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Understanding Consumers’ Ethical Justifications: A Scale for Appraising Consumers’ Reasons for Not Behaving Ethically

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Abstract

This article reports the results of research aimed at developing and validating a multi-item scale to measure consumers’ agreement with three main justifications for not engaging in socially responsible consumption (SRC) behaviours, namely the ‘economic rationalist argument’ founded on the idea that the costs of SRC are greater than its benefits, the ‘economic development reality argument’ based on the idea that ethical and moral aspirations are less important than the economic development of countries, and the ‘government dependency argument’ grounded in the premise that government inaction demonstrates the legal character and the banality of unethical consumption behaviours. The scale items were generated on the basis of a multi-country qualitative study of consumers (Eckhardt et al., 2006, ‘Why Don’t Consumers Behave Ethically’. DVD Document, AGSM). The content validity of the scale was assessed in the first study. The second study was a survey of 157 Canadian adult consumers in which the three-dimensional scale and other scales measuring relevant concepts were administered. The survey results showed that the 28-item resulting scale is reliable and generally behaves as one would theoretically expect. Implications for consumption ethics researchers and policy makers are proposed.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Jean Pasquero (UQAM), Bart Kasowski (University of Montréal) and two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. HEC Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Alain d’Astous

  2. Corus Québec, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Amélie Legendre

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  1. Alain d’Astous
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  2. Amélie Legendre
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Correspondence to Alain d’Astous.

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d’Astous, A., Legendre, A. Understanding Consumers’ Ethical Justifications: A Scale for Appraising Consumers’ Reasons for Not Behaving Ethically. J Bus Ethics 87, 255–268 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-008-9883-0

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