Mindfulness Approach to Ethical Consumption

Abstract

Consumer ethics has increasingly attracted attention by academics and practitioners in recent years. Nonetheless, research so far has mostly focused on understanding consumer's ethical judgments and the associations between those ethics-related general attitudes and selected antecedents drawn from Hunt-Vittel Theory of Ethics. Nonetheless, evidence in practice raises more serious doubts about validity of ethical judgments as a measure of consumer ethics, reminding the attitude-behaviour gap that has been long discussed in the literature. On the other hand, as the ethical consumption turns to the mainstream market, there has been a question whether antecedents of consumer ethical behaviour widely investigated in the literature will exert the same influence on mainstream consumer behaviour. This chapter proposes a conceptual framework arguing for new approach to understand and measure ethical consumption. Implications and research directions are also provided.