In an interview he explains that he is frustrated of NGOs fighting against windmills and recommends that campaigns should in future target industry and politics less, and instead try to positively influence the consumers:
“die Kampagnenarbeit muss sich in Zukunft weniger gegen Politik und Industrie richten, sondern im positiven Sinne an den Konsumenten. Denn offensichtlich haben Industrie und Politik überhaupt kein Interesse daran, wirklich sozial und umweltverträglich zu denken, zu arbeiten und zu produzieren.”
NGOs already argue that consumers are willing to buy ethically. Südwind recently presented a survey, which suggests that 2/3 of the consumers think eco-fair fashion is important. According to the survey, every second consumer is willing to pay more for socially or ecologically better products. Here you find the press release.
Timothy Devinney, one author of the book “The myth of the ethical consumer”, agrees that many consumers would say they care about human rights or the environment (earlier I wrote about the book). However, he argues that this does not mean that they also consume in that way. In a short video he explains what he means by saying the ethical consumer is a myth:
1. Consumers simply do not behave in the way those promoting the notion of ethical consumption want them to behave. They don’t purchase ethically, but in a very utilitarian way.
2. While people talk very generally about ethical consumers, consumers don’t behave in general notions of ethicality, but very specifically.
3. The ethical consumer is a role model presenting what people would like to behave like. But not reflecting reality.
Here is a radio interview with him, and here is their resourceful website. I think that he is right that consumers behave utilitarian and that they behave in much more complex ways than some organizations would like them to do. The consumers are certainly not the panacea regarding environmental and fair production and a too strong shift towards the consumers seems unwise to me. But this does not mean that the government and other organizations should try to change the behaviour of consumers. Clearly, consumers, companies and governments must all change.
Avocado store: Riding the LOHAS-wave
Posted: September 22, 2010 Filed under: News | Tags: Avocado store, e-commerce, Ethical consumption, LOHAS, Rating tool Leave a comment »The German weekly Business Magazine Wirtschaftswoche yesterday published the article “Avocado store setzt auf die grüne Welle“. The article presents the e-commerce startup “Avocado store“, which recently won 300.000 Euro in competition for startup companies. Like Amazon, the store allows companies to offer their products online, and so far, it offers more than 2100 products. But unlike Amazon, Avocado store only sells “social and fair products” (big focus on clothing). The article claims that such online stores might be a chance particularly for smaller “green” or “fair” labels to market themselves successfully.
The big question is, which products does the store regard as “green” and “fair”? A quick glance at the website tells me that the store asks the company that offers a product on the platform to argue, why they think it is sustainable. There are nine criteria: CO₂-saving | ressource saving | low toxics in production | cradle to cradle | organic raw material | fair & social | long-living product | recycled | made in germany. In addition, consumers can evaluate each single criteria.
I think the idea of such such a shop is really good, and I think that it can help promote particularly smaller “sustainable” labels. However, the founderes of the shop must take care that they finally do not sell products under the “ethics” umbrella that only have very poor sustainability criteria. I think that it is problematic that the nine very broadly defined criteria already now theoretically include almost every product. And I also have my doubts, whether sellers and consumers should be the only ones rating the products regarding their sustainability. Sometimes more information of high quality is more helpful than tons of information of low quality, which only confuses the consumers. I believe that the stores should at least have some more strict “must have” criteria or some kind of benchmarking system that allows to rank products in terms of their sustainability. Even if this task is difficult to fulfill, there are other platforms that might show the right way (see my earlier post).
Conference: Shopping to Save the World?
Posted: September 16, 2010 Filed under: Conferences | Tags: Conference, Development, Environment, Ethical consumption Leave a comment »
Here is a call for papers of the annual meeting of the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) in Seattle:
Shopping to Save the World? Ethical consumption, development and environment
This paper session will explore the various material and symbolic connections between people, places and natures that are highlighted and hidden through ethical consumption initiatives.
If consumption is becoming a new front line in development or environmental interventions and the market is being re-inscribed as the place for political and moral action, then what are the consequences of this in terms of environments, subject formation and networks of collaboration or oppression across spaces? What actors, processes and power dynamics are involved in framing ethical consumption as a viable ‘solution’ to global social and environmental problems? How do consumers embody this new form of ‘responsibility’? And how does this process result in new forms or understandings of caring across distance, solidarity, philanthropy, economies and/or nature?
Inspired by the vast amount of work in geography exploring the material and symbolic aspects of ethical consumption, questioning the meaning of ethical consumption and investigating the ways in which discourses of ethical consumption function, this session encourages participants to expand on this rich array of work by drawing on theories such as feminist geography, critical race theory, political ecology, neoliberalized natures and development geographies (for example); in order to further explore the ways in which ethical consumption can be approached and understood within the discipline.
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
- fair trade, sustainable, local, organic, ethical, developmental consumption
- anti-consumerist, simplicity movements
- ethical consumption discourses and subject formation
- the symbolic and material connections through ethical consumption networks
- North-South dynamics, development and consumption
- the geographical imaginaries of consumption
- commodity fetishism
- local-global power dynamics, scales and consumption networks
- feminist or critical race analyzes of ethical consumption
Titles and abstracts (250 words) of proposed papers should be sent to Roberta Hawkins (rohawkins(at)clarku.edu) by October 10th, 2010.
