The coherence of inconsistencies: Attitude–behaviour gaps and new consumption communities
By Caroline Moraes, Marylyn Carrigan, Isabelle Szmigin. 2012
197 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Despite the growing success of well-marketed environmentally friendly products, there remains a gap between consumers' positive attitudes towards green issues and products, and their inconsistent and often conflicting consumption behaviour. Indeed, this is a challenge for social marketers seeking to advance the sustainability agenda. Therefore, this study problematises what has been conceptualised as attitude–behaviour gaps (Boulstridge & Carrigan, 2000), and explores how groups of consumers have re-construed such practices and their meanings through the formation of New Consumption Communities (Szmigin, Carrigan, & Bekin, 2007). Multi-sited ethnographic findings illustrate the social processes through which ethical and green forms of consumption are established and normalised. Findings also stress the importance of normative and habitual reframing through ‘ethical spaces’ (Barnett, Clarke et al., 2005) in establishing and maintaining increased consistency in participants' consumption meanings, behaviours, and goals. Thus we re-frame attitude–behaviour gaps as coherent inconsistencies, which allows for a move away from solely trying to explain and change individual consumer behaviour, to identifying how suitable upstream and downstream (Verplanken & Wood, 2006) approaches and policies can be used to facilitate more sustainable forms of consumption.
Subfields: Food Science, Gender Studies, Marketing
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/82ce5292ad965772768718e200f9512e7a4a4f58
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In Marketing
Citations in the corpus
- Influencing Factors of Chinese Consumers’ Purchase Intention to Sustainable Apparel Products: Exploring Consumer “Attitude–Behavioral Intention” Gap (2020, background): “…intention gap model established by pervious researches [7,47–49] (Bray et al., 2010, Carrigan and Attalla, 2001; Papaoikonomou et al., 2011; Moraes et al., 2012) provides as the base for a conceptual framework to explore determinants of consumer behavioral intention toward sustainable…”
- Assessing the intention-behavior gap in electronic waste recycling: the case of Brazil (2017, background): “These criticisms mostly highlight the limitations of the underlying view of acts as the outcome of rational, cognitive, highly individualistic decisions, neglecting the social and structural conditioning daily practices such as waste disposal (Connolly and Prothero, 2008; Moraes et al., 2012).”