• Paraphrase
• Claim
  • earth-friendly, justice-supporting consumers cannot translate their values into meaningful impact.
• Evidence
• “the shading and distancing of commerce” Princen (1997) is an effect of information assymetry.
  • producers up and down a supply chain can hide the negative social and environmental impacts of their operations, putting conscientious consumers at a disadvantage. //
• this is a result of the evolution of alienation accelerated by the industrial revolution that created the dualistic abstractions of producers and consumers.
• Before that, producers and consumers lived often one and the same in small village settings
• After the Industrial Revolution, producers became manufacturers with imposing factories that were cutoff from the general population

• This set the conditions for opaqueness that have plagued us ever since. //

• time constraints, competing values, and everyday routines together thwart the rational intentions of well-meaning consumers (Røpke 1999)

• assigning primary responsibility for system change to individual consumers is anathema to transformative change (Maniates 2001, 2019)

• This can be broken down into three broad categories of reasons:

  • Rebound effects
    • https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=jevon%27s+paradox
    • increases in consumption consistently thwart effciency-driven resource savings across a wide variety of sectors (Stern 2020). -sustainability scholars increasingly critique “effciency” both as:
      • a concept (Shove 2018)
      • as a form of“weak sustainable consumption governance” (Fuchs and Lorek 2005).
    • Many argue that, to be successful, effciency measures must be accompanied by initiatives that limit overall levels of consumption, that is, “strong sustainable consumption governance.

  • Attitude-behavior gap

  • Behavior-impact gap

Chen, Cathy Xi, Gordon Pennycook, and David Rand. ‘What Makes News Sharable on Social Media?’ PsyArXiv, 9 July 2021. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/gzqcd.

PANDEMIC SHOCKS, FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS, MARKETS AND BEHAVIOURS Tickets, Tue, Dec 15 2020 at 17:00 | Eventbrite. (n.d.). Retrieved March 5, 2021, from https://www.eventbrite.it/e/biglietti-pandemic-shocks-financial-institutions-markets-and-behaviours-131361717433?utm-medium=discovery&utm-campaign=social&utm-content=attendeeshare&aff=estw&utm-source=tw&utm-term=listing#

Goolsbee, A., & Syverson, C. (2020). Fear, Lockdown, and Diversion: Comparing Drivers of Pandemic Economic Decline 2020 (Working Paper No. 27432; Working Paper Series). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w27432

Veltri, G. A., Prof, Lupiáñez-Villanueva, F., Folkvord, F., Theben, A., & Gaskell, G. (2020, April 29). The impact of online platform transparency of information on consumer’s choices. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/htja5

Li, J., Hallsworth. A.G. and Coca-Stefaniak, J.A. (2020), “The changing grocery shopping behavior of Chineseconsumers at the outset of the COVID-19 outbreak”, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie. https://doi.org/10.1111/tesg.12420

Martin, R., & Ruby, M. (2020). What does food retail research tell us about the implications of COVID-19 for grocery purchasing habits? [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/z2kup

I have studied in my International Marketing course here how social media is a cultural institution in society and has an extremely powerful influence on societal structures regarding preferences, levels of acceptance of products/technology, and how consumers are influenced to use them.