IS “SHOPPING WITH A CONSCIENCE” A PROMISING OR PAINFULLY wrongheaded way to bring about social change? Debates over this question have been vibrant and often heated. But to date they have rarely been informed by research on the implementation of standards in global industries. Celebrants and critics have argued about the politics of conscientious consumerism, but they have left the work of figuring out what lies “behind the label” to other sets of scholars, or ignored it entirely. Our goal has been to mobilize a wide range of evidence to bridge this gap. We have documented patterns in conscientious consumer behavior, proposed an interpretation of it, and developed a series of case studies of global industries, helping to answer the question of whether standards created to please (or appease) conscientious consumers actually make a difference “on the ground.” In this chapter we briefly take stock of our findings, identify some overarching patterns in the case studies, and discuss what we see as useful paths forward for both conscientious consumers and scholars of conscientious consumption.
We began our analyses by examining patterns of boycotting and buycotting by European and American consumers. Among other implications, these analyses challenged the image of conscientious consumerism as a fully individualized identity project of “sovereign” consumers. It is true that individuals who prioritize post-materialist values and have a strong sense of personal political efficacy are more likely than others to be conscientious consumers. But a variety of social structures also matter—from gender, income, and social class to cross-national economic opportunity structures.
This rough sketch of consumers then led us to a deeper interpretation of consumer behavior and its sociopolitical implications. Our interpretation, as developed in chapter 2, emphasized that consumer demand for “alternative” products is often, though not always, bound up with self-interest and perceived private benefits (e.g., improved health or energy cost savings). Furthermore, we argued, conscientious consumerism can take self-serving, exclusionary, antiegalitarian, and counterproductive forms. The ideology of conscientious consumerism, which glosses over all of this to paint a rosy picture of shopping to save the world, must be rejected. Yet practices of conscientious consumption, if divorced from this ideology, might still be useful in promoting fairness and sustainability. There is evidence to suggest that individuals can sometimes act as hybrid citizen-consumers who make conscientious consumption part of a repertoire of political engagement.
In part 2 we looked more closely at standards for fairness and sustainability in four global industries. Notably, the standards covered here do not have obvious private benefits for consumers, so an analysis of their emergence and effectiveness is especially important. Our four case studies do not capture the full gamut of conscientious consumption, but they have allowed us to explore a wide range of issues and locations. Moreover, all four industries make products that consumers use literally every day—clothing, electronics, wood and paper, and food. Even if one just considered sugar and soy, it would be difficult to get through a day without consuming them in one form or another.
Consistent with our approach (as outlined in the introduction), these case studies showed that local sites of implementation are not “empty spaces” that merely receive global standards; they are rich social orders, where global standards layer onto preexisting systems of power, inequality, and governance. Whether looking at the problem of freedom of association in China, agrarian histories in Paraguay, or contentious forest boundaries in Indonesia, it should be clear that national and local circumstances cannot be ignored if one wants to go “behind the label.” In addition, the standards that have arisen in these industries vary in their stringency and independence, but it takes more than simple designations of “greenwash” or “fairwash” to understand them. Reasonably credible labels have often fallen short of their goals, and initiatives led by companies and industry associations have increasingly used at least some external auditing to check compliance rather than merely asserting it through public relations campaigns.
This tour of four global industries has taken us across a wide swath of terrain not only in terms of production locations in Asia and South America but also in terms of the array of products, rule-making initiatives, dynamics of implementation, and countervailing trends. Table C1 summarizes some of the key features of our four industry cases. The rough characterizations in this table assist in integrating information and comparing cases, although they are not meant to replace the more nuanced findings in the chapters.
Looking at the making of wood and paper products in chapter 3, we saw how the FSC became the most credible certifier of the world’s forests and labeler of sustainable forest products, despite initially low levels of consumer demand. The FSC found enough support from retailers, foundations, and governments to survive competition with an industry-based competitor. But this has not been sufficient to halt deforestation. The FSC label has grown in the marketplace, especially on paper products. But certification at the forest level has been messier than the label implies, and it has often been incapable of preserving endangered ecosystems and ensuring the rights of forest-dwelling communities.
One reason for the limited impact of forest certification is that forests are being converted to agricultural uses. In chapter 4 we unpacked the structure of agri-food value chains and honed in on two models of standard setting in this industry: the commodity roundtables (like RTRS and RSPO) and fair trade. Looking closely at sugar and soy production in Paraguay, we argued that fair trade certification, despite some shortcomings (and some recent drift away from its original rationale), can help smallholder farmers upgrade their capacities and increase their competitiveness. The commodity roundtable approach, in contrast, may promote CSR in the agribusiness industry but ends up marginalizing small farmers and ignoring alternative models of production.
Table C1. Key Features of Four Industries
Turning from food to clothing, we examined the rise and limited effects of codes of conduct, factory auditing, and certification in the apparel and footwear industry. Chapter 5 illustrated not only the role of different constituencies in driving different rule-making projects, but it also vividly illustrated the puzzle of rules: after almost two decades of rule making and auditing, apparel production is still quite unruly, as seen in its mobility and in recent deadly accidents. Anti-sweatshop campaigns awakened consumers to global labor exploitation, but the improvements that have occurred have been small or offset by the industry’s movement to new locations.
In chapter 6 we examined how similar concerns about labor conditions have arisen in the global electronics industry, especially in the past several years. In this industry, conscientious consumption has been slow to emerge, and unreflective consumerism has fueled a dynamic system of production that demands highly flexible labor markets and sometimes extremely long working hours. This industry seemingly has the resources, and perhaps even some of the will, to improve conditions. But despite some progress in tracking “conflict minerals,” the industry has remained stuck in an architecture of production that impedes significant progress on labor standards in the assembly process.
Across all of these industries, we have seen that the impacts of production standards are less than their backers claim. Simple images of “sweat-free” factories, fair distributions of profit, and sustainable resource use bear little resemblance to the sites of production that we have studied. That said, it would be wrong to conclude that nothing has changed. Indeed, each chapter points out some progress that has been made and some ways in which voluntary standards have contributed. But even the most credible standards are not guaranteed to improve production conditions. Their effects depend on a number of other circumstances, from local institutional arrangements to particular structures of production. In addition, even the most credible voluntary standards are essentially powerless to affect larger trajectories of economic development, such as the conversion of forests to agricultural land, the rise of large-scale, mechanized soy production, or the globetrotting character of the apparel industry.
Our case studies also suggest that consumer markets must be seen as part of the problem, not just a potential solution. Despite the growth of conscientious consumption, there is a great deal of unreflective consumerism behind the exploitation of workers and environments around the world. This is clearest in the electronics industry, where consumers’ taste for ever newer products fuels the short product life cycles (to avoid the “sour milk” problem) and rapid churning of styles. It is striking how rarely conscientious consumers have questioned the consequences for workers. The same individuals who demand organic food and fair trade coffee are often all too eager to scoop up the next smartphone.
With these comparative cases in mind, we can revisit the “rough guide” developed in our introductory chapter. There we suggested that one could understand conscientious consumption and production projects by focusing on four factors: (1) global-local linkages (globalized localisms and localized globalisms), (2) the “puzzle of rules,” (3) constituencies behind standards, and (4) structures of consumption and production. Each of these factors has been illustrated explicitly in the four main chapters in part 2. Recall from our analysis of agri-food production, for instance, how domestic political histories and local institutional structures have created distinct “localized globalisms” in the global value chains for sugar and soy. More broadly, “globalized localisms” have fueled the proliferation of standards for fair and sustainable food, as illustrated by the globalization of fair trade out of earlier local attempts to support farming cooperatives in particular countries.
When it comes to the “puzzle of rules”—that is, the simultaneous explosion of rules and unruliness—recall the analysis of the apparel industry, where a variety of rule-making projects has arisen but where the industry nevertheless remains footloose in search of low wages. Similar stories of unruliness, although with less geographical mobility, characterize the rapid scaling up and down in electronics, the rise of illegal logging networks, and the expansionary logic of commodity agriculture.
Perhaps our most basic point is that standards, labels, and other assurances arise from the priorities of particular constituencies. Recall the example of the apparel and footwear sector, where some rule-making projects are tailored to the interests of heavily branded firms, others spring from the needs of their less branded competitors, and still others represent labor rights activists’ attempts to set a high bar for compliance. This is a fragmented field of rule making (Fransen and Conzelmann forthcoming), and it is fragmented in large part by competing interests, not just multiple approaches. In the forest products industry, competition is largely between the FSC and PEFC, with the former being largely a coalition of NGOs and retailers and the latter being a coalition of timber manufacturers and landowners. It is tempting to view the proliferation of eco-labels and social labels as simply reflecting a diversity of opinions about what sustainability and fairness mean. But it is crucial to remember that these opinions are rooted in particular interests and agendas. Our point is not to entirely dismiss initiatives that serve industry interests. Programs like the EICC in electronics, BSCI in apparel, and PEFC in timber can sometimes foster small improvements to the existing system of production. But they have shown no capacity to push firms to significantly alter their production methods, and this is not terribly surprising given their origins.
Turning to structures of consumption and production, our case studies provide several new insights. Most fundamentally, while the discourse of conscientious consumerism imagines changes being made through “the global market,” our case studies show that markets are structured differently across industries, and that global industries intersect with varied national and subnational political arrangements. Even the features of products, such as the perishability of food, can influence which companies are susceptible to consumer pressure and what kinds of standards emerge. In addition, our case studies reinforce and to some degree revise ideas about industry concentration and global value chains, as we discuss below.
First, it is clear that NGOs seeking to make rules for global industries want to leverage the power of large, well-known lead firms in global value chains. We have seen how social movement campaigns or media exposés of Nike, Apple, The Home Depot, and Starbucks, among others, led them to develop or support standards for their suppliers. Naming and shaming well-known firms has certainly attracted public attention to labor and environmental problems, and in some cases it has been used to “make a market” for independently certified products. Large, well-known lead firms and global standard setting would appear to go hand in hand, then. In addition, as the analyses in chapter 1 showed, when a country’s retailing structure is concentrated (featuring a small number of large supermarkets/hypermarkets), consumers are more likely to engage in boycotting and buycotting than when retailing is fragmented among many smaller stores. Here again it would appear that mega-retailing and conscientious consumption are highly compatible.
But our case studies suggest that this is not the entire story. There is what might be dubbed the “contradiction of retail concentration.” While facilitating product certification and conscientious consumption in some ways, the concentrated power of large retailers also puts downward pressure on prices in global value chains and poses risks for the independence and integrity of certification initiatives. In the apparel industry, Walmart, Kmart/Sears, Target, and Tesco are certainly not alone in pushing down clothing prices, but their scale allows their decisions to ripple broadly, and their sourcing and pricing strategies are what many others in the industry have imitated. In furniture retailing, IKEA’s power to demand low prices from manufacturers is similar to Walmart’s, and both companies put low prices at the center of their strategy, even though they also both support FSC certification. In electronics, mega-retailers like Best Buy, MediaMarkt, and, more recently, Amazon.com can press brands for lower prices, indirectly facilitating the rapid introduction of new models to forestall falling prices. If low prices were consistent with fair and sustainable production, there would be no problem. But in various ways our case studies have illustrated how intense pressure for low prices (and quick deliveries) leaves suppliers with little space to meet demands for fairness and sustainability.
Furthermore, working with large retailers may allow independent certification initiatives to build their market share, as seen in the mainstreaming of fair trade and FSC certification, but it can also make them more dependent on corporate supporters and lead to a watering down of standards. By some accounts, dependence on large companies is what lies behind fair trade’s drift away from smallholder cooperatives, especially the recent moves by Fair Trade USA described in chapter 4 (see Jaffee 2012). As our analysis of the FSC shows, mainstreaming does not necessarily eviscerate stringent standards, but it does require some compromise. Furthermore, when large retailers do support independent certification initiatives, they often end up capturing part of a price premium that conscientious consumers assume goes directly to producers, workers, or communities (see Stecklow and White 2004). The contradiction of concentrated retailing does not have a simple solution, but we hope that both practitioners and future researchers will consider whether in particular situations the benefits of hitching conscientious consumption to large retailers and brands are worth the costs.
In addition, our case studies have illustrated how the complexity of global value chains has muted the effects of production standards. Subcontracting remains common in the apparel industry, yet subcontractors rarely receive the scrutiny that first-tier suppliers do. As evidenced by scandals involving Walmart and the Gap, lead firms may not even fully know where their products are being made, although it is sometimes hard to tell the difference between real and feigned ignorance of subcontracting. In some parts of the timber industry, complex and often illegal timber trading networks have made it difficult for companies like IKEA and JYSK to even trace the sources of raw materials, much less ensure that those sources are sustainable. In electronics, the shift from integrated systems to modular production enabled complex supply chains and the kind of fast competition that demands ultra-flexible labor markets. Some global value chains are simpler, such as those for coffee, some types of lumber, and fresh fruit and vegetables, and this has made it somewhat easier to enforce standards for these products. But it turns out that even products that would appear to have simple links from producer to consumer are increasingly being made by breaking the global value chain into smaller segments so that lead firms can find the lowest-cost providers at each node. For instance, fish are being farmed in Latin America, frozen and shipped to China to be filleted, and then frozen and shipped to grocery stores and restaurants in the United States (see Stringer et al. 2011). The perishability of food puts some limits on this process, so food production will never be as “modularized” as electronics, but the trends in this direction are striking.
Relatedly, our case studies reveal that there has been a partial convergence of global industries on something roughly akin to the “buyer-driven” model of global value chains, seen especially in the growing power of large retailers. But there is significant variation within the four industries we have discussed. Recall from chapter 4 that supermarkets have become quite powerful in the production of fresh fruit and vegetables, but for processed foods, manufacturers, processors, and even input providers can be the lead firms. Recall from chapter 3 that retailers have become powerful in the production of lumber and furniture, but they are less powerful in the pulp and paper industry, where large manufacturers remain dominant (even though they are challenged by retailers such as Staples).
In addition, though, it does not appear that global value chains need to be strongly buyer-driven in order for standards for fairness and sustainability of some sort to take hold. The commodity roundtables (e.g., RTRS and RSPO) are mainly geared toward food processors and input suppliers; unlike fair trade, they have not staked their claims on support from retailers and consumers. In the forestry arena the FSC was able to make headway into the pulp and paper industry, although it had to alter its approach to labeling to do so (creating “FSC Mix” and “FSC Recyled” labels). The “buyer-driven” designation has been a powerful conceptual tool for practitioners and scholars of global standards, but the specialized literature on global value chains has moved on to a more elaborate typology of governance structures (e.g., Gereffi et al. 2005). Our case studies show some convergence but also the importance of fine-grained distinctions between global value chains. On the other hand, we suspect that typologies of coordination in global value chains, whether crude or elaborate, are unlikely to determine the shape of rule-making projects for fairness and sustainability. Industry structure is an important variable, but rule-making projects are varied, dynamic, and shaped by a variety of historical and political processes.
In many instances, projects to promote fairness and sustainability take the form of standards that are applied to existing structures of production, no matter how unequal or exploitative they are. This is true of most initiatives in the apparel and electronics industries (e.g., FLA, SAI, ETI, BSCI, EICC), the commodity roundtables (RTRS and RSPO), and, in many parts of the world, forest certification (e.g., PEFC and much FSC certification). The best hope from these initiatives is that they can spur managerial improvements: factories can become somewhat safer and more humane, farms can become less destructive to land and more charitable toward local people, and timber harvesting can become less disruptive of local ecosystems.
In contrast, some projects explicitly promote alternative models of production, equating fairness and sustainability with democratically managed cooperatives, community-based forestry operations, or factories organized by independent labor unions. As we have shown, projects of this type invariably originate outside the industry, from NGOs and activists. Standards to support these models are “in the market but not of it,” as Peter Leigh Taylor (2005) put it. Fair trade is the clearest example of this sort of standard, even though it (especially Fair Trade USA) has partially drifted away from its original commitment to cooperatives. The origins of the FSC lie in part in attempts to promote community-based forestry projects, and the FSC has certified some community forestry operations in addition to mainstream industrial operations. In the apparel industry, rule making took off primarily without endorsing an alternative production model, yet recently the WRC has supported alternatives such as the unionized Alta Gracia factory in the Dominican Republic. In the electronics industry the recently developed Fairphone project seeks to provide an alternative, although it is not entirely separate from the mainstream production architecture.
Apart from noting that they require support from industry outsiders, what more can be said about the promotion, and possible consumption, of alternative production models? First, our case studies suggest that the likelihood of viable alternatives depends on the characteristics of the industry in at least two ways. To start, there must be a niche that is not being filled by dominant firms. Interestingly, there are theoretical reasons to believe that it is when large, generalist firms dominate a market that the viability of smaller specialists increases.1 Second, the resource and technical requirements for making the project must be relatively low in order for industry outsiders to be able to construct viable alternatives. We suspect this is one reason that alternative production models are more prominent in agriculture and forestry than in manufacturing. Especially in the case of electronics, resource and technological requirements mean that Fairphone entrepreneurs have to rely on the existing production architecture (i.e., using standard inputs and an assembly factory in China).
Third, however, we should not view the emergence of alternatives only in terms of industry structures. History matters. Alternative production models are not formed out of thin air. They need decades of prior institution building to become viable in global markets. In some ways the consumption of alternatives is made possible by what Marc Schneiberg (2007), in a different context, called the “flotsam and jetsam . . . of abandoned or partly realized institutional projects” (70). Recall that fair trade certification has been able to support cooperatives because of decades of land reform and local organizing projects that came before. Community-based forestry has a similar, though not unblemished, history (see Agrawal 2005). The recent development of the Alta Gracia rested on years of activism at the BJ&B factory in the same location and on larger labor reforms in the Dominican Republic. In some circumstances, conscientious consumption can support alternative forms of production, but those circumstances should not be taken for granted.
Fourth, conscientious consumers should remember that there are serious business risks involved in departing from dominant industry structures. Alternative models for apparel and electronics will have to abandon “fast fashion”/“fast electronics” in order to improve labor conditions, for instance. If conscientious consumers want to support such alternatives, they must provide not merely a premium price but some patience as well, which may mean missing out on the latest fashions and technologies. A “slow goods” movement, akin to the “slow food” movement, may ultimately be required for alternative production models to gain traction.
How can researchers go further in unpacking conscientious consumption in global industries?
Many questions remain about consumer behavior, production standards, and the connections between them. We hope that researchers can extend our approach to further assess the accomplishments and limits of conscientious consumption. We see three types of tasks as especially important.
To begin, there are additional questions to be asked about consumers. To go beyond the existing survey evidence on boycotting and buycotting, researchers need richer, more nuanced data on what these activities mean to consumers. For instance, boycotting may mean simply avoiding one product and choosing an easy substitute, or it may mean participating in a long-term and costly effort as part of a social movement. Overall, scholars should build more holistic portraits of consumers, putting their occasional conscientiousness about fairness and sustainability in the context of their larger understandings of “morals and markets” (see Fourcade and Healy 2007). More nuanced data—whether through in-depth interviews or more sophisticated survey designs—can also help to identify the conditions under which consumers attach explicitly political, ethical, or mainly self-serving meanings to their purchases, extending or testing our interpretation in chapter 2. Examining consumers outside of Europe and the United States is also important, especially for extending the analysis of how political, economic, and cultural contexts shape conscientious consumption. Remember, however, that evidence based on surveys and interviews has serious limits if one wants to assess consumer behavior. The field experiments described in chapter 2 have provided important findings, and they deserve to be extended into other markets, products, and issues.
Ultimately research on individual consumers can go only so far before it runs into two other crucial types of questions. First, how significant are diffuse consumer tastes and preferences in structuring markets? Scholars have rightly emphasized that organized consumer demand is more powerful than diffuse preferences (Seidman 2007) and have rightly criticized “naïve aggregationist” views of consumer markets (Willis and Schor 2012). But this does not eliminate the possibility that shifts in consumer tastes could in some ways alter industry operations, even though they are not guaranteed to do so. Mass consumer tastes have shaped earlier trajectories of industrialization (see Sabel and Zeitlin 1985) as well as both the rise and decline of the tobacco industry (see Brown et al. 1999; Schudson 1984), so it is worth inquiring into mechanisms by which they might subtly influence global industries.
A focus on consumers also runs into questions about the effectiveness of standards that they might support. After all, consumers can rarely observe the social and environmental implications of a product directly. There is a great need for well-structured research to enrich the kinds of analyses in our industry case studies. We believe that the most promising research designs will be comparative. They may involve comparing similar firms that are and are not subject to scrutiny/standards. They may involve comparing the implementation of standards in different industries, as we have begun to do. Or they may involve comparing the implementation of the same standards in different places. Researchers have begun to take up these tasks, but getting solid evidence on implementation takes great time and effort, so there is much work left to be done. As our case studies have illustrated, private, voluntary rules are not implemented in a vacuum, so we would encourage researchers to take public/state regulation seriously as well. Much can be learned, for instance, by comparing the implementation of public and private regulation on the same issue in a given location (see Amengual 2010).
Taking governments seriously also means doing a better job of linking research on labor and environmental standards with research on development. Our case studies have referenced the role of developmental states, but many questions remain about how government policy and trajectories of industrial innovation influence conditions at the point of production and whether they might accomplish some of the fairness and sustainability goals that have caught the attention of conscientious consumers. Often the priorities of developmental states and transnational corporations are in alignment—for flexible labor markets, rapid scaling up of exports, and containment of popular disruption (e.g., strikes and agrarian movements), for instance. But sometimes governments realize they are getting less than they bargained for, and they begin to adopt reforms that do not serve the needs of transnational corporations. In other words, corporations’ desire for “one big market” governed by a logic of neoliberalism may push up against divergent goals from governments in developing countries. As discussed in chapter 6, governments that promoted electronics and the flexible labor markets it required have sometimes begun to question the lack of spillover benefits and to shift toward a tightening of labor markets. To the extent that global industries have heavy investments in a particular place, due to sunk costs or natural resource endowments, such reforms may be promising. Research on the space for developmental states to be strong regulatory states is crucial if we are to move past the impasses of voluntary standards.
What does it mean to shift from an ideology of conscientious consumerism to a repertoire that includes conscientious consumption?
Finally, it is important to return to our point in chapter 2 in light of the material that has followed. In that chapter we argued that the ideology of conscientious consumerism is vapid and regressive but that specific practices of conscientious consumption might be meaningful and progressive if treated as part of a repertoire of political engagement. Our industry case studies have identified a few positive effects of conscientious consumption, and we hope they can help readers to identify more and less meaningful labels and assurances. Enthusiastic consumers can also consult a growing set of consumer guides, including Goodguide.com’s product ratings and Consumer Reports’ “Greener Choices” guide to food labels. But it is crucial to remember that these guides rely heavily on companies’ and labels’ procedures. Information on their performance is extremely sparse. For some products, consumer guides can make inferences about sustainability based on the species and location of production, as does the Seafood Watch guide produced by the Monterey Bay Aquarium, though the growing complexity of the seafood trade has made a once simple guide increasingly byzantine.
Notwithstanding variation in the impacts of production standards, our case studies have highlighted the need for other approaches, since even the best voluntary standards and assurances make relatively small dents in global industries. These other approaches have included binding as opposed to voluntary agreements, strong local social movements, and reinvigorated governmental regulation. As we argued in our chapter on food, fair trade certification can sometimes be one ingredient for the improvement of smallholders’ capacities, but many of the other ingredients come not from consumers but from the domestic political context. Or, as seen in our analysis of deforestation, what neither the FSC nor the RSPO have been able to do is to engage in land-use planning and authoritatively enforce land rights; these tasks require governmental action. In the apparel and electronics industries, some of what private rule-making projects have struggled to do is being accomplished by worker militance and government reform in the coastal areas of China.
So how can conscientious consumers build a repertoire of political engagement that would recognize and support nonconsumerist solutions? There is no easy answer to this question. In fact, the first step may be to recognize that significant social change comes from long-term, hard-fought social movements, supported by sympathetic outsiders but led by committed grassroots activists. In some cases conscientious consumers can become those activists, and in others they can support such movements by contributing to local civil society organizations or well-networked NGOs.
As for other things that citizen-consumers can do to build their repertoires of engagement, we suggest the following: when confronted with concerns about a product’s social or environmental implications, do not simply look for an alternative in the market; instead, use the opportunity to find out what policy choices are available to deal with the underlying problem. For instance, one could respond to industrial accidents in the apparel industry by searching for sweat-free clothing. (One could also give preference to companies that have signed the binding Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety, which might be more productive.) But one should also inquire into how trade policy can be made more supportive of labor rights (as opposed to treating labor standards merely as barriers to trade, as the WTO has done) and make this part of one’s political priorities. To take another example, in coming to terms with deforestation’s role in exacerbating global warming, one should not simply look for FSC-certified paper and RSPO-certified snacks. One should look for local and national policies that reduce the main causes of global warming—that is, the burning of fossil fuels—and policies that support stronger governance of the world’s forests.
In short, a simple narrative about shopping for alternatives has been all too consuming for many scholars and citizens. Romanticized ideologies of conscientious consumerism are harmful. Romanticized images of fair and sustainable products are inaccurate. But hardheaded engagement with the politics of globalization is essential, and perhaps products can be an entry point for that kind of engagement.
