As way of introduction, let me first admit I don’t like shopping. I don’t like having thousands of styles, features, models, price points, and choices to make. I don’t like looking for products in stores. I don’t even like web shopping as I somehow end up spending hours trying to find the best deal on the highest user-rated model of whatever thingamajig I need.
I am also a veritable “Debbie Downer” of consumer products. I can find the toxic waste in every silver lined product. I torment my family and friends with bad news on the labor, health, environmental, social, and human rights impacts of the brands and products they love. I am in general a reluctant, grumpy, curmudgeon, worry-wart, and continually questioning consumer.
So writing a blog about consumption, even environmentally and socially responsible consumption, might seem like a bad idea.
But let me make a further admission. Even though I don’t enjoy shopping, I still buy looks of stuff. For myself. For my family. For my kid. And I am faced with the same challenges you face every day in finding good, decent, healthy, safe, non-exploitive products. Even living in Berkeley, it’s hard to wear all homemade hemp clothes, grow your own coffee, or do all your computing on an abacus.
So I am faced with the same challenges you are of finding “clean clothes,” “green” electronics, and safe toys that weren’t manufactured by children. And I am constantly trying to make sense of rapidly proliferating certifications, labels, standards, monitoring schemes, and corporate social responsibility programs. I also spend a lot of time trying to figure out which web sites – and the underlying data they rely on – I should trust. And what issues I should really focus on as a questioning consumer.
But don’t worry, I am not going to be your ethical shopping advisor.
Instead, I want to use this blog to discuss some of the critical issues behind our consumption choices. My academic research examines three layers of these complicated questions.
First, how things are produced, and in particular, how changes in the global organization of production is shifting the distribution of benefits and costs of these systems. Virtually every supply chain I study is currently undergoing a major restructuring. I am thus interested in tracking the new class of multinational corporations – most of which the public has never heard of – that now run these supply chains. [Quick – name the largest manufacturer of footwear in the world? **Answer below.]
Second, my research seeks to monitor and measure the environmental and social impacts of these production systems. In particular, I am interested in identifying critical impacts of global supply chains. That is, where in the life-cycle of a product and where in the global web of operations do the most important impacts occur. This helps point toward what we should care most about, what we should avoid, and what we should be asking corporations to mitigate. This research also seeks to identify root causes of problems in global supply chains.
Third, I am ultimately interested in new strategies of governance over these production networks. What processes hold the most promise for making global production systems more accountable, transparent, democratic, equitable, and sustainable? And what role can consumers play in influencing corporate practices?
So over the coming months I want to use this blog to discuss the impacts of different production and consumption choices, and to examine the information available, and more often lacking, that can help make informed consumption decisions.
I also want to learn from you - clearly concerned consumers – about product choices and challenges, the information you need, and the actions you have taken.
My role on this blog will thus be to question consumption and production systems. This may sometimes lead you to avoid certain products. But also hopefully may lead us all towards supporting strategies that advance more environmentally sound and socially just economies.
So, after Buy Nothing Day on November 25th, when we are all back to our normal routines of buying lots and lots of stuff, let’s question consumption together.
* With apologies to Socrates. ** Pou Chen – a Taiwanese conglomerate – that produces for Nike, Reebok, adidas, New Balance, Timberland, Puma, Doc Marten’s, etc. etc.