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https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/media_451526_en.pdf

The growth of contemporary capitalism is producing a broad sweep of environmental and socialills, such as environmental degradation, exploitative labor conditions, social and economic inequity,and mental and physical illness. A growing awareness of these significant consequences by an ‘‘ethical’’ consumer segment has catalyzed a field of research dedicated to investigating ethical consumerism. Of particular academic and practitioner focus is the general failure of this ethical consumer segment to ‘‘walk their talk’’—the ethical consumption attitude–behavior ‘gap’. In this
article, we draw on Althusser and Žižek to critically analyze the ideological functioning of the ethical consumption gap. We argue that this focus inadvertently promotes erroneous notions of consumer sovereignty and responsibilization. We conclude with a call to reimagine the gap as a construct that paradoxically preserves—rather than undermines—dominant and destructive consumerist capitalism. We redirect research toward the underlying capitalist structures that predicate and benefit from the gap.




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aufhebung
 aufhebung      29.06.2018 - 11:33:55 , level: 1, UP   NEW
ten zaver o marketing construction of gap je naivny- gap tam je uz pritomny

We have argued that the idea of the ethical consumption gap and its continuous constructionthrough, and mobilization in, ethical consumerism scholarship functions ideologically in twoimportant ways.

First, the notion of the gap reifies the assumption that the responsibility for
making ethical choices in the market rests with individual consumers. Positing a commonality of ethics in all spheres of life—domains both outside and inside the market logic—maintains the belief that the consumer is sovereign and results in the responsibilization of consumers. Blame for capitalism’s destructive tendencies is no longer the organization of the economic system but consumers’ subjective attitudes and personal deficiencies (see also Firat, 1996; Gilbert, 2014;Littler, 2008).

Second, the individualization of the gap allows for holding on to the belief that the
capitalist system does have the ability to better itself to become something else via the negation of destructive consumption by ethical consumption. The gap becomes a fantasy where the difference between a consumer’s attitude and behavior is elevated to represent the difference between a capitalism that is flawed and one that is just, sustainable, and equitable. If the fetish is the embodiment of the Lie which enables us to sustain the unbearable truth, as Zˇizˇek (2009: 65) suggests, the gap functions as our fetish, and as long as we can hold on to it, we can hold onto our fantasy rather than confront the blatant irrationalism of global capitalism predicated on excess,
exploitation, and destruction. In the final analysis, it is this insight—the gap as fetishistic disavowal—that we offer as our contribution to an important emerging conversation about the role of marketing, marketers, and the capitalist system more generally in perpetuating the destructive machine of neoliberal capitalism (see in particular Bradshaw and Zwick, 2015; Giesler and Veresiu,2014).

To be sure, the point is not that ethical consumption cannot happen. Some ethical consumers do exist, despite the significant sacrifices and barriers in the marketplace. Some consumption acts are ethical, based on ethical and sustainable marketing and production practices. Nonetheless, an important point of ideological critique is that even if ethical consumption were to happen in reality, it would not be able to resolve capitalism’s underlying contradictions that rest on creating insatiable
desire and consumption excess. That is to say, even with some increase in ethical consumption, ethical marketers would not obtain the perfection of the fairytale, where in the end everything works out perfectly, where workers at Amazon are always treated with dignity, global warming is reversed, animal cruelty eradicated, and coffee farmers in Guatemala enter the middle class. Indeed, there is something tragic about maintaining the gap as a symbolic act when marketers realize that little would truly be resolved by closing it. We therefore call on marketing researchers to refocus their investigation from the ethical consumption gap to the marketing construction of the gap and the underlying capitalist structures that predicate and benefit from it.