Abstract
Virtues are generic benchmarks to help us navigate in the debates on what is good and bad, right and wrong, and who are them and us. They have always played a role in politics, community, and in economic and private life.1 We use virtues as a basis for passing judgment on politicians, company owners, people we meet in brief but frequent daily encounters, and in family relations. Virtues and ethics are again a public focus because we sense that social, political, and economic interactions have changed and this threatens the roots and values embedded in our political, economic, and social communities. The shifts to globalization, individualization, postmodernization, risk society, and governance discussed in chapter 1 make us ponder about the quality of political, social, and economic life and make us aware that our communities are local, national, regional, and global in orientation. The shifts also imply that today more responsibility is put on individuals to formulate their own conceptions of right and wrong.2 Good responsibility-taking requires the use of virtues.
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Patrik Aspers and Emil Uddhammar, eds., Framtidens dygder—om etik i praktiken (Stockholm: City University Press, 1998);
and Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue. A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1993).
Göran Möller, “Den dygdiga människan,” in Aspers and Uddhammar, eds., 1998, 25–33.
Benjamin Cashore et al., “Legitimizing Political Consumerism: The Case of Forest Certification in North America and Europe,” in Micheletti et al., eds., Politics, Products, and Markets. Exploring Political Consumerism Past and Present (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003).
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Dietlind Stolle, Communities of Trust: Social Capital and Public Action in a Three Country Comparison in Sweden, Germany and the United States (Ph.D. diss., Princeton: Princeton University, Department of Political Science, 2000).
Patrick François, Social Capital and Economic Development (London: Routledge, 2002);
and Saguaro Seminar in Civic Engagement in America, Bettertogether (Harvard, MA: John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2001), 4.
Bob Edwards and Michael W. Foley, eds., Social Capital, Civil Society and Contemporary Democracy (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997).
Frieder Rubik and Gerd Scholl, eds., Eco-Labelling Practices in Europe. An Overview of Environmental Product Information Schemes (Berlin: Institut fur ökologische Wirtschaftsforschung (IÖW), 2002), 319, 324.
See Putnam ch. 16; and Dietlind Stolle and Marc Hooghe, “Consumers as Political Participants? Shifts in Political Action Repertoires in Western Societies,” in Micheletti et al., eds., 2003, 265–9.
Dag Wollebæck and Per Selle, Det nye organisajonssamfunnet. Demokrati i omforming (Bergen: Fagbokforlaget, 2002), chs. 7 and 9.
Janet A. Flammang, Women’s Political Voice: How Women are Transforming the Practice and Study of Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), ch. 4.
Annette Baier, “Trust and Antitrust,” Ethics 96 (1986), 245–7, 252–60; and Stolle.
Carole Pateman, “Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy,” in Carole Pateman, ed., 1989;
and Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees, Our Ecological Footprint. Reducing Human Impact on the Earth (Gabriola Island, BC, Canada: New Society Publishers, 1986).
Norman Barry, Respectable Trade. The Dangerous Delusions of Corporate Social Responsibility and Business Ethics (London: Adam Smith Institute, 2000), 35.
David Vogel, Kindred Strangers. The Uneasy Relationship between Politics and Business in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 160.
This criticism is raised in the book Can We Put an End to Sweatshops? by Archon Fung et al. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1001), 47–8, 65–9; and in the report from International Council of Human Rights Policy, Beyond Voluntarianism. Human Rights and the Developing International Legal Obligations of Companies (Geneva: International Council of Human Rights Policy, 2002), 7–20.
Göran Ahrne, “A Labour Theory of Consumption,” in Per Otnes, ed., The Sociology of Consumption (Oslo: Solum Forlag, 1988).
Compare with Richard Sennett, The Tall of Public Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
The expression “civilize capitalism” comes from Landon R. Y. Storrs, Civilizing Capitalism. The National Consumers’ League, Women’s Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
Dana Frank, Purchasing Power. Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement 1919–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994);
and Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal. Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Third World Traveller, Shell Oil in Nigeria [online], http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Boycotts/ShellNigeria_boycott.html, 2002.
See Jørgen Goul Andersen and Mette Tobiasen, Politisk forbrug og politiske forbrugere. Globalisering og politik i hverdagslivet (Aarhus: Magtudredning), 55–6; Olof Petersson et al., Demokrati och medborgarskap. Demokratirådets rapport 1998 (Stockholm: SNS Förlag, 1998), 80
as well as descriptive statistics from the study provided by Jan Teorell, and Olof Petersson et al., Medborgarnas makt (Stockholm: Carlssons, 1989), 139
as well as descriptive statistics from the study available in the report by Göran Blomberg et al., Medborgarundersökningen. Råtabeller (Stockholm: Maktutredningen, 1989), 131, 165.
Andreas Foliesdal, “Political Consumerism as Chance and Challenge,” in Micheletti et al., eds., 2003, 17–18.
Fung et al., 3–40. Can We Put An End to Sweatshops? (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001).
Naomi Klein, No Logo. No Space, No Choice, No Jobs (London: Flamingo, 2000), 30ff.;
and Christer Sanne, “Willing Consumers—or Locked-in? Policies for a Sustainable Consumption,” Ecological Economics 42 (2002), 280–6.
Jed Greer and Kenny Bruno, Greenwash. The Reality behind Corporate Environmentalism (Penang, Malaysia: Third World Network, 1996); and Nader.
Pierre Bourdieu, “Uniting to Better Dominance,” Items and Issues 2 (3–4) (Winter 2001): 1.
Benjamin Barber, “Globalizing Democracy,” The American Prospect 11 (20) (September 2000): 2.
Mary Kaldor, “‘Civilizing’ Globalization? The Implications of the ‘Battle in Seattle’“ [online], http://www.lse.ac.uk/Depts/global/MarySeatde.htm, 2000, 8.
Paul Kennedy, “Capitalist Enterprise as a Moral or Political Crusade: Opportunities, Constraints and Contradictions,” in O’Connor and Wynne, eds., From the Margins to the Centre. Cultural Production and Consumption in the Post-Industrial City (Aldershot: Arena, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 1996), 227.
Ward Morehouse, “Consumption, Civil Action and Corporate Power: Lessons from the Past, Strategies for the Future,” Development. Journal of the Society for International Development 41 (1) (1998), 51.
Simon Zadek, “Consumer Works!” Development. Journal of the Society for International Development 41 (1) (1998): 7.
See for instance ibid.; Minna Gillberg, From Green Image to Green Practice. Normative Action and Self-Regulation (Lund: Lund Studies in Sociology of Law, 1999), 194–208; Fung et al.; and Debora L. Spar, “The Spotlight and the Bottom Line. How Multinationals Export Human Rights,” Foreign Affairs 77 (2) (1998).
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© 2003 Michele Micheletti
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Micheletti, M. (2003). Shopping with and for Virtues. In: Political Virtue and Shopping. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403973764_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403973764_5
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