Globalizing Responsibility

The Political Rationalities of Ethical Consumption

Clive Barnett, Nick Clarke, Paul Cloke, Alice Malpass

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781405145572, 9781405145589
• eBook ISBN: 9781444390230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Globalizing 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

Chapter One

Introduction: Politicizing Consumption
in an Unequal World

1.1 The Moralization of Consumption

In contemporary debates about climate change, human rights, social justice, sustainability and public health, patterns of everyday consumption are commonly identified as both a source of harm and as a potential means of addressing various problems. In turn, consumers are routinely challenged to change their behaviour through the exercise of responsible choice. In this book, we develop a genealogical analysis of the institutional, organizational and social dynamics behind the growth in ethical consumption practices in the United Kingdom. We theorize this phenomenon in terms of the problematization of consumption and consumer choice. We argue that the emergence of ethical consumption is best understood as a political phenomenon rather than simply a market response to changes in consumer demand. By this, we mean that it reflects strategies and repertoires shared amongst a diverse range of governmental and non-governmental actors. The emergence and growth of contemporary ethical consumption is, we propose, indicative of distinctive forms of political mobilization and representation, and of new modes of civic involvement and citizenly participation. In developing this argument, we seek to counter the common view that the emergence of ethical consumption activities is a sign of the substitution of privatized acts of consumer choice for properly political forms of collective action. In order to move beyond the terms of this negative evaluation of ‘consumerism’, we argue that it is necessary to displace ‘the consumer’ from the centre of analytical, empirical and critical attention.

In this book we develop the argument that the emergence of ethical consumption should be understood as a means through which various actors seek to ‘do’ politics in and through distinctively ethical registers. Above all, it is the register of responsibility that is prevalent in the diverse activities that make up the field of ethical consumption. We argue that ethical consumption campaigning is a form of political action which seeks to articulate the responsibilities of family life, local attachment and national citizenship with a range of ‘global’ concerns – where these global concerns include issues of trade justice, climate change, human rights and labour solidarity. In short, we are interested here in understanding how ethical consumption campaigning seeks to ‘globalize responsibility’.

In developing our argument, we take our distance from the two dominant social science traditions of thought about the politics of consumption. In the first, consumption serves as a privileged entry point for thinking about the attenuated moral horizons of modern life. In this paradigm, Marx’s account of commodity fetishism is reframed as a hypothesis about the deleterious effects of affluent consumers having no knowledge about the origins of the goods that they consume. On this view, responsible action requires the development of cognitive maps that connect spatially and temporally distanciated actions and their consequences through the provision of explanatory knowledge. The moral charge of research on commodity chains and value chains lies in the claim that by reconnecting locations of production, networks of distribution and acts of consumption, the alienating effects of modern capitalism can be exposed. Behind this style of analysis is the assumption that the secret to motivating practical action lies in helping people to recognize their entanglement in complex networks of commodification and accumulation.

In a second tradition of research on the politics of consumption, the emphasis is on asserting the skilled, active and creative role of consumers and consumption activities. Research in sociology, anthropology, cultural studies and human geography has demonstrated that everyday commodity consumption is a realm for the actualization of capacities for autonomous action, reflexive monitoring of conduct and the self-fashioning of relationships between selves and others. Here, consumption is reframed as a field in which ordinary people resist, subvert and creatively appropriate dominant cultural registers of consumerism.

From the perspective of the first of these traditions, the moral issue raised by commodity consumption is the imperative of attending to the consequences of extended networks of production and distribution that people are entangled in by virtue of their actions as consumers (see Wilk 2001). This view is often associated with the assumption that consuming more responsibly is equivalent to consuming less. From the perspective of the second tradition, however, the central moral issue is the acknowledgement of the ways in which consumption offers people opportunities to determine the types of selves and the types of relationships they wish to cultivate. This perspective is much more attuned to appreciating the importance of objects of consumption to practices of self-making (see Miller 2001c). And these two views are not necessarily opposed of course. The moral force of demonstrating the chains of consequence into which consumers’ identities are woven tends to assume that, once informed about these consequences, people have the capacity to take responsibility for changing their consumption activity accordingly, in order to minimize environmental impacts, to boycott unethical companies, or to support fair trade or organic product ranges.

Both of these styles of critical social science stand in a longer tradition of moralizing about consumption. Hilton (2004) observes that from the eighteenth century through to the mid-twentieth century, consumption itself tended to be subjected to (largely negative) moral judgement. The rise of modern consumer politics in Europe and North America after 1945 represented a demoralization of consumption, in so far as this politics focused on the benefits and risks associated with specific products in a context in which generalized mass consumption was considered a norm. In this respect, Hilton (ibid.: 119) suggests that the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century saw ‘a discernible trend to remoralize the market through issues of ethical consumerism and globalization’. In this context ‘[m]oralities of consumption might therefore be re-emerging as globalized critiques of the discrepancies in northern affluence and southern poverty’ (ibid.: 120).

The dominant motif of the contemporary remoralization of consumption is the revival of a long-standing tradition of opposing the egoistic, hedonistic, self-interested imperatives of the consumer to the civic virtues of the citizen. Schudson (2007: 237) has observed that – a lot of criticism of consumer culture has been moralistic, judgemental, intolerant, condescending, and, perhaps, muddled. The muddle involved in the criticism of consumer culture is most evident, he suggests, in this opposition of consumer to citizen. It is a trope that ‘offers a narrow and misleading view of consumer behaviour as well as an absurdly romanticized view of civic behaviour’ (ibid.: 238). The idea that commodity consumption and consumerism are irredeemably individualistic, irresponsible and apolitical is in need of revision, not least in light of the centrality of consumer activism to histories of modern citizenship, civil society and welfare (e.g., Hilton 2003, 2008; Trentmann 2008). As Schudson (2006: 203) suggests, ‘in an age of environmentalism, consumer boycotts, and political regulation of the safety of cars and toys and pajamas’, the assumption that the world of consumption and the world of politics are guided by diametrically opposed values is ‘ripe for reconsideration’. With this in mind, understanding the globalization of responsibility through discourses of ‘ethical’ consumerism requires us to adopt what Schudson calls a post-moralistic approach to understanding the contemporary politicization of consumption. But this requires us to take a detour through some recent moral and political philosophy to better grasp what is at stake in thinking seriously about the concept of responsibility and its relationship to the contemporary politics of consumption.

1.2 Justice, Responsibility and the Politics of Consumption

If a great deal of academic analysis of consumption is implicitly if not explicitly moralistic, then it is also the case that much of this analysis tends to presume that the moral values associated either negatively or positively with consumption are self-evident. Moralizing about consumption depends on simplifying a complex range of practices, processes and relations. Seen from one angle, the active, assertive consumer of cultural studies lore is able to maintain multiple personal relations of care and love through the purchase, exchange and use of commodities. Seen from another angle, they are complicit in the reproduction of systematic inequalities of global wealth, environmental damage and human rights abuses. And it is the latter perspective that has attracted most sustained attention amongst scholars interested in connecting consumption to the concerns of moral and political philosophy (see Crocker and Linden 1998).

Our starting point is that reasoning about issues of responsibility and consumption should not be reduced to a causal calculation of causes and effects. Nor should we necessarily frame these issues in the purely ‘ethical’ terms of worrying about how affluent consumers in the West should best discharge their obligations to assist those less fortunate than themselves. These two frames – in which responsibility is reduced to a matter of causality and/or a matter of assisting those less fortunate – are the primary registers in which issues of responsibility have been discussed in human geography’s so-called ‘moral turn’ (see Smith 2000 for a review of this field). But we need to keep in view the close proximity between issues of responsibility and questions of justice. The political dimension of justice is hardly absent from this set of debates in human geography, but there is a persistent tendency to think of values such as justice, care or responsibility as externally generated criteria against which the world should be judged and by which action should be guided. In contrast, our concern here is with developing an account of responsibility and justice understood as normative modalities through which practices unfold in the world (see Boltanski and Thévenot 2006).

Debates in political philosophy about global distributive justice provide an entry point for framing the relationship between responsibility and consumption. Thomas Pogge (1994, 2001) has argued that rather than reasoning about obligations to those less fortunate than oneself from the perspective of a potential helper, it is more appropriate to acknowledge that affluent citizens of the West stand in the position of supporters and beneficiaries of global institutional systems that contribute to the impoverishment and disenfranchisement of distant others. Pogge’s point is that questions of global responsibility are not merely matters of personal morality; they are also issues of justice. Or, from a related but distinct position, Onora O’Neill (2000) argues that equal moral status should be afforded to ‘distant others’ because, in everyday activities, their status as moral agents is taken for granted. Like Pogge, O’Neill is making an argument not just about moral responsibility, but about equality and justice. Both of these positions are part of a broader field of debates in which the principle of egalitarianism as the core value of justice is framed in terms of particular understandings of responsibility (see Hurley 2003).

The arguments of Pogge and O’Neill are part of a broader philosophical debate about the degree to which the egalitarian theory of justice developed and defended by John Rawls (1972) can be applied to transnational processes and the global scale (see Tasioulas 2005). The pivotal issue in these debates concerns the question of just what range of activities should be evaluated by an egalitarian theory of justice. Rawls (1972: 7–11) originally argued that ‘the subject of justice’ should first and foremost be thought of as the institutions of society which sustain deep and pervasive inequalities – what he called ‘the basic structure of society’. The basic structure included ‘the political constitution and the principal economic and social arrangements’ (ibid.: 7). On this view, then, the primary subject of justice is ‘the way in which the major social institutions distribute fundamental rights and duties and determine the division of advantages from social cooperation’ (ibid.). In making this argument for ‘the basic structure of society’ as the primary subject of evaluations of justice, Rawls was imposing a restriction on the range of activities that theorizing about ‘social justice’ should be expected to address:

Many different kinds of things are said to be just and unjust: not only laws, institutions, and social systems, but also particular actions of many kinds, including decisions, judgments, and imputations. We also call the attitudes and dispositions of persons, and persons themselves, just and unjust. (Ibid.)

Rawls did not consider this broader range of activities to be a primary concern of a theory of social justice. For him, these were matters of ethical judgement rather than evaluations of justice (cf. O’Neill 1996).

Philosophical debates about global distributive justice focus on the question of whether it is plausible to think in terms of a ‘global basic structure’, and therefore whether it is appropriate to extend and revise principles of egalitarian justice to this scale of evaluation (Pogge 1994). Rawls (1999) himself thought that principles of distributive justice could not be extended in this way, and affirmed instead a somewhat paternalist ‘duty of assistance’ to other peoples. But cutting across positions on this issue of the scope of justice there is a debate concerning whether the restriction of questions of justice to the basic structure is actually justifiable. In a radical endorsement of the principle that ‘the personal is political’, G. A. Cohen (2000, 2008) argues against Rawls that this restriction should be lifted, so that ‘non-coercive’ structures such as conventions, social ethos and personal choices also fall under the evaluation of egalitarian principles of justice. For Cohen, principles of justice necessarily make a claim on personal conduct; they require the site of justice to be extended beyond ‘political’ fields all the way into matters of ‘ethics’. Against this view, while arguing that the scope of distributive justice principles should be extended globally, Pogge (2000) argues against the idea that egalitarian criteria for assessing institutional structures should also apply to a morality that governs personal conduct as well. In his view, this ‘monist’ position will actually hinder the development of an overlapping consensus on issues of global distributive justice.

These debates in political philosophy about the scope (global or domestic) and site (‘coercive’ institutions of the basic structure and/or ‘non-coercive’ fields of personal conduct and social ethos) of egalitarian justice are played out in practice in the contemporary politicization of consumption. As we have already suggested, commodity consumption is routinely presented as implicated in wider networks of global inequality and environmental harm. A recurring theme of public debates about what to do about consumption is the problem of where effective agency for changing consumption lies. Is it the responsibility of ‘everyone’, as consumers, to ‘do their bit’ and ‘play their part’ in reducing the unjust, destructive, unsustainable consequences of consumption? Or does attention need to be focused on structural factors, such as the regulation of markets, the monitoring of production and distribution systems, or re-gearing international financial and trade regimes? Arguing the former position might well lead to charges that this lets the real culprits off the hook, as well as imposing unreasonable burdens on socially differentiated groups of consumers. Arguing the latter position might elicit the charge that this passes the buck – that, as citizens, people should be more responsible about exercising consumer choice. In Chapter 5 of this book, we show how both of these sentiments find expression in the ordinary forms of reasoning that are bought to bear by ‘consumers’ about the responsibilities they are supposed to discharge through their everyday consumption choices. Philosophical tensions concerning the scope and site of justice are, then, very real matters of public debate, campaign strategy and policy design in the contemporary politics of consumption.

The contribution to this set of philosophical debates that most informs our analysis here is that of the feminist political philosopher Iris Marion Young. Young uses the contemporary politicization of consumption as the real-world example with which to work through these questions of the relationship between justice and responsibility. In her work on political responsibility, Young deploys the example of anti-sweatshop campaigns, particularly the movement that developed in the United States from the mid-1990s around this issue, to clarify the types of critical reasoning that might be applied to issues of global injustice. Young’s (1990) own retheorization of justice stands in critical relation to the Rawlsian heritage, not least by extending the definition of the basic structure to include a wide range of non-distributive issues, such as the social division of labour, structures of decision-making power and processes of cultural normalization (see Young 2006). This is a deepening of the definition of the basic structure, as distinct from the extension of the scope of the Rawlsian principle of the basic structure that Pogge recommends or the generalization that Cohen recommends. Against the type of position developed by Cohen, Young reaffirms the Rawlsian principle of two levels of moral evaluation: ‘one to do with individual interaction and the other to do with the background conditions within which that action takes place’ (2006: 91). She affirms that questions of justice refer primarily to the latter level:

Theorizing justice should focus primarily on the basic structure, because the degree of justice or injustice of the basic structure conditions the way we should evaluate individual interactions or rules and distributions within particular institutions. (Ibid.)

Young therefore refuses to collapse institutional analysis into the analysis of individual interactions. Young’s commitment to the idea that the primary subject of justice is the basic structure, suitably extended and deepened, helps us to appreciate the task she pursues in her theorization of the modalities of political responsibility disclosed by the anti-sweatshop movement. Her account of political responsibility is a response to the challenge of developing a point of view that can encompass ‘the accumulated consequences of the actions of millions of mediated individuals’ (ibid.: 96). Young’s own response focuses attention on how this challenge is being practically met through innovative forms of transnational mobilization and campaigning.

Political responsibility emerges in Young’s analysis as a theme in which questions of justice are articulated with the evaluation of individual-level conduct and interaction in a non-reductive way. Young (2004) develops what she calls a social connection model of political responsibility, in which responsibility is understood to arise from the ways in which different actors are implicated in structural social processes. Her starting point is a concern not to reproduce a discourse of blame and guilt by applying a single standard of justice to both social structures and individual action (Young 2003). Consumer campaigns often invoke the theme of collective responsibility in the effort to motivate individual behaviour change, implicitly falling back on a model in which responsibility is about being held liable for the consequences of one’s actions. But staking claims about responsibility on a liability model of responsibility is, Young points out, likely to be counterproductive, and also risks reproducing injustices of its own. In seeking to motivate action, it is not enough to show that someone is connected through their everyday actions as a consumer to wider systems that reproduce harm. Quite the reverse in fact, since on their own, any one individual might not actually be able to do much about sweatshops on the other side of the world. In many arguments of this sort, an individual consumers’ connection to labour exploitation or environmental destruction in distant places seems to depend on a whole chain of mediating causal linkages. These might persuade an individual consumer that their actions contribute, in small ways, to the reproduction of those harms. But they are just as likely to convince the consumer that on their own, as a consumer, there is not much they can do about it (see Allen 2008).

In contrast to this blame-focused understanding of responsibility, Young sets out an understanding of political responsibility that can negotiate between an undifferentiated claim of individual responsibility and an undiscriminating claim about collective responsibility. Young (2007: 179) calls this alternative a model of shared responsibility, one in which responsibility is distributed across complex ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Introduction: Politicizing Consumption in an Unequal World
• Part One: Theorizing Consumption Differently
• Part Two: Doing Consumption Differently
• Notes
• References
• Index