Looking Behind the Label: Global Industries and the Conscientious Consumer by Tim Bartley, et al. (review)

Looking Behind the Label is an important contribution to the literature on ethical consumption or political consumerism, and, more broadly, will be of interest to scholars and students of consumption, social movements, and global value chains. The authors reject the established terms "political consumerism" (Stolle and Micheletti 2013), for framing "shopping with a conscience" as a necessarily political act, and "ethical consumption" (Barnett et al. 2011), for the presumed implications of a coherent ethical rationale, in favor of "conscientious consumerism." The central question the book addresses is whether consumer activism and "conscientious consumer" activity "contribute to a fairer, more sustainable model of globalisation" (3). As the authors aver, debate has tended to be between positive and negative appraisals of the culture, politics, and meanings of such forms of consumption. Such debate has tended to be to the exclusion of consideration of, first, the societal structures of constraint and opportunity through which people engage in such consumption activity, and second, and even more starkly, how such consumption activity actually impacts conditions at the point of production.

Looking Behind the Label seeks to remedy these occlusions by combining in one volume the analysis of "conscientious consumer" attitudes and behavior, the market structures through which such activity takes place, and conditions in sites of production subject to voluntary, transnational social and environmental standards (such as Fairtrade). The book synthesizes analyses of US and European consumer surveys, and of industry and market structures, with an impressive roster of fieldwork that has taken the authors from, inter alia, footwear factories in China, to smallholder farms in Paraguay and timber operations in Indonesia.

The production-end case studies in the book address Forest Stewardship Council accreditation of the wood and paper industry; agricultural "fair trade" schemes and "commodity round tables" (such as the Roundtable on Responsible Soy); "social auditing" of labor conditions in the apparel sector; and initiatives in the consumer electronics sector to address both factory labor conditions and issues around "conflict minerals" in the supply chain. The case studies are syntheses of existing studies and the authors' own research. While each of the case studies draws on some original interview material, curiously, the scope of the authors' original research is not specified. While this omission does not detract from the overall arguments, it leaves somewhat unclear the originality of the contribution to the empirical cases.

The authors demonstrate considerable scholarship, and the bibliography stands as a useful resource, in which context there are one or two surprising omissions on the consumption side, with which this reviewer is most familiar (e.g., Yates 2011). Furthermore, the authors generally present a restricted sense of consumption as acts of acquisition, out of step with the wider understanding of consumption, embracing the appropriation and appreciation of goods and services, offered by contemporary sociology of consumption (see Warde 2015). This limited sense of consumption is perhaps understandable in the context of the book's focus on the production-end results of "conscientious consumer" decisions in the marketplace. Perhaps, however, this restricted view of consumption also helps explain the authors' uncritical assumption that there is, in any strong sense, "an overarching ideology of conscientious consumerism as a vision of social change" that requires debunking (5). The authors' argument is that "we should not rely on shopping to change the world," but that "specific practices of conscientious consumerism" can play a role in wider strategies for reforming global industries (ibid.). However, while there are of course ideal-typical instances of "shopping to change the world" discourse, "conscientious consumerism" covers quite distinct things: from the radical lifestyle commitments of subcultural groups to the "lay normativity" of ordinary consumers. And furthermore, a number of empirical studies (answering the authors' call for more nuanced data on conscientious consumers and their consumption activities) demonstrate how people's everyday reasoning encompasses critical reflection on their own consumption activities (e.g., Barnett et al. 2011); and...