Ordinary ethics and craft consumption: A Southern perspective

Geography has recently experienced something of an ‘ethical turn’, and much attention has been focused on consumption as a site of ethical practice. Studies of ethical consumption tend to focus on explicitly socially or environmentally responsible purchasing decisions, but a growing body of research on ‘ordinary ethics’, starting from the premise that most consumption has a moral dimension, has opened up the notion of what counts as ethical to include everyday habits, considerations and desires. There remains, however, relatively little appreciation of the ethical agency of consumers within the global South, and little consideration of how enactments of ordinary ethics within Southern contexts may deepen understandings of the practices and meanings of diverse forms of consumption. Addressing this gap, this paper explores accounts of producers and consumers of craft in informal trading spaces in Cape Town, a city that 20 years after apartheid’s end remains deeply racially segregated and has seen numerous incidents of xenophobic violence. It is in this context that I unpack the ethical dimensions of a seemingly trivial form of consumption, arguing that sites of informal trade may provide spaces for the expression and enactment of care for the other. While not always entirely positive, these interactions reveal a complex moral landscape where shared identities and mutual recognition underpin mundane economic transactions. The paper concludes that ordinary ethics of care for the other go beyond explicit, rational responsibility, and that informal spaces of trade should be considered as key sites for the exploration of consumer ethics.     

Theorising middle class consumption from the global South: A study of everyday ethics in South Africa’s Western Cape

Emerging research on the increasing significance of consumption in the global South is concerned with its links to the globalizing middle classes. Against the backdrop of optimism invested in the new global middle classes to fuel consumption-led growth, this paper contributes to new debate about the articulations and significance of ethical consumption in the global South. Missing from much current mainstream policy, media and academic debate is acknowledgement of the diversity of the global middle classes and an understanding of how ethical interpretations and behaviour differ in various consumer markets around the world. In response, this paper draws on qualitative research in South Africa’s Western Cape to explore the cultural significance of everyday ethical realities in shaping consumption in the global South. In addition to addressing the relative absence of research into ethical consumption in global South contexts, the paper makes two key contributions based our findings. First, it challenges the tendency, particularly in economic discourses, to generalise about the ‘new’ global middle class consumers by highlighting the significance of locality and context in shaping consumption practices in the Western Cape; specifically it finds that, for diverse middle class consumers, thrift is an important ethical choice and practice determining consumption patterns. Second, it highlights the significance of everyday ethical practices in shaping consumption in the Western Cape, focusing specifically on how thrift is imbricated in concerns with not just economic constraint, but also care, habit and aspiration. The paper concludes with reflections on the wider implications of these findings and suggests that they illustrate a need to theorise ethical consumption from contexts in the global South, on their own terms.     

Ethical consumption: Uncovering personal meanings and negotiation strategies

The purpose of this paper is to examine how individuals define ethical consumption (EC) and then how they negotiate ethical consumption as they move from one country to another. The authors explore these questions by reporting on and interpreting the evolution of their understanding of EC and their own ethical consumption behavior, the EC practices that have endured over time and national contexts, the tensions they encountered in maintaining EC practices in these transitions and the adaptive strategies they used to manage those tensions. While there has been research on the tensions faced by individuals practicing EC, there has been a paucity of research investigating those tensions from a cross-country and longitudinal perspective. Moreover, although several studies have focused on EC purchase practices of specific goods (e.g., athletic shoes, fair-trade commodities), none has considered this question in the context of purchases of basic needs categories – food, water, energy, transportation and housing. Each of the three authors has been able to maintain his or her own personal consumption ethic in spite of living in different countries. Whenever consumption practices emanate from, and are imbedded within, a strong ethical framework of values that informs EC, each was able to make the necessary adjustments to overcome the obstacles and points of resistance across countries. Even in those situations involving considerable inconvenience and discomfort, each used adaptive strategies that allowed retention of their consumption practices. Among those strategies employed by the authors were choice of community in which to live, self-regulation and self-reliance.     

Sustainable lifestyles: Framing environmental action in and around the home

This paper examines the nature of environmental action in and around the home. Given the rise of local sustainable development and the emphasis placed on individual actions for sustainability, the paper examines the role of citizens in adopting sustainable lifestyles, incorporating a range of behavioural responses from energy saving and water conservation, to waste recycling and green consumption. Focussing on the debate in geography concerning the engagement of the public in environmental action, the paper argues that despite the assertions of those who advocate a deliberative approach to engagement (see [Owens, S., 2000. Engaging the public: information and deliberation in environmental policy. Environment and Planning A 32, 1141–1148]), an approach based on a social–psychological understanding of behaviour can have significant benefits. Such an approach is being developed by geographers in a range of settings and in this paper these developments are situated within the context of existing research that has identified environmental ‘activists’ in terms of their values, attitudes and demographic composition. The paper aims to examine environmental behaviour in relation to two key issues: (1) the way in which environmental action is framed in everyday practices (such as consumption behaviour) and (2) how these practices are reflected amongst different segments of the population to form lifestyle groups. The paper provides new insights for examining sustainable lifestyles that further our appreciation of how actions to help the environment are lived in everyday practices and framed by different lifestyle groups. Accordingly, the paper offers both academics and policy makers new insights into the potential use of focussing on lifestyle groups as a means for changing behaviour.     

Young adult households and domestic sustainabilities

Young adults in the Global North occupy a contradictory environmental identity: they are purportedly more environmentally concerned than older generations, but are also labelled hedonistic consumers. Most studies have focused on young adults still residing in parental homes, neglecting that Generation Y (born between 1975 and 1991) has ‘grown up’. The consumption patterns and environmental implications of their newly established households demand scholarly attention. Through a large-scale household sustainability survey, conducted in Australia, we have uncovered important inter-generational differences in environmental attitudes and everyday domestic practices. We found that generational cohorts hold distinct environmental attitudes. Younger households were most concerned with climate change, and least optimistic about future mitigation. However, generational differences influenced everyday domestic practices in more complex ways. All households engaged extensively with those ‘pro-environmental’ practices that reflected established cultural norms, government regulations and residential urban form. For other pro-environmental practices there were clear differences, with Generation Y households being the least engaged. A widening ‘value-action gap’ was apparent across our sample population, from oldest to youngest. However, rather than reflecting Generation Y’s supposed hedonism, we argue that this gap reflects generational geographies: how lifecourse intersects with housing and labour markets and norms of cleanliness to shape everyday domestic practices. Our research illuminates the shortcomings of a one-size-fits-all approach to household sustainability. The young adult stage is a time of transition during which homes and independent lifestyles are established, and practices are altered or become entrenched, for better or worse.     

Mucky carrots and other proxies: Problematising the knowledge-fix for sustainable and ethical consumption

This paper uses evidence from focus groups in England to consider how consumers think about and, more importantly, distinguish foods by both primary and secondary qualities, using both their own judgement but also advice produced by various organisations acting as ‘knowledge intermediaries’, such as independent certification bodies. We thus consider the ‘sorting out’ that consumers do with food, particularly in developing typologies of ‘goodness’ and ‘badness’, and the cues on which they base these judgements, from the material immediacy of ‘mucky carrots’ to the abstract remoteness of organic certification. In particular, we problematise the ‘knowledge-fix’ that underlies attempts to provide knowledge to promote more sustainable and ethical consumption. This raises problems of how consumers give assurance schemes meaning, how ethical and sustainable schemes are subject to re-fetishization and how consumers tend towards increasing scepticism and distrust of such claims, thus making a ‘politics of reconnection’ far from easy.     

Bushfire and everyday life: Examining the awareness-action ‘gap’ in changing rural landscapes

In this paper we use the notion of ‘everyday life’ to critically examine an apparent ‘gap’ between bushfire risk awareness and preparedness amongst diverse landholders in rural landscapes affected by amenity-led in-migration in southeast Australia. Landholders were found to bring their own agency to bushfire preparedness in the relationships between everyday procedures, dilemmas, and tradeoffs. Consequently, regardless of landholders’ awareness levels, attitudes towards bushfire and natural resource management influence if, how, and to what extent landowners prepare for bushfires. We argue that not only is the ‘gap’ complex but also paradoxical in that it is both evident in, and constituted by, landholder attitudes and action and simultaneously dissolved in their practices and decision-making in everyday life. Three dilemmas of everyday life in particular were found to underpin these attitudes: costs (in terms of monetary and time values), gender roles, and priorities. Using a mixed-methods research approach, this simultaneous cultural construction and material nature of bushfire in everyday life is mapped out through landholders’ narratives and actions that embody living with fire on the land. The place of bushfire in landholders’ everyday life has direct relevance to recent international discussions of the vulnerability of the growing number of people living in bushfire-prone rural-urban interface areas.     

Mobilising generosity, framing geopolitics: Narrating crisis in the homeland through diasporic media

This paper provides an account of the humanitarian interventions enacted by the Croatian–American diaspora during the secessionist conflicts in Yugoslavia during the 1990s. Whilst undeniably an act of generosity towards ‘distant strangers’, actions such as these also represent a much more complex reality – they are an outcome of a complex set of relations and processes, in which the ethical choices of individuals become bound up with nationalist ideologies, geopolitical questions and, crucially, knowledge and understanding of distant events. In particular, this paper considers the ways in which generosity is mobilised through the framing of Balkan geopolitics through diasporic media. In so doing, it becomes possible to deepen the dialogue between work on geography and ethics on the one hand, and critical geopolitics on the other. In particular, the paper argues that due attention needs to be paid to the ways in which such ‘networks of concern’ are constructed in a variety of banal and mundane ways.     

Bounding difference: Intersectionality and the material production of gender, caste, class and environment in Nepal

Current theorising in human geography draws attention to the relational emergence of space and society, challenging ideas of difference that rely on fixed identities and emphasising the importance of the everyday in the production of social inequalities. Similarly, feminist political ecology has emphasised the role of ‘nature’ or ‘environment’ in the production of subjectivities such that ideas of gender and nature arise in relation to each other. In this paper I build from these insights to explore the ways in which the embodied performance of gender, caste and other aspects of social difference collapse the distinction between the material and the symbolic. Symbolic ideas of difference are produced and expressed through embodied interactions that are firmly material. Through this kind of conceptualisation, I hope to push forward debates in geography on nature and feminist political ecology on how to understand the intersectional emergence of subjectivities, difference and socio-natures. Importantly, it is the symbolic meanings of particular spaces, practices and bodies that are (re)produced through everyday activities including forest harvesting, agricultural work, food preparation and consumption, all of which have consequences for both ecological processes and social difference. Through the performance of everyday tasks, not only are ideas of gender, caste and social difference brought into view, but the embodied nature of difference that extends beyond the body and into the spaces of everyday life is evident. I use ethnographic evidence from rural Nepal to explore the ways in which boundaries between bodies, spaces, ecologies and symbolic meanings of difference are produced and maintained relationally through practices of work and ritual.     

Understanding Chinese consumers’ ethical purchasing decision-making process: A combination of qualitative and quantitative study

As with all shopping, there is a wide gap between ethical shopping intention and behavior, and consumers’ ethical shopping processes are very complicated. Through a two-stage study, this paper analyzes those underlying factors that prevent consumers from translating their stated ethical intentions into actual ethical buying behavior. An initial qualitative study uses in-depth interviews with 36 consumers and identifies 6 consumer personal factors and 5 shopping situational factors impeding the transformation of consumers’ stated ethical intentions into actual ethical behavior. In the second stage, a quantitative study uses a large-scale questionnaire, investigating 1200 consumers, to test the adaptability of these personal and situational factors and to investigate their moderating effects on the relationship between ethical intentions and behavior. The findings show that among the personal factors and in addition to ethical consciousness, economic rationality, buying inertia, cynicism, and ethical cognitive efforts all have significant moderating roles on the relationship between ethical intention and action; further, all of the situational factors have moderating effects upon the relationship between intention and action. Finally, the paper provides us with some profound conclusions and insightful implications about how to motivate consumer support for firms’ ethical behavior and how to transfer this type of support into truly positive purchasing behavior.     

Domesticating neo-liberalism: Everyday lives and the geographies of post-socialist transformations

This paper examines the ways in which neo-liberalism is both constructed and made ‘more tolerable’ through everyday practices and livelihoods in post-socialist cities. It argues that existing conceptualisations of neo-liberalism centre too fully on the role of powerful global forces and institutions in constructing marketisation processes, and consequently neglect the ways in which everyday lives are embroiled in the formation of neo-liberal worlds. Through an exploration of the experience of neo-liberalism in the Slovak Republic and drawing upon research with households in one large housing estate in Bratislava, the paper examines the ways in which everyday lives construct neo-liberal possibilities in the attempt to make them ‘more tolerable’. In particular, the paper explores the postponement of the future by some members of the middle-aged generation failing to reap the benefits of economic reform, the role of economic practices ‘outside’ of market-based capitalist relations in constructing engagements with the formal market, and the role of domestic food production in sustaining household networks and social reproduction for some of the most marginal households in the context of low-wage employment and state benefit reductions.     

Changing household water consumption practices after drought in three Australian cities

One of the major challenges of moving toward more sustainable and water sensitive futures is to change people's everyday water consumption habits. The experience of the Millennium drought in Australia (1996–2010) and water restrictions introduced during that time intervened to change everyday water practices in specific ways creating durable change in some practices and mutable change in others. Drawing on focus groups with 62 people, in three diverse Australian cities, a rich picture of diverse water practices emerges. Using a specific social practice framework we explore the key practices of garden watering and showering and tease out the elements in each – we discuss how and why there has been more innovation and change in garden practices than shower practices. We argue that sustained water restrictions drive material change in households and these material changes appear to be more effective in changing water use than transforming water saving competencies or meanings alone. Further, we show that the commitment and resistance to water saving has a spatial context – data from three different cities allowed us to see how location, climate and policy responses interweave with everyday practices. The implication of our research is that policy interventions should be 'fit for purpose' according to social practices in spatial context.     

‘The health event’: Everyday, affective politics of participation

This paper is about a single event: a conference (A.K.A. ‘the health event’) held in the English East Midlands in July 2005, at which findings from a policy-led research project regarding young people’s health needs were fed back to research participants. The paper foregrounds some of the everyday work, happenings, emotions, conversations and materialities which were fundamentally constitutive of ‘the health event’ and, thus fundamentally constituted the moments of affirmative, politically-charged participation which could and did happen therein. Thus the paper bears witness to the sorts of practices, minutiae and highs and lows which are surely fundamentally constitutive of participation, policy and politics per se, but which (despite the growing visibility of nonrepresentational theories) are typically absent from salient accounts of participation, Children’s Geographies and Post-medical Geographies.     

Situated knowledges and the spaces of consent

Informed consent has often been presented as a kind of ethical panacea, the best way of guarding against medical and scientific abuses of human rights. However recent empirical research has led bioethicists to question both the feasibility and the value of informed consent procedures. This paper also seeks to critique informed consent, but focuses less on its empirical shortcomings. Instead, this paper questions the assumption that ethics involves engaging in the kind of rational, distanced, objective reflection traditionally considered the basis of both scientific observation and ethical decision making. Drawing on recent insights from ethical geography and geographers studying the biotechnology industry, I wish to argue that ethical reflection is a relational and situated process, less about being distanced and objective, and more about recognizing how our ethical decisions are shaped by our social and material environment.     

Child sponsorship,ordinary ethics and the geographies of charity

Charitable donation, far from being done in a vacuum, is practised inseparably from the messy spatialities of everyday life. Drawing on literature from the geographies of care, this paper analyses the practices and experiences of giving that surround child sponsorship, a popular charitable scheme that directly links each donor with a child somewhere in the Global South. Through this, the paper argues for a more nuanced approach to the spatialities of charity. It affirms the significance of donation not just as a one-off response to a tear-jerking campaign, or as a mundane regular commitment, but also as a deeply personal engagement that draws into play multiple different aspects of people’s everyday lives and intersects with existing identity- and community-building projects. Throughout, therefore, the paper focuses specifically on the micro-geographies of donation, engaging with the messy details of everyday performances of charitable ethics and identity. To achieve this, it draws empirically on interviews with a small number of British sponsors, most of whom expressed an affiliation with the Christian faith. The paper therefore foregrounds a particular focus on the dialogic relationship between the spatialities of charity and the landscapes of faith, religion and spirituality.     

Curating the quest for ‘good food’: The practices,spatial dynamics and influence of food-related curation in Sweden

What is ‘good food’? Is it fair trade, local, organic or ethically produced? With an ever-expanding array of products and ‘qualities’ to consider, consumers in the global North may find it increasingly difficult and time-consuming to make the ‘right’ choices. As a result, a range of intermediaries, including food apps and collective buying groups, are emerging to support and influence people with their food choices. While intermediation refers to all activities linking producers and consumers, this paper narrows the focus and considers one important, yet poorly understood, intermediary function within the food marketplace: ‘curation’. Although the concept of curation has long been associated with museums and art worlds, curatorial practices are evolving in the contemporary marketplace and are performed by a growing range of actors operating in physical, temporary and virtual spaces. Rather than acting as brokers or gatekeepers, curators interpret, translate and shape the marketplace by sorting, organising, evaluating and ascribing value(s) to specific products. They also offer general and personalised recommendations to consumers. Although the literature on local food privileges the direct relations between producers and consumers, this paper considers the important role of intermediaries. Drawing on interviews and participant observation in Sweden it contributes to the existing literature on curation by examining the spatial dynamics and nature of curatorial practices, the motivations behind them and the values they create for consumers. The findings demonstrate that a range of activities can be understood as curation and that in order to nuance and extend existing conceptualisations of curation a wider and more dynamic range of actors (food apps), spaces (blogs) and values such as inspiration, convenience and sense of community need to be considered.     

Consuming transnational fashion in London and Mumbai

Drawing on focus group research in London and Mumbai, this paper charts the changing social and cultural contours of transnational fashion consumption. Transnationality is approached as a complex social field, participation in which is not restricted to the members of specific ethnically-defined transnational communities. Following a discussion of the nature of transnational fashion, the paper explores the discursive practices of a wide range of consumers with different degrees of investment in this transnational field encompassing differences of gender and generation, education and occupation. We highlight the existence of multiple forms of modernity (rather than a simple gradient from Western modernity to Eastern tradition), with social and cultural change taking place at an uneven pace and subject to periodic disruption and temporary reversals. In contrast to more linear notions of globalization, defined in terms of the relentless erosion of local difference, our research demonstrates the persistence of locally-specific cultures of consumption in both London and Mumbai. Drawing from Appadurai’s work on the social life of things and Bourdieu’s analysis of the sociology of taste, we attempt to characterise these locally specific consumption cultures. We argue against conventional accounts of ‘authenticity’ as an innate property of particular social groups or particular goods, suggesting that the meaning of goods is defined by their active appropriation in specific contexts of use.     

Following things of rubbish value: End-of-life ships, ‘chock-chocky’ furniture and the Bangladeshi middle class consumer

There has been an upsurge of geographical work tracing globalised flows of commodities in the wake of Appadurai’s (1986) call to ‘follow the things’. This paper engages with calls to follow the thing but argues that work thus far has been concentrated, first, on global flows from developing world producers to developed world consumers, and, second, on things that remain stable as they circulate. This paper instead argues that ‘follow the thing’ research needs to also attend to flows ‘down’ the value chain, from developed to less developed worlds, and to things that are either coming apart or being disassembled. The case presented here is end-of-life ships, sent to be broken in less developed countries, as most are, in this case in Bangladesh. It looks at how the arts of transience re-work materials from rubbish value ships into new forms and objects in the household furnishing sector, which are then appropriated by Bangladeshi middle class consumers. Far from being a minor feature this is shown to be empirically a significant component of the Bangladeshi economy. Theoretically the paper challenges many habitual assumptions about global flows of commodities and urges ‘follow the thing’ research to rethink the thing. Paying attention to the back-end of the value chain shows that things are but temporary configurations of material. At best partially stable, things are argued to be endlessly being assembled, always becoming something else somewhere else.     

‘Letting them go’ - Agricultural retirement and human-livestock relations

Through a focus on agricultural retirement, this paper extends on the recent work considering human-livestock relations. Drawing on research conducted in Hampshire and West Sussex (UK), the paper utilises farmers’ narratives of farm work and retirement to explore the themes of [dis]connection between farmers and their dairy cattle. The paper attempts to add complexity and nuance to assumptions about the nature and extent of animal objectification with commercial dairy farming, and consider the intricate moral geographies [re]created within the individual farm. The discursive and material ‘placings’ of animals are considered alongside an exploration of how the intricate temporality and spatiality of these are disturbed and disrupted by the move to retirement. In discussing these relations the paper examines how animals are central to the everyday lives and identities of farmers and how separation from them alters farmers’ attachment to particular practices, places and social networks.