The consumer, politics and everyday life

A serious limitation of work in the field of ethical consumerism and social consumption is the contextualization of the research, independent of the methodology. In this article, we hint at how we can resolve these dilemmas by applying techniques that give us information involving trade-offs amongst a larger range of issues across a broader sample of people. In doing so, we also show that the complexity that we see in individual decision making is in evidence at the macro level as well. Just as individuals refuse to follow the idealized patterns represented by “ethical consumerism” in purchasing, so, too, do they fail to conform to simple rules around general social, economic and political preferences.