The British Journal of Sociology 2010 Volume 61 Issue 2

Making a difference: ethical consumption and the everyday

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Matthew Adams and Jayne Raisborough

Abstract Our everyday shopping practices are increasingly marketed as opportunities to make a difference via our ethical consumption choices. In response to a growing body of work detailing the ways in which specic alignments of ethics and consumption are mediated, we explore how ethical opportunities such as the consumption of Fairtrade products are recognized, experienced and taken-up in the everyday. The everyday is approached here via a specially commissioned Mass Observation directive, a volunteer panel of correspondents in the UK. Our on-going thematic analysis of their autobiographical accounts aims to explore a complex unevenness in the ways ordinary people experience and negotiate calls to enact their ethical agency through consumption. Situating ethical consumption, moral obligation and choice in the everyday is, we argue, important if we are to avoid both over-exaggerating the reexive and self-conscious sensibilities involved in ethical consumption, and, adhering to a reductive understanding of ethical self-expression. Keywords: Ethical consumption; everyday; Fairtrade; Mass Observation; shopping; local

Introduction Public awareness of the human, ecological and environmental cost of consumption has increased over the past few decades (Fraj and Martinez 2007). It has been closely accompanied by the idea that consumers can improve matters through responsible consumer choices. While forms of what might be called ethical consumption have a long history (for example the Co-operative movement), the explicit marketing, accessibility and popularity of ethical products is unprecedented (Connolly and Shaw 2006; Low and Davenport 2007; Mayo 2005). Magazines, websites, campaigns and pressure groups dedicated to
Adams (School of Applied Social Science, University of Brighton) and Raisborough (School of Applied Social Science, University of Brighton) (Corresponding author email: ma21@bton.ac.uk) London School of Economics and Political Science 2010 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2010.01312.x

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ethical consumption proliferate; as do labelling initiatives, supermarkets own ethical brands and opportunities to donate to charity as you spend. For some commentators the ability to make a difference through consumption is steadily shaping up as a new activism (Bryant and Goodman 2004: 344); with others arguing that good consumption is becoming the means through which individuals frame otherwise insurmountable problems and participate in solutions (Micheletti 2003). Ethical consumption is a growth market. To take Fairtrade as an example, in the UK, sales of products carrying the Fairtrade label topped 712.6 m in 2008; a substantial year-on-year increase from 16.7m in 1998. Globally, Fairtrade certied products surpassed 1.6 billion in 2007, a 47 per cent increase on the previous year (Fairtrade Foundation 2009). This growth has led to a frenzy of proling work to identify the ethical consumer often via personality measures and socio-demographics. It is a fair summary of the eld to argue that academic attention in business, marketing and consumer studies has focused on dening the ethical consumer, and exploring their ethical awareness in relation to purchase behaviour. A focus on the consumer reects a prevailing assumption in ethical consumer research of the ethical consumer as a xed identity (Cherrier 2007: 332) who makes rational use of available information about free trade/ corrective solutions to consider the consequences of their purchase practices (Fraj and Martinez 2007). This formulation persists but suffers from a tendency to reduce questions of ethics in relation to consumption to an individuals ability to cognitively process ows of information (Caruana 2007: 291). Critiques of this formulation stem from a growing awareness that it, shows little resemblance to ethical individuals in the real world (Cherrier 2007: 322), and sets about placing ethical consumer practices within the complexity of everyday life. This contextualization project offers great promise in realizing the perhaps fragmented or heterogeneous aspects of ethical consumption practice; yet a tendency to focus its empirical efforts on selfdened ethical consumers restricts the everyday to specic groups or allegiances and, we argue, serves to marginalize wider questions about the ways individuals regard and respond to the increasing alignment of ethics and consumption. Our aim is to add to this contextualization project, pushing the conceptualization of ethics and consumption beyond the comfortable heuristics of business-as-usual marketing models as applied to the doing of ethics. We draw on a specially commissioned Mass Observation Archive (MOA) directive, a method long associated with exploring the everyday through the interpretations of those who live it (Purbrick 2007), to specically focus on how individuals, regardless of ethical credentials, relate to and experience the increasing call to make a difference as they shop. Our ndings suggests that our correspondents negotiate understandings of the relationship between
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ethics and consumption in practice in a complex and uneven co-mingling of doubt, scepticism, positive regard and wider denitions of ethical practice, which include an emphasis on the local.

Critique of the ethical consumer model There is now a critical mass of work in the social sciences that problematizes the assumption of a discrete ethical consumer who shops in prescribed, rational, ethically-inected ways by considering the social and cultural framing of ethical practices in the domain of consumption (e.g. Barnett et al. 2005). Such work marks a discernible shift towards the everyday and with this, a readiness to trouble binary formulations of ethical consumption/non-ethical consumption stemming from Millers original argument that all consumer behaviour, however ordinary and routine, is likely to be shaped by diverse values of caring for other people and concern for fairness (Barnett et al. 2005: 17; Miller 1998). Barnett and colleagues in particular are interested in ways in which everyday practical moral dispositions are re-articulated by policies, campaigns and practices that enlist ordinary people into broader projects of social change (Barnett et al. 2005: 23). The process of re-articulation has largely been approached via the study of the rhetoric and semiotics of the promotion and packaging of ethical consumption initiatives such as Fairtrade: For example the Traidcraft product catalogue (Clarke et al. 2007a) and campaign organization (Barnett et al. 2005); brand imagery and advertising (Bryant and Goodman 2004; Goodman 2004; Varul 2008; Wright 2004) and ethical consumer How-to guides (Clarke et al. 2007b).Taken as a whole, this work critically maps the way consumers are oriented towards very specic prescriptions and framings of ethics in their consumption practices. The governing of consumption an array of strategies that aim to regulate the informational and spatial contexts of consumer choice is thought of as so many devices for turning oughts into cans (Barnett et al. 2005: 31). Researching the mediation of specic campaigns such as Fairtrade in this way can tell us a great deal about normative articulations concerning the relationship between ethics and consumption and how they manifest and take presence in the everyday. But work focusing exclusively on enlisting practices of mediation do not provide any insight into how the attempts they make to re-articulate ethical dispositions are regarded and taken-up by individuals in everyday consumption practices. Studies of ethical consumption campaigning may well point to the generation of narrative frames in which mundane activities like shopping can be re-inscribed as forms of public-minded, citizenly engagement (Clarke et al. 2007b: 242) but analyses of peoples own accounts of their consumption practices suggests that such re-inscription is not wholly manageable or predictable (Newholm 2005).
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There is relatively little qualitative exploration of peoples experiences of ethical consumption outside of consumer and marketing studies, and what there is tends to focus on self-identied ethical consumers (e.g. Cherrier 2007; Carrigan, Szmigin and Wright 2004). This means that ethical consumption risks being regarded as a given object, foreclosing some of the discussion of the dynamics of its normative mediation, and marginalizing some of the theoretical advances discussed above. Accordingly, in light of the critique of the rational ethical consumer model, our starting point is not the already-formed ethical consumer and the complexity of their consumption choices, but the broader question of if and how people negotiate the various calls to be ethical in their everyday consumption; to consider how people position themselves in relation to dominant discourses, rather than assuming they are already positioned. As such, our research addresses understandings of the relationship between ethics and consumption in the everyday, rather than practices of ethical consumption. Our discussion now shifts to our qualitative study of the relationship between ethics and consumption: a specially commissioned Mass Observation Archive (MOA) directive, entitled Shopping and making a difference.

The Mass Observation Archive The MOA has historically been used by social researchers as a tool for exploring everyday realities through the eyes of the people who are living them. This focus potentially allows us to place ethical consumption in the everyday lives of a community dened by the social practice of writing (Purbrick 2007) rather than any explicit commitment (or otherwise) to the phenomenon of ethical consumption. This is an important corrective, because, to reiterate, existing (largely consumer) research, mainly quantitative, has focused on pre- and/or self-dened ethical consumers making (or not) discreet product choices and displaying related attitudes (Mintel 2004; Vantomme et al. 2006; Carrigan, Szmigin and Wright 2004). Our aim is not to quantify the ethical consumer, but rather to offer a more textured description of the practice of ethics. The Mass Observation project in its current phase is distinctive in that a panel of volunteers, known as correspondents (about 500 in number recruited through press, television and radio) respond to set directives1. The directives, sent out four times a year, comprise of prompts that encourage correspondents to write about selected events or issues, for example the death of Diana (Autumn 1997); 9/11 (Autumn 2001); and everyday routines and experiences such as last nights dreams (Winter 1992). The prompts can suggest activities such as reecting on memories, keeping a diary, making a poster and so on. In summer 2007 our specially-commissioned three-part Directive Shopping and Making a Difference was distributed (Mass Observation Archive
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2007). The rst part asked correspondents to recall shopping memories of their own and family members of boycotts and/or other ethical initiatives. The purpose here was to contextualize current understandings of ethical consumption in contexts both personal and historical. The second part asked correspondents to record their views and feelings during a fairly substantial shopping trip. They were encouraged to think about why they made the choices they did (and by observing the practices of others, the choices they made), with reference not just to ethics, but health and politics too. In the nal section we prompted correspondents to consider wider issues such as the extent to which the things they buy reect their own personal values. There are methodological concerns about MOA data which tend to echo general concerns about qualitative research as a whole: issues of representativeness and the degree to which the correspondents stories are ctionalized (McNicol 2004). The panel is not representative of the general UK population on several counts: women, people aged over forty years old, living in the south-east of England and of white ethnicity are overrepresented (Black and Crann 2002); though the MOA has made efforts to widen the sociodemographics of its correspondents. That said, we could make too much of this weakness. The MOA is not after all a questionnaire (Sheridan 1993) and it is through the inconsistencies, contradictions, beliefs and ambiguities of each personal story that the everyday may be glimpsed (McNicol 2004). In the words of a long-time director of the Archive: Through autobiography we may come to learn about peoples hopes and fears, their individual choices in relation to wider social and political change, their rational and unconscious motives for acting and, above all, the meaning and signicance which they give their daily lives. (Sheridan 1996: 166) Qualitative approaches such as the MOA are essential in grasping the meanings people deploy in relation to phenomenon like ethical consumption, and provide an essential grounding for future qualitative and quantitative work.

Making sense of the directive We received 262 responses to our summer directive making a difference. The information provided by the MOA allows us only to say that 66 per cent of our respondents were women, 34 per cent were men; 49 per cent were aged 60 or older; 22 per cent were 4559; 22 per cent were 3044; 7 per cent under 29; information about occupation and location was more piecemeal so is not included here. To protect correspondents anonymity each response was known to us only by a code (e.g. L1002) and gender; some correspondents also provided age and occupation.2 This information could provide rudimentary markers of social class. We consider class to be an important element in all
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consumption practices, as a basis for distinction (Bourdieu 1984). We have conceptualized the class dimensions of ethical consumption elsewhere (Adams and Raisborough 2008). However, to read class directly from brief descriptions of location and occupation we believe would generate at best speculative and at worst misleading connections between class and consumption this may be one limitation of MOA data. It was immediately apparent that our directive had generated enormous diversity, not only in terms of questions selected and length and direction of responses, but also how each of the prompts was interpreted. This is not surprising as correspondents for the MOA are encouraged to write freely in whatever medium or style they feel comfortable with and are not obliged to respond to the directive in part or whole. Thus some correspondents related to the prompts in a broad sense, resisting the direction of the directive: discussing childhood memories of war-time thrift in relation to consumption, for example. Others responded to the prompts much more systematically, providing detail on each and every issue. Within and across these differences we were also struck by the extent of the variety of interpretations of, and commitment to, ethical consumption. In the face of such diversity, given our stress on the everyday, we were alive to the danger of decontextualizing aspects of a correspondents response from its wider and supporting narrative. What we have found useful is an adaptation of Gordon, Holland and Lahelmas (1998) three-stage process of qualitative scrutiny. The rst stage (thematic) refers to immersion in the data in order to identify emerging themes. The second stage (interpretative) involves returning to the data to interpret their content through those themes. The nal stage entails the extraction of illustrations and examples of those themes. We adapted these stages by cross-referencing between emerging themes to best capture, for example, correspondents shifts between support and ambivalence for ethical consumption. Thus a three stage thematic analysis is useful analytical tool for MOA data, if we ensure that we returned to the data to embed otherwise isolated themes in each correspondents full response.This approach was considered the best t with the key concern to explore the ways ordinary people experience and negotiate calls to enact their ethical agency through consumption in complex, perhaps even contradictory practices of the everyday. The directive oriented respondents towards reections on how consumption practice relates to ethics and personal values, and if and how consumption can make a positive difference. Unsurprisingly, correspondents talked about being ethical or making a difference through consumption in terms of trying to be or do good. Goodness was a broad category incorporating issues of fairness, desert and commitment; but also allowed space for a fair degree of cynicism and scepticism; for example suspicion of do-gooders, or a questioning of how much good was being done. Our analysis has allowed us to tease out
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the different ways in which the correspondents used goodness; and we present these, for the sake of conceptual clarity, as thematic headings (commitment to being good; hard to be good; good but doubting and closer to home). However, it is important to note that these were embedded in the ow of a correspondents story, each of whom wrote selectively in response to prompts, often interrelating or presented in contradictory ways. The nature of the MOA responses makes any kind of quantitative framework for these thematic headings difcult to ascertain.A content analysis may reveal quantitative patterns of, for example, descriptive variants on the use of good, but this would not offer the kind of description we feel is necessary to explore how people are making sense of ethics and consumption. All we would claim is that we consider these categories to be a useful starting point for a critical sociological interpretation of the doing of ethics via consumption.

Commitment to being good Here we consider examples of expressions of a commitment to being good, which appears to readily t with the notion of a discreet and rational ethical consumer. A number of comments closely reect the normative interpellation that might be expected of Fairtrade promotional material, for example, and the discourses of consumer activism (doing good via enlightened consumption choices) in which calls to ethical consumption are embedded. B3757 (Male, 21) is a prime example of the enlightened, reexive consumer who consistently purchases Fairtrade he buys Fairtrade as much as possible (committed), he thinks about it on every shopping trip (pervasive reexivity), and takes an activist and expansive view of the importance of ethical consumption: everyone should be ethically effective by thinking of the bigger picture at all times. L1691 (Female, 63) articulately occupies a position of ethical reexivity. She sees shopping as an activity in which the personal and political are closely identied for me but this is increasingly complicated over the years and requires a constant review and reappraisal of my attitudes and values. This high level of consumption-oriented reexivity is further mirrored in this respondents hierarchical listing of shopping priorities (health, value, fairly traded, locality). L2604 (M, 68) always buys . . . anything that helps the grower or farmer receive a just reward for their efforts. The fact that Fairtrade has taken off is, he thinks, a result of our consciences being made more aware of ethical issues. Such statements seem to clearly parallel the relationship between expert knowledge and rational individual practices theorised in the academic advocacy of the reexive ethical consumer. Many more examples abound, from detailed advocacy to brief statements of support, e.g. B3631 (F, 31) lives in Birmingham and is proud that Birmingham is the biggest Fairtrade city in the UK; L1002 (F, 60) does try to think about the
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things she buys which are not green or planet friendly (ethical reexivity); What we nd in these accounts is a general awareness of the bads of globalization in terms of production, and an acceptance of solutions based on the goods of enlightened consumption via the exercise of individual responsibility. However the hold of ethical consumption as a way of doing good has a broader reach. Our ndings also suggest that ethical consumption can set up a default ethical position, whereby ethical consumption of Fairtrade produce is considered even by those who are indifferent to such purchases.Thus,B3019 (M, 61) and B3252 (M, 61) both buy, they say, on the grounds of taste alone, and the rest does not bother them, but still dene themselves as selsh shoppers. The Fairtrade consumer is by proxy a more seless shopper; the point of reference to be negotiated remains the Fairtrade consumerist representation of ethics. This section suggests a clear t between standard accounts of the ethical consumer and our correspondents experience. These accounts closely resemble advocacy accounts of ethical consumption as the act of discreet and enlightened consumer choice. If we were approaching self-identied ethical consumers and attempting to elicit motivations, attitudinal dispositions etc. that underpinned this self-identication, we might stop here. We could offer support for mainstream consumer research, in which consuming ethically is understood in both theory and practice to depend on processing knowledge and information, and on explicit practices of acknowledged commitment (Barnett et al. 2005: 28). However, as Barnett and colleagues attest, even if this is a partially successful interpellation of the normative ethical consumer, the t between ethics and normative frameworks may not always be straightforward: our correspondents indicated that different positions are available for occupation in response to such demands. Hard to be good Whether or not there was an avowed commitment to doing good via ethical consumption, correspondents also indicated that in practice, doing good was complicated by a number of obstacles. There is a high correspondence here between our ndings and existing literature which in an aim to strengthen the resolve of ethical consumers, has suggested that the cost, quality (e.g. taste) and accessibility of goods may be impediments to increased sales of ethical goods (Boulstridge and Carrigan 2000; Bekin, Carrigan and Szmigin 2006): a typical shopping trip will be a balancing act between my social conscience and the size of my purse. (F4090 (F, 35)) purchases are compromises [between ethics and cost]. (B3019 (F, 40)) to my shame, I dont tend to buy fair-traded food. Its just too expensive. I hate to say that. (N3588 (F, 46))
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This leads some to argue that if goods are more readily available, competitively priced and of equivalent quality, obstacles would be overcome (Linton, Liou and Shaw 2004, Nicholls and Lee 2006; Wright and Heaton 2006). However our ndings also reveal deeper everyday struggles, when confronted with being good in the context of consumerism and the accompanying range of choice open to them. Signicantly, these obstacles are not so easily remedied by market solutions. Here the data allows us to move away, in degrees, from the straightforward interpellation of the committed, or potentially committed, ethical consumer. Hence G3752 (M, 51) expresses commitment to Fairtrade nagging away at the back of my mind, but as well as being compromised by the pragmatics of his purchasing power, he reects on the problem of conicting information and the difculty of prioritizing claims made about health, fairness and so on. Others display various degrees of commitment to ethical consumption intermingled with conicting and/or competing demands: sometimes my priorities . . . are in conict with one another e.g Fairtrade goods are probably transported by air and we have to buy Fairtrade bananas from the Co-op or Sainsburys as the local market does not stock them. Also even Fairtrade coffee and chocolate are not particularly healthy. (L1691 (F, 63)) the whole global warming carbon emissions and buying out of season, not paying the cost of harvesting certain commodities, has come home to roost, Everyone is aware of how we got it wrong. (L1002 (F, 60)) Fairtrade is good for the soul, organic is good for the body. (A1706 (F, 61) All these quotes suggest other concerns are potentially in conict with Fairtrade when they are attempting to register ethically on ones reexive endeavours. These concerns were echoed throughout the respondents writing where we nd a complex overlaying of competing ethical demands for reexive engagement in terms of haulage, corporate power, health and Fairtrade. Furthermore, such struggles commonly lead to a more or less explicit sense of dissonance, guilt or tension in attempting to navigate a path through competing demands for consumer commitment: in everyday life its sometimes hard to think of moral or ethical ways to live, you have to question your every action which is hard. (C1832 (F, 60)) although I can make out the issues which form the pathways of the ethical consumer maze, I am not always able to follow them, for it is sometimes hard to see the wall that is built up by nancial constraints or conicting ethical issues and there are misleading labels which lead me into dead-ends. (A3403 (M, 37))
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To take a longer example from our data, F4090 (F, 35), describes in some detail her shopping quandary regarding the purchase of bananas for her family. Recent nancial constraints on the family have limited her choice to the value range of bananas in her local supermarket. After one trip, she noticed on arriving home the bananas were from Cameroon. This worried her, because as part of her social work training, she had learnt of concerns over the treatment of young Cameroonian women. On her next visit, she searches for alternatives and nds bananas from Costa Rica also in the value range. However, she writes Unfortunately I dont know much about Costa Rica. It could be just as bad as Cameroon but there is no way I can check everything out. In some ways, this is why things like Fairtrade are good, because at least it takes the worry out of your shopping choices. These responses offer support for Cherriers (2007) assertion that individuals can feel overwhelmed rather than empowered by ethical choices. However, in this example, ethical consumption allows a way through the moral maze, but does not necessarily equate to the reexive processing of knowledge. It is thus possible that rather than the choice of ethical goods being the outcome of enlightened and extended reection on the production process, in the face of such complexity, some correspondents end up opting for Fairtrade by employing heuristics or loose rules (Newholm 2005). Newholm does not expand on the use of heuristics, though Thompson and CoskunerBalli perhaps offer some insight in their discussion of the ideological allure of simple choices (2007: 149). In a world of complex global trade dynamics and ambivalent morality, even in the daunting context of making a difference, heuristics such as the Fairtrade label may afford consumers feelings of condence in outcomes, direct participatory involvement, and personal engagement (2007: 150). Our data suggests that the common cultural equation of Fairtrade with doing good might suspend the requirement for reexive effort otherwise involved in negotiating through the complex demands noted above.

Good but doubting Respondents suggest that even as they do-good through ethical consumption, they are not always entirely convinced that good is being done and were often sceptical of the big business of ethical consumption. These concerns were apparent in discussions centring on cost; a suspicion that supermarkets were overpricing to service some Mr Bigs in creaming off the prots B3323 (M, 72), illustrates concerns about middlemen (B89 (F, 76); D3664 (F, 25); F1589 (F, 75)) while others expressed confusion and worry when Fairtrade goods were cheaper than similar products (for example A883 (M, 73); C41 (F, 48)), as this seemed to undermine the purpose of Fairtrade. These doubts directly relate to the mainstreaming of Fairtrade: a term that speaks to widening
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accessibility and promotion of ethical goods, often through supermarkets. Thus for some of our correspondents something happens to the good of ethical consumption when delivered through bigger businesses: I have a friend who imports coffee and claims that Fairtrade is an entirely cynical marketing exercise and very rarely if ever benets those it is meant to. (C4097 (F, no age provided)) Such comments present a stark contrast to Arnoulds claims that citizenship and consumerism can increasingly be aligned unproblematically: that successful, progressive practices of citizenship should take place through marketmediated forms in our culture because these are the templates for action and understanding available to most people (Arnould 2007: 105). Such responses reect Low and Davenports (2007) warning that mainstreaming presents ethical goods as merely another shopping choice. For some correspondents this resulted in an emptying out of their perception of Fairtrade, so that it was merely a brand (A3573 (F 45); L1002 (F, 60)), a fad (L1696 (M, 90)) a fashion (B1475 (F, 64)), and that newer products were jumping on the Fairtrade bandwagon (B1215 (F, 54)). There is space here then to cast some doubt on conceptual models that equate good consumer practice with a straightforward feel good factor. Thus Soper argues that the moral rewards of ethical consumption include the intrinsic pleasures of consuming differently (2007: 211); and relatedly a distinctively moral form of self-pleasuring or a self-interested form of altruism: that which takes pleasure in committing to a more socially accountable mode of consuming (2007: 213). Sopers account indicates a complex interaction of self-interest and altruism, but it echoes the feel-good factor often explicitly associated with buying Fairtrade in promotional literature and consumer testimony (Goodman 2004; Nicholls and Opal 2005). However, our data suggests that shoppers weave complex lay knowledge of global problems; such as perceived bads of supermarket business with unease towards ethical consumption itself. What we nd is that this does not deter all consumers from shopping ethically but demonstrates the complexity of their motivations, and understanding of their own ethical actions. Claims to make a difference are then far from idealized, but hedged by the hard realities of global capitalism. Although Fairtrade mobilizes consumer suspicion of corporate power by positioning itself against free trade, in becoming mainstream it gains in size to more closely resemble a corporation and, of course, has closer ties to some of those corporations. Fairtrade has to navigate difcult terrain, positioned as it is against free trade while located squarely within a market system. Consequently it is in danger of being (mis)recognized as the very thing it denes itself against, as evident in the unevenness of our responses. Thompson and Coskuner-Balli (2007) concur in arguing that consumers are potentially wary of global polit-brands shining beacons of socially responsible
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capitalism that promote themselves as agents of progressive social change for the same reasons. The authors study of community-supported agriculture, reported that their research participants turn away from corporate politbrands and, instead, direct their politicized consumption choices toward noncorporate, local alternatives (Thompson and Coskuner-Balli 2007: 149). Our ndings similarly revealed a turn towards the local. However this co-existed in complex and fragmentary ways with expressions of support for mainstreamed Fairtrade and supermarket-scepticism.We now turn to discussions of the local in more detail.

Closer to home Academic denitions of contemporary ethical consumption, despite variations, tend to assume that the phenomenon is based on relationships to distant others (Cova 1997; Barnett et al. 2005). However, although distance was a recurring theme of importance in our respondents writing, it was not always articulated in ways which t comfortably into such a conceptualization. Our respondents persistently reframed ethical consumption in the spatial/ geographical terms of the local, emphasizing their commitment to purchasing the local production and/or the supply of consumer goods. A variety of spatial/product markers complicated any simple reading of the local: British farmers, British goods, local shops, the high street, your own country. Similarly, justications for articulating ethical consumption as a commitment to closer rather than distant others, where discernable, were varied: regionalism, nationalism, environmentalism and communitarianism are not easy to unpick, nor necessarily mutually exclusive, in accounting for such an emphasis. Sometimes the emphasis on the closer as opposed to distant was an explicit naming of shopping locally as ethical or more ethical than purchasing Fairtrade items produced further aeld: I have endeavoured to shop ethically ever since I grew up . . . British made goods, British farm products, Local goods. British Car. (M2164 (F, 80)) When it comes to food I always buy British . . . to me that is being ethical you should buy from your own country rather than boost the economy of another. (F1634 (F, retired)) We have a primary duty towards our own people, culture and nation. (M3190 (M, 49)) Most of the making a difference shopping we do is to try and support local/independent shops and try to limit our food miles and food waste . . . we feel as though we are trying to contribute to the local economy and also supporting good farming practices for the future. (O3259 (F, 42))
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All [British farmers] deserve a better deal in our estimation . . . perhaps it is time we thought of Fairtrade for them. (B1654 (M, 76)) In these ve examples the rst three suggest an implicit justication in terms of nationalist and/or regionalist consumer ethics perhaps; the fourth is more explicitly concerned with localized economic support, farming practices, and environmental concerns relating to food transportation; the fth is similar to the rst but explicitly applies the concept of Fairtrade to British farmers. Whilst the welfare of others is a shared concern amongst our respondents then, which others are deemed worthy of compassion in everyday practices of consumption, and for what reason, varies enormously. In other responses there was no explicit labelling of local shopping as an alternative form of ethical consumption, but none the less a similar shifting of emphasis onto priorities and practices which were marked by the importance of purchasing from those closer to home: I support the local farmers more now than that of foreign countries . . . we should look at our dying farming industries rst . . . Fairtrade does not make any difference to me now whilst I shop. However, I will always buy local produce rst . . . I feel we should look closer to home too. (L4047 (M, 37)) [Whats more important than Fairtrade] is buying locally to keep our small shops open and to stop our town shops going out of business and the town from becoming a wasteland . . . our fellow man in faraway places cant compete with this. (L1504 (M, 81)) The spatial and relational dynamics of emphasizing the ethics of shopping closer to home has received little attention in academic literature concerned with what is explicitly labelled as ethical consumption. Where it has, the local seems to be relegated to a fallback position for those who would consume ethically, narrowly understood, but lack the resources to do so. Thus for Clarke et al. local shopping indicates the degree to which the exercise of choice is shaped by systems of collective provisioning over which consumers have little direct inuence (2007b: 239). Ascertaining the degree of choice versus the degree of systemic collective provisioning is a complex conceptual manoeuvre, particularly if we see the exercise of choice as a reection of class-based dispositions and prevalent in all action is the logic of the consumption of signs guiding consumption choices (Arnould 2007: 98; Baudrillard 1988[1970]; Bourdieu 1984). The issue of genuine choice aside, our respondents did sometimes reect that their choices were limited by access to Fairtrade goods, but this seems to be an unnecessarily reductive understanding of the meaning of local shopping to some of those avowing an involvement in it. Shopping closer to home can be expressed as a political choice with or against Fairtrade purchasing, and so can even be explicitly claimed to be a form of ethical consumption.3
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Work in the sociology of food on slow and local food movements raises some fascinating parallel debates (e.g. Chrzan 2004; Holt and Amilien 2007). In these food movements there is an explicit concern with how dominant food production is disconnected space from place, stretching the distance between where food is produced and where it is consumed (Labelle 2004: 87), and we see an emergence of another dimension of what we have referred to elsewhere as a politics of proximity (Adams and Raisborough 2008). As Labelle attests, Local food is one of the most obvious examples reecting proximity, though locality has many meanings . . . local food can express proximity in direct relations, like a farmers market, as well as through its introduction into institutions and other regions, enabling connections over a range of distances. (2004: 87) That these connections, like those of Fairtrade, are always mediated, suggests that future research tackles the politics of proximity across various food movements to grasp the shifting dynamics of consumer culture, and the tensions between universalizing and localized discourses of consumption-based ethics. There is potential here for expanding our understanding of ethical consumption and shifts in consumer culture more generally, by conceptualizing more complex spatial and relational dynamics at the heart of the relationship between ethics and consumption. It is possible that such shifts will culminate in the branding of the local in a similar way to Fairtrade is branded; for example there are already a number of moves in mainstream supermarkets to regionally brand foods, and to include imagery of local producers; some independent retailers identify the food miles of products and sourcing locally appears to have rapidly increasing appeal in the logic of consumer signs. If emphasis on the local is about than the politics of space and place, it is also about issues of attachment and embodiment. Peoples connection to their locality in terms of consumption may be a reexive route through the ethical maze of consumption choices, but it also reects, or perhaps reinstates, a more directly relational dimension of everyday life. It rearticulates or rembeds the social relations of the individual, to use Giddenss term, but not across indenite tracts of time and space as he suggests (Giddens 1991: 18), at least not exclusively. Rather than the place becoming a meaningless dimension of social time and space, the mediated relationships understood as closer to home are in these responses imagined as a meaningful and purposeful attachment which can be registered via forms of everyday consumption.

Conclusion We started this paper by recognizing the increasing opportunities we have as consumers to make a difference. Yet we have departed from assumptions
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circulating in consumer and business studies of a xed ethical consumer with specically directed and targeted ethical actions. Instead, we have considered, via the MOA directive, lived experiences; both of the call to this particular form of ethical agency and also to the varied ways that such a call, even when responded to positively (making the right choices), is understood and actioned. The correspondents wrote of realities that were more complex than formulations of a xed ethical consumer can allow. It is here that we argue the MOA offers a means, through personal subjective accounts and fragmented autobiographies (Black and Crann 2002) to dislodge the certainty of researcher dened categorizations and categorical approaches more generally (Stanley 1988; Valentine 1999: 495). A focus on the personal narratives of the MOA helps to contextualize ethical consumption within the wider sociocultural rhythms of everyday life, in ways that provide some insight into how choices are recognized, rendered meaningful, and taken up. This leads us to approach denitions of ethical consumption and the consumer with some caution. Barnett et als denition is encouragingly broad: ethical consumption is any practice of consumption in which explicitly registering commitment to distant or absent others is an important dimension of the meaning of activity of the actors involved (2005: 29). There are two points that our discussion allows us to unpack; the notion of commitment and the detailing of specic others. Our ndings did demonstrate that many consumers did have a commitment to, in their own words, being good and making a difference through their shopping decisions. As existing literature would lead us to expect, this commitment was sometimes confounded by pragmatics of cost, accessibility and at times, product quality. Yet, a focus on the obstacles of good purchase behaviour only allows us to speak of the opportunities/ possibilities of action, not of the nature and experience of commitment in itself. Our data suggests that commitment cannot be read as equivalent to uncritical views of ethical consumption, nor an idealist view that good is being done. Despite many declaring a commitment to ethical consumption, the MOA correspondents views on their own actions were far from clear cut with many expressing grave concerns about bureaucratic and business corruption; the sheer scale of global bads; and consumer culture. Others framed commitment as something less explicit; apparently employing heuristics to ease the process of deliberation involved in the contemporary consumption choices of some. An explicit registered commitment thus leaves little room for doubt or for a wavering, suspicious, ambivalent consumer juggling their choices amidst competing knowledge claims. We have expressed these in terms of doubts but this may not do justice to seemingly constant variability, uncertainty and unevenness found in our correspondents accounts. Of course one of the limitations of the MOA is that we cannot probe more deeply; something which an interview based research design might allow (Raisborough and Bhatti 2007). We can however, suggest
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from our reading of the data, that unevenness and doubt are not always unwelcome accompaniments to commitment that threaten to potentially hijack or soften it. Instead, we get the view here that unevenness is a necessary constituent to the ways that commitment materializes through dynamic epistemologies (knowledge of supermarket practices for example) that differently assert the realities of global business and also, of any moderating good action. It is tempting to describe the MOA correspondents as fragmented at least in terms of their ethical consumption practice and/or ethical identities; but we are reluctant to do so, as this serves to isolate what we see as component parts of a coherent, liable to ux, but mostly uneven, biographical narrative. In sum, our MOA correspondents do not switch from one mindset to another all knowledges interweave and operate when they reect upon ethical purchases and all inform the experience of a commitment to doing good. That the correspondents also referred to the ethical in terms of the local works to disrupt any formulation linking the good choices here with the livelihood of a producer over there distant or absent others. While a sense of fairness resounded through many accounts, there was a keen sense that commitment to a distant other should be matched, or secondary, to a commitment to producers closer to home. As we have discussed above, a number of respondents negotiated the dilemmas of doing good by shopping closer to home and doing good by buying labelled Fairtrade goods, usually produced, in part at least, at some distance from the point of consumption. Thus once the activity of consuming ethically becomes a heuristic, qualied by scepticism, jostling amongst competing demands such as the local, its level of importance as a dimension of meaningful activity takes on a protean relativity to the psycho-social context in which consumption takes place. Consequently work on the phenomenon of ethical consumption that takes ordinary individuals accounts seriously must look beyond the mediation of Fairtrade in campaigning and promotional materials, and engage with everyday accounts of consumption and ethics. We acknowledge that we have made only a modest contribution to this engagement here. However we strongly believe that a more complex t between social re-articulations of ethical consumption, enlisting processes and individual articulations arises in our study precisely because of the advantages of our particular approach: we engaged directly with individual experiences; self-identication as an ethical consumer was not a pre-requisite for selection and did not therefore prime responses in any way; and our prompts allowed space for respondents to work-up their own articulations of the relationship between consumption and ethics. Thus whatever its limitations, we are convinced that the MOA provides sociological insight into the everyday dimensions of a complex and growing social phenomenon. (Date accepted: February 2010)
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Notes
1. For more information on the history and practice of the Mass Observations Archive see www.massobs.org.uk 2. We represent those codes here as, for example L1002 (F, 60). 3. There is now a Fairtrade for British farmers campaign in the UK supported by the supermarket chain Waitrose. See http://www.waitrose. com/food/foodissuesandpolicies/ Fairtradeforbritishfarmers.aspx for more details.

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