Tamás Dombos Current Project Tamás Dombos Curriculum Vitae Current Project The last decades brought a spectacular discursive explosion in texts that try to link the issues of ethics and morality to consumption. A wide range of academic volumes, political manifestos, self-help guides and magazine articles have been published with the aim of changing the direction of consumer society. This discursive explosion has been accompanied by the call for new activist strategies like simple-living, anti-consumption, sustainable consumption, consumer boycotting, to put it more generally: to give ethical considerations a greater role in the everyday decision-making of consumers. This phenomenon has been recognized by entrepreneurs and corporations as well, who try to understand its implications for their operation and turn it to their own profit. Despite of this discursive boom relatively low attention has been paid by sociologists and anthropologists to investigate how-if at all-these discourses shape the decisions of consumers and practices of economic actors. With the help of qualitative methods-interviews, participant observation and discourse analysis-my research investigates how different actors in the field co-construct the market as a politicized space. The research is organized around three cases reflecting the diversity of ethical considerations and ideological positions present in discussions about ethical consumption, as well as showing different levels of embeddedness in the Hungarian context. The first case is an online organic food shop and delivery service. The concept of organic foods arrived to Hungary in the early nineties, when several small-scale agricultural producers saw an economic potential in organic food production. In this early period, organic foods were not targeted at Hungarian producers, nearly all the organic products was exported to Western Europe. By the end of the nineties, organic agriculture became a government priority as well, various programs were set up to help producers contemplating going organic and a government sponsored media

campaign familiarizing the general public with the concept of organic food was launched. Parallel to this, organic food stores started appearing in larger cities, especially in the more prestigious commercial spaces such as downtown shopping areas and shopping malls. The particular focus of my research is an online organic vegetable delivery service that has been around for nearly a decade, being among the first offering food delivery services in Hungary. It started off originally as side-activity of a foundation promoting environmentally conscious living, but is currently run as a for-profit enterprise linked to a well-established family farm 40 km East of Budapest. This case offers insights to the institutionally most established form of ethical consumption in Hungary articulating environmentalist considerations. The second case study consists in tracing joint efforts of a number of NGOs to introduce fair-trade goods to the Hungarian market. At the beginning of the research, the fair-trade movement was virtually non existent in Hungary, the concept was unknown for the general public, and fair-trade labeled products were not available either at regular or specialized shops. To change this situation, various NGOs with agendas some way or another linked to the fair-trade movement formed a strategic alliance, and started introducing fair-trade movement in Hungary. Their activities entail media campaigns, educational programs, the operation of a mobile fair trade coffee, and extended efforts to make fair-trade labeled products available for consumers, which includes pressuring wholesalers and retailers as well as actively mediating between them. This case offers a chance to follow the complete process of establishing a new set of considerations for consumption, that of third world producers and global inequalities in general. The third case will be a brand and store-chain for goods produced by Hungarian small and medium enterprises. Although the claim to support Hungarian producers by buying goods of Hungarian origin has been present since 1990 (and has historical precedents going back to the 19th century) previous schemes operated with a discreet label to show that the product was manufactured in Hungary. The new initiative, which started four years ago breaks with the modesty of previous attempts, and envisions a network of producers and retailers all brought under one brand. The goods ranging from wine and bread, to shoes and toilet paper are currently sold both in neighborhood shops and supermarkets, as well as specialized shops that exclusively sell these products. Although the earlier thrust of the movement somewhat subsided after the very successful first years, it still incorporates over one hundred producers and the goods are widely available around the country. This final case draws attention to a widespread form of ethical consumption that is very often omitted from contemporary treatments of ethical consumption, due to the analysts' unreflected identification of 'ethical' with 'politically progressive'. This case based approach enables going beyond the two camps that so far dominated the social scientific treatment of consumption: one that reduces consumption to institutional practices of economic actors (retailing, advertisement, branding) and the other that claims the agency of the consumer by strategically downplaying the role of institutions aiming at influencing consumer practices. To bridge the gap between these two strands of consumption studies, the research uses cases to bring together consumers and institutional practices under one framework of analysis by following three types of entities: people, things and messages. People followed involve consumers, activists, and entrepreneurs. These three groups of actors are identified through their attachment to various ethical consumption products (organic food, fair-trade goods and products branded as locally produced goods), connecting all phases of the products' life-cycle from production to consumption. These three actors are interrelated also through the myriad of messages in the form of discussion boards, official publications and advertisements forming an objectified trace in the circulation of meanings attached to ethical consumption.