Re-enchanting Consumer Ethics Through Embodied Relationality : An Ethnographic Approach to the Attitude-Behaviour Gap

Abstract

Most research on the ‘attitude-behaviour gap’ adopts linear, rational, and individual models, or highlights notions of consumer uncertainty and confusion. We argue that different strands of the debate can benefit from an exploration of embodied relational processes shaping consumer ethics, namely an acknowledgement of the profound corporeal and interdependent nature of all consumption experiences. The aim of this paper is thus to explore the embodied relational aspects of everyday ethical consumption and cast new light on the ‘attitude-behaviour gap’. We do so by drawing on embodiment in practice theories and through an ethnographic study with six families in North-East England, including observations, interviews, kitchen and walking-with tours, and participants’ diaries. Our findings highlight four embodied relational practices: reconciling competing embodied states; negotiating togetherness; seeking sensorial familiarity; and calibrating attention and engagement . The paper contributes to the existing literature by offering embodied relationality as a theoretical framework to visualise the complex ambivalent embodied state consumers experience in everyday practices . We leverage this to rethink the ‘attitude-behaviour gap’ as a disenchanted concept , namely detached from the embodied nature of all social action and, as such, limited in its explanatory potential. We conclude the paper by outlining future research and intervention avenues to re-enchant consumer ethics scholarship, namely reconnect it with its embodied and relational nature.