ABSTRACT

This chapter explains two very different narratives of consumption and ethics: one scholarly story emanating from the highly influential work of the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, the other, a digital story' connected with the recent rise of mobile, digital applications that facilitate ethical consumption choices. One of the world's leading social theorists, Zygmunt Bauman, has throughout his long and distinguished academic career forged a powerful vision of consumption as social decline. The chapter then move to a more direct discussion of ethical consumption as contemporary politics and practice, while exploring also the continuing intellectual efforts in the social sciences to politically place, characterize, and critique the ethical consumer. Finally it ends with some brief observations on the political limits and potentialities of rendering consumption an explicitly ethical task.