1st Edition
Ethical Consumption: Practices and Identities A Realist Approach
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.
Foreword
Preface
Introduction
Part I Theorising the Ethical Consumer
1. Analysing Consumption: Toward an Integrated Approach
2. Ethical Consumption and Critical Realism
3. Ethical Consumption as a Reflexive Life Project
Part II Studying the Ethical Consumer
4. Studying Consumption: A Realist Approach
5. Meeting the Ethical Consumers
6. Becoming an Ethical Consumer: Moral Concerns, Emotional Commentaries, and Reflexive Deliberations
7. Being an Ethical Consumer: Exercising Moral Agency in the Contexts of Objective Reality
8. The Inner Self in the Outer World: The Social Life of an Ethical Consumer
Conclusion
Index
Biography
Yana Manyukhina gained her PhD in Sociology and Social Policy in 2016 from the University of Leeds, UK.
"Yana Manyukhina's beautifully clear book will be of value to all concerned with the politics of food and consumerism. It analyses not only how people develop as ethical food consumers but also, perhaps more crucially, why they make the life-style changes that are so urgently needed to promote sustainable ways of living."
Priscilla Alderson, Professor Emerita, University College London
