Ethical Consumption: Practices and Identities : A Realist Approach

The book engages with the topic of ethical consumption and explores ethical consumer practices and identities from a critical realist perspective. By elaborating Margaret Archer’s work on human reflexivity, it develops an original social theory explaining how individuals form, actualise, and sustain ethical consumer identities. It presents the findings from a qualitative study with self-perceived ethical food consumers to demonstrate the fit between a proposed theoretical mechanism and the actual experiences of ethically minded consumers.

This book engages with the topic of ethical consumption and applies a critical-realist approach to explore the process of becoming and being an ethical consumer. By integrating Margaret Archer’s theory of identity formation and Christian Coff’s work on food ethics, it develops a theoretical account explicating the generative mechanism that gives rise to ethical consumer practices and identities. The second part of the book presents the findings from a qualitative study with self-perceived ethical food consumers to demonstrate the fit between the proposed theoretical mechanism and the actual experiences of ethically committed consumers. Through integrating agency-focused and socio-centric perspectives on consumer behaviour, the book develops a more comprehensive and balanced approach to conceptualising and studying consumption processes and phenomena.