Events

The Sustainability and CSR Research and Teaching Group would like to invite you to the following event. 

Researching consumer ethics: debates and disciplines

Presented by Dr Terry Newholm, Honorary Fellow at Manchester Business School

Consumption ethics as a field of study is based on the understanding that life in affluent consumer cultures raises specific moral challenges that relate to production and consumption practices. As the American philosopher David Schwartz says, "… many of the products we buy as consumers regularly come to us with histories steeped in highly unethical practices, such as exploitation, avoidable suffering, and environmental damage." (2010, Consuming Choices: Ethics in a Global Consumer Age Rowman and Littlefield. pvii).

Dr Newholm will explore the development of debates in consumption ethics through the many contributing disciplines. Since the early marketing work in 1970s America on the ‘socially responsible consumer’, consumption ethics has attracted significant contributions from, among others, political scientists, philosophers, geographers, economists, historians, anthropologists, and educational theorists. Debates have developed around such concerns as the individualistic and/or collective nature of ‘ethical consumption’, its history, its position in the education of affluent consumer cultures, fair trade vs. free trade, the private vs. public context of our consumption, formulas for how we should live in consumer culture etc. This wide range of academic contributions has set the context for a mature field of study in what seems a remarkably short timescale.

Dr Terry Newholm is an Honorary Fellow at Manchester Business School. He has fourteen years of publications in consumption ethics:

Bibliography

• Newholm, T. (2012). Understanding the Ethical Consumer: Employing a Frame of Bounded Rationality. Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic Publishing.
• Newholm, T. (2011). Fair Trade. In D. Southerton, Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture (pp. 567-569). Los Angeles: Sage.
• Newholm, T., & Shaw, D. (2007). Studying the Ethical Consumer: A Review of Research. Journal of Consumer Behaviour , 6 (5), 253-270.
• Harrison, R., Newholm, T., & Shaw, D. (2005). The Ethical Consumer. London: Sage.
• Newholm, T. (2005). Case Studying Ethical Consumers. In R. Harrison, T.
• Newholm, & D. Shaw, The Ethical Consumer (pp. 107-124). London: Sage.
• Shaw, D., & Newholm, T. (2002). Voluntary Simplicity and the Ethics of Consumption. Psychology and Marketing , 19 (2), 167-185.
• Newholm, T. (2000). Consumer Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Indicative, Legitimation, and Regulatory Role in Agricultural and Food Ethics. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics , 12 (2), 153-164.
• Newholm, T. (1999). Relocating the ‘Ethical Consumer’. In R. Norman, Ethics and the Market (pp. 162-184). Aldershot: Ashgate.
• Newholm, T. (1998). Low Energy Light Bulbs, Markets and Ethics. Philosophy Today , 11 (28), 4-5.

Please book your place by emailing Petra Molthan-Hill.