Ethical and political consumption: an integrated typology of practices

Abstract

Addressing the diversity of consumer practices requires perceiving and measuring ethical and political consumerism beyond acts of buycotting and boycotting. By viewing consumption as limited to ‘purchasing’ and ‘shopping’, the agency of the consumer is bound to certain rules and mechanisms of the market, raising questions on the degree of alternativeness of each practice. Arbitrarily ascribing a strictly ‘noneconomic’ motivation behind the ‘ethical’ and ‘political’ framings of consumption results in excluding private (economic) troubles from the public sphere (ignoring thus their political nature). This conceptual article presents a novel analytical tool that maps consumer practices according to two critical conditions within which practices are performed: monetary transaction and legality. An example of how the proposed typology can be applied in the lodging sector demonstrates the typology’s ability to appreciate the diversity found in consumer practices, while also commenting on their degrees of alterity. Overall, the article calls for a reconsideration of the narrow repertoire of consumer action that is often associated with ethical and political consumerism, if we want to understand consumption as an “arena of politics” and a form of political participation in a more democratic manner (where every person gets to “vote”).