Systematic Literature Review on 'Why people make ethical consumer choice in their life?'

Running head: LITERATURE REVIEW
Systematic Literature Review on ‘Why people make ethical consumer choice in their life?’
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author note:

1LITERATURE REVIEW
Introduction
Ethical consumerism has been gaining popularity in the recent years. It is a type of
consumer activism that empowers the consumers for making ethically informed consumption
choices, which leads to reduction in unnecessary wastes and unethical purchasing practices
(Carrigan 2017). This literature review revolves around the concept of people making ethical
consumer choices in their life. The study is based on the case study of ShopHere, an Australian
multi-channel retailer, which distributes products through 95 retail outlets and through the e-
commerce platform. The company decided to move into ethical production for meeting the
requirements of the ethical consumers following some global scandals like collapse of Rana
Plaza in Bangladesh, and cotton labor scandal in Uzbekistan.
The research question of this project is that why people make ethical consumer choice in
their life. The aim of this project is to investigate and find out the reasons which cause
consumers to make ethical choices. The objectives of the study are to determine the impact of the
cost of products, the trends in ethical consumption and self-sustainability in choosing ethical
products by the consumers. To address the aim and objectives, exploratory research will be
conducted using mixed research method.
This literature review will provide an overview on recent literatures that dealt with the
reasons behind people making ethical consumer choices and a systematic structure will be
followed to present the systematic literature review.
Search process
The literatures for the systematic review were searched by using keywords or key phrases
relevant to the research questions. The keywords and phrases include ethical consumer, ethical

2LITERATURE REVIEW
consumption, ethical consumer choices, impact of ethical choices on cost of products, trends in
ethical consumption, and sustainability in ethical consumption. The ProQuest database was
explored using these phrases and the timeline for the search was limited to 2017 and 2018.
However, for some articles, the timeline had to be extended to 2016. The literatures that were
extracted for this review were based on empirical studies.
Literature review
Various academic sources, such as, peer reviewed journal papers were chosen and
reviewed for this literature review. The papers were selected on the basis of the study designs.
All the papers conducted empirical study to explore different aspects of the ethical consumption
and consumer choices. 15 articles were chosen using the keywords and phrases mentioned above
and all these studies were conducted using empirical investigations. Regarding ethical
consumption and consumer choices, various factors were found that play different roles in
influencing the consumer behavior in determining ethical aspects of the purchasing intentions
and purchasing behavior.
From the study by Yacout and Vitell (2018) it is seen that need for cognition (NFC) is an
important factor that affects ethical consumer behavior. The authors examined for scenarios,
illegal behavior, actively benefitting unethical behavior, passively benefitting from unethical
behavior and no harm, no foul behavior by applying the variables depicting the NFC and three
discrete emotions, fear, emotional arousal and power and their impact on the ethical consumption
by the consumers residing in Alexandria and Cairo in Egypt. Through survey data collection and
empirical investigation through hypothesis testing, the authors found that the NFC and the three
emotions play a very significant role in motivating the customers to follow ethical consumption

3LITERATURE REVIEW
practices in which the perceived issue importance on the moral intensity plays the role of
mediator. However, it was also found that the predictors vary in different ethical scenarios.
Hence, this study focused on emotional aspects of consumers regarding the ethical consumption
behavior.
On the other hand, Gentina et al. (2018) explored the impact of parental support and peer
support on the development of consumer belief among the adolescent school students. The
authors focused on three different factors, self-esteem, materialism and power, as mediators and I
has been found that the independent factors influence the dependent factor quite significantly.
Thus, from this study, three different factors could be identified which have considerable impact
on the development of ethical consumer beliefs. Thus, there are many factors constituting the
concept of ethical consumers.
Another study by O'Connor, Sims and White (2017) was done on exploring the fair trade
purchasing behavior among the university students and community people. The study
highlighted another four factors, that is, attitude, self-identity, perceived behavioral control and
moral norm which affect the fair trade purchasing behavior, that is, ethical consumption. Thus, it
can be said multiple factors can influence the ethical consumer choices, which affect business
performances of firms.
Zollo et al. (2018) highlighted other factors that influence ethical consumer behavior.
Moral intuition plays a significant role in the purchasing decision making by the consumers. By
the application of new ecological paradigm (NEP), the ethical concerns and ecological conscious
consumer behavior can be measured and it is found that if the organizations can predict this type
of behavior through inferential intuition, it would be beneficial for the organization. In this