Consumer Competence Strategies, Spiritually Inspired Core Values and Locus of Control: What Are the Links?

Gabriella Spinelli,Holly Nelson-Becker,Roberta Ligossi

doi:10.3390/su11174787

Abstract

Ethical consumption has increased as a result of a more pressing environmental agenda, allowing consumers to assert their core values through marketplace decisions. The progressive secularisation of society has opened a gap on how religion and spirituality, defined in this paper as constructs that underpin core values, affect individuals through their consumption choices. An exploratory approach was taken in this research to investigate how consumers negotiate their daily shopping habits, whether they align with or diverge from their religious or secular core values, and whether an internal or external locus of control (LoC) was demonstrated. This qualitative study used the theory of reasoned action and applied an interpretative paradigm, being most interested in the lived experience of the 25 participants. They were recruited from religious, spiritual, and secular backgrounds, following a purposeful sampling strategy. The participants kept a 2-week daily diary detailing spending decisions and were interviewed, also to provide the opportunity to discuss their diary entries. Findings reveal the direction of linkage between constructs such as core values, LoC orientation and Consumer Competence strategies. The study also revealed how religious participants were subject to a moral dualism that at times created dissonance between their core values and their consumer behaviour.

Highlights

Consumers are increasingly engaged with ethical issues when making purchase decisions
By postulating that spirituality and religiosity underpin core values, the purpose of this study is to understand how religion, spirituality or secular core values influence the orientation of locus of control (LoC) and what consumer competence strategies are enacted
We discovered that core values do affect consumer choices and that consumer competence strategies are the mechanisms people enact to reconcile potential behaviour that may be misaligned with self-reported core values

Summary

Introduction

Consumers are increasingly engaged with ethical issues when making purchase decisions. Researchers have often referred to this phenomenon as the intention–behaviour gap [5], the “Attitude–Behaviour Gap” [6] or the “30:3 phenomenon” [5] The latter term describes the more than one-third of consumers in the UK who would call themselves ‘ethical purchasers’ yet purchase only a 1−3% market share of ethically-accredited products [7]. Given the discrepancy between intention and behaviour, it is reasonable to argue that consumers in the marketplace might experience post-purchase dissonance and retrospective feelings of guilt if they are not able to reflect in their daily shopping some of the values that they want to embed in their life. The role of spirituality as a set of core values that may influence ethical consumption has been neglected

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