Information Systems & Operations Research Seminar Series – Professor Caroline Moraes

Title: Understanding Failed Ethical Consumption Through a Socio-Cultural Lens: An Examination of Online Fashion Shopping

Date: 6th November 2026 / 15:00-16:00 / ONLINE

Time: 15:00 to 16:00 ONLINE

Speaker: Caroline Moraes, Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham

Caroline Moraes is Professor of Marketing and Consumer Research at Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham. Currently, she is Director of the Centre for Responsible Business. Her research examines how issues of ethics, sustainability and responsibility manifest in everyday consumer practices, marketing and markets. She has published her work in a range of academic journals, including Sociology, Urban Studies, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Business and Psychology, Psychology & Marketing, Marketing Theory, European Journal of Marketing and Journal of Travel Research. She is Consumer Ethics Section Co-Editor at Journal of Business Ethics.

Professor Caroline Moraes – Department of Marketing – University of Birmingham

Abstract:

This presentation focuses on a newly published article examining how ethical consumption is constrained by the configuration of social practices. In this work, my co-authors and I advance a socio-cultural perspective on ethical consumption by theorising ethics as a cultural-level general understanding that threads through consumption activities within social practices. Drawing upon qualitative research with 58 participants and online fashion shopping as the focal social practice, our findings show how the configuration of online fashion retail consistently blocks ethical fashion shopping. This fosters practice destabilisation, frustration and deepened ethical reflexivity, triggering strategies for practice reconfiguration. We contribute to the literature on ethical consumption by establishing how ethics fails to embed in consumption and by providing a socio-cultural theorisation of ethics as a general understanding that can be enabled or constrained in social practices. The significance of these contributions lies in their ability to determine that ethical consumption is constrained beyond the level of individual agency; that it can be incredibly frustrating for consumers to attempt to find individuated solutions to systemic problems; and that ethical consumption is not just the responsibility of ethically minded consumers.