Following the call for further research on the consumer perspective of corporate ethics, this research sets out to explore and conceptualize the construct of ‘Consumer Perceived Ethicality’ (CPE), referring to consumers’ aggregate and valenced perceptions of a subject’s(i.e., a company, brand, product, or service) ethicality. Results present novel insights into how positive/negative CPE is formed and impacted by various kinds of corporate conduct, thereby offering some explanations as to why some companies benefit from positive while others suffer from negative moral equity.

In the globalized garment industry (GGI) most clothing is involved in complex networks that exploit both people and the environment. This system is unsustainable yet supported by Canadian consumers, who have become disconnected from their clothing’s production and disposal processes as a result of the development of increasingly complex social and technological systems since the Industrial Revolution. Canadians currently learn about the industry from public portrayals in which the dominant messages are designed by corporations promoting consumption. Nevertheless, growing numbers of consumers are realizing that this system is unsustainable and attempting to take action. This study uses methods based on institutional ethnography to explore the challenges faced by Canadians trying to engage in ethical consumption. Promoting sustainability is seen as requiring broad structural change, which can be supported by individual Canadians seeking to learn about the industry and working with its global stakeholders to build the civil commons.

In the globalized garment industry (GGI) most clothing is involved in complex networks that exploit both people and the environment. This system is unsustainable yet supported by Canadian consumers, who have become disconnected from their clothing’s production and disposal processes as a result of the development of increasingly complex social and technological systems since the Industrial Revolution. Canadians currently learn about the industry from public portrayals in which the dominant messages are designed by corporations promoting consumption. Nevertheless, growing numbers of consumers are realizing that this system is unsustainable and attempting to take action. This study uses methods based on institutional ethnography to explore the challenges faced by Canadians trying to engage in ethical consumption. Promoting sustainability is seen as requiring broad structural change, which can be supported by individual Canadians seeking to learn about the industry and working with its global stakeholders to build the civil commons.

The objective of this study is to explore possible factors affecting college students¡¦ preference for fair trade coffee. The investigated factors included four of the values listed in Sheth, Newman and Gross's (1991a) theory of consumption values, as well as price, convenience (of buying fair trade coffee), and demographic variables. The values were functional value, social value, emotional value, and epistemic value. This study further divided emotional value into caring value and mood value; the formal reflected caring about farmers, child labor and the environment/ecology, and the latter focused on the possibility of having a good mood from consuming fair trade coffee. A convenience sample of 198 college students studying in Kaohsiung who often drank coffee were interviewed. Results from regression analysis suggest that college students would be more intended to buy fair trade coffee if they believed it had high caring value or high mood value. Furthermore, respondents spending less than 200 NTD per month on coffee were less intended to buy fair trade coffee than those spending between 200 NTD and 499 NTD per month on coffee were. Finally, functional value, social value, epistemic value, prices, and convenience¡Xall assessed by respondents' perceptions¡Xdid not have significant impact on the respondents¡¦ preference for fair trade coffee. Based on these findings, several recommendations were made to the government, schools, and organizations interested in promoting fair trade coffee.

Referat: Unter den Stichworten "Ethischer Konsum", "Politischer Konsum", "Moralischer Konsum" o.Ä. lassen sich seit den letzten Jahren Konsummuster fassen, in denen neben der Erfüllung privater Wünsche und Bedürfnisse immer stärker die Frage danach aufgeworfen wird, inwiefern das eigene Konsumverhalten dazu beitragen kann, bestehende globale Verteilungsungerechtigkeiten/Umweltprobleme abzumildern oder ganz zu beseitigen. Unter anderem mittels verschiedener Siegel, die faire Arbeitsbedingungen oder eine nachhaltige Produktion (vermeintlich) garantieren, sollen Konsumentinnen und Konsumenten dabei mit dem für sie nötigen Wissen über die Herkunft der Waren ausgestattet werden. In vorliegender Arbeit wird die Frage gestellt, wie in Diskursen und Praktiken jener Formen kritischen Konsums gesellschaftliche Problematiken (z.B. die oben angesprochenen) in Probleme bzw. Aufgaben individueller Lebensführung übersetzt werden, mithin also von einer globalen Ebene auf eine lokale, körperliche herunterskaliert werden. Dabei wird kritischer Konsum als spezifisches Handlungsfeld verstanden, welches jenen Spielraum eröffnet, der für die Etablierung jeglicher aktiv gestalteter Lebensführung ("Selbsttechniken" im weitesten Sinne) notwendig ist, und damit die Konstituierung von "raumsensiblen" und "verantwortlich" agierenden Konsumentinnen und Konsumenten erst ermöglicht.

This thesis explores the relationship between food and identity. Drawing on the concept of ‘gastro-anomie’, or ‘food normlessness’, it asks how individuals’ make sense of food and eating in the context of an increasingly globalised and complex food economy. Through a series of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with a small number of individuals living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the thesis outlines participants’ everyday attitudes toward food and eating practices. It concludes that individuals actively seek out and ultimately find meaning through their food consumption practices. Consciously aware of the problems associated with the global food economy, the participants in this study used their food choices as a way to reflexively carve out their identities. Their bodies provided a powerful medium through which they engaged in these efforts.

Yoga has been an organizing feature of community for thousands of years, shaping and being shaped by the bodies, minds, spiritual worlds and social relationships of its practitioners. Over the course of the last century, it has become a global celebrity-endorsed exemplification of how to live a “good” life and been transformed from the “exotic,” grotesque menageries of ascetic “sinister yogis” and itinerant sages, to define the fit, graceful, radiant, blissful personages of American supermodels and pop-stars. Yoga has moved from the ashrams of India to gyms, church basements and specialized studios of Europe, North America and Australia, and from these centers of economic and political power, to “exotic” peripheries through the global and bodily movements of world-travelers seeking self-discovery, health, spiritual transformation, and connection with the natural world in “less developed” locales. This dissertation explores and documents the movement of yoga-motivated travelers to tourism locales with no historical connection to yoga, asking questions about 1) how yoga travelers’ activities fit in larger contexts of ethical tourism and cross-cultural consumption as yoga travels across borders, 2) the role yoga plays in practitioners’ lives, shaping health, gender, sexuality, and lifestyle, 3) outcomes of sustained contemporary yoga practice on the bodies of practitioners, including affective transformation through bodily manipulation, the expansion of sensual awareness through breath, auditory techniques, meditation and mind-body synthesis, 4) how these bodily transformations are interpreted and applied to contemporary life through syncretic adaptations of yoga ethics from classical yoga texts with contemporary ethical discourses of environmentalism and consumer choice, and 5) how yoga tourists and the owners of yoga tourism locales view, interact with, and mobilize “foreign” locals and locales through sustainable development narratives and ideas of global community and universal spirituality. I apply contemporary anthropological agendas to yoga as a means to explore different ways of being alive, paying particular attention to how sensual potentials are brought to conscious experience by relational engagement with nature and culture, thus shaping our affective worlds. This dissertation charts intimate bodily and cross-cultural human relationships played out through yoga. It considers the spiritual, economic, political and cultural impacts of globalized yoga and yoga tourism. Close attention is paid to the experiential aspects of yoga and how yoga enlivens and relates to larger social narratives of nature sanctity under contemporary stresses of neoliberalism, including how yoga practitioners engage with the ethics of yoga and consumption to make lifestyle choices that align with political and economic concerns for viable ecological, social and cultural futures. / Graduate

This thesis explores the role of the self-concept on ethical consumption behaviour within the Thai consumer context. Religiosity has an influence on a person’s self and morality as Thai people place high importance on religious values. Ten consumers are studied through in-depth, phenomenological interviews, focusing on ethical consumption experiences and meanings. The self-concept is viewed as an experiencer and a moral entity that is dynamic and contextual between internal and external values. The study has extended knowledge on the self-concept and self-image congruency in the context of ethical consumption. It found the existence of a self-ethics relationship through processes of internalisation and externalisation. Personal value, emotion, moral salience, religious beliefs and social values are internalised into the self-concept. On the other hand, externalisation allows consumers to express personal meanings onto society. Self-monitoring functions in these processes to control ethical behaviour. Ethical consumption helps consumers to construct and enhance moral identity, underpinned by the moral self. This thesis has found self-ethics congruency, where meanings of the self and ethical consumption are symbolised and encouraging ethical consumption. Moreover, the multidimensional self has emerged from the study. This finding offers insights on different aspects of the self-concept through ethical consumption. Consumers intuitively engage in ethical consumption when emotion is involved. The implications of this study suggest “who ethical consumers are” by looking at the consumer’s self. Organisations and marketers can use different selves and moral identity to segment and target potential ethical consumers while creating brand image corresponding to consumer’s self-image.

Esta dissertação faz uma reflexão sobre alguns aspectos do atual período da globalização, que foi denominado como a era da bagaceira, termo usado para caracterizar os desmandos e desatinos causados por graves problemas que vem acontecendo nas últimas décadas. Analisa o consumo ético como uma postura que cada indivíduo pode adotar para contribuir com a sustentabilidade do planeta. Tem como base de análise a cadeia produtiva do caranguejo na região do Delta do Rio Parnaíba PI e MA e a implantação de uma educação ambiental pautada em alguns princípios éticos como possibilidade de se desenvolver esta postura e não deixar a sustentabilidade se tornar mais uma falácia mercadológica perante tanto consumismo. / This thesis reflects on some aspects of the current period of globalization which has been called the era of foolery, term used to characterize the excesses and follies caused by serious problems which have been happening in the last decades. It analyzes ethical consumption as an attitude which each individual can adopt to contribute to the sustainability of the planet. Its base for analysis is the lobster production chain in the region of the Paranaíba River Delta of PI and MA and the implantations of an environmental education based on some ethical principles as a possibility for developing this attitude and not permitting that sustainability becomes another market fallacy faced with so much consumerism.

No description available.