5-Year iPhD Studentship, full fee waiver and stipend – Responsible Consumption

Whilst consumption plays a crucial role in people’s lives, helping them to access life-sustaining goods and services, promoting growth and human flourishing and providing ways to participate in social and political arenas, it is also implicated in a number of ‘Grand Challenges’. On the environmental side, concerns about overconsumption, waste, pollution (e.g. microplastics), biodiversity loss (e.g. Palm Oil), deforestation (e.g. beef grazing), land erosion, species loss, not to forget climate change, have been directly connected to consumption and market practices as well as production processes. On the social side, concerns range from fundamental issues of market participation, inclusion and poverty faced by consumers (e.g. food banks), to inequality and gender-based stereotyping (e.g. sexualised advertising) through to concerns about the unseen human consequences of production processes (e.g. Labour sweatshops & Modern Slavery). Sometimes, such social and environmental challenges collide, with climate change prompting forced migration, and biodiversity loss (e.g. through overfishing or intensive farming) driving poverty, displacement and human rights abuses.

In response to these challenges, this project seeks to promote much needed research into the area of Responsible Consumption. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) outline 17 goals based upon a today’s most pressing ‘Grand Challenges’ facing society, such as climate change, poverty and inclusion, biodiversity loss, equality and decent work, to name but a few. Here, Responsible Consumption (SDG 12 – ‘Responsible Consumption & Production’) broadly defined, has been identified as pivotal to society’s efforts to create new ways of organising market processes in a more responsible, sustainable and just way. Responsible Consumption is both a recognition of the urgency of the aforementioned challenges and a belief that consumer-market-production relationships can be reorganised to create more socially equitable and environmentally sound models. This research project seeks to contribute to a discrete and important aspect of this endeavour by seeking a deeper understanding of Responsible Consumption, the forms it takes, the barriers it involves and, fundamentally, what this means to consumers and the lives they lead.

The project would contribute to the growing academic debates that have sought to understand responsible consumption and its relationship to the market and sphere of production. Here, some researchers have focussed specifically on consumer’s individual lives and the responsible choices they make. For example, there is a prominent conversation about the role of consumers in driving demand for more responsibly augmented products and services, throwing light on responsible decision-making choices (Valor and Carrero, 2014) and the factors shaping, and in some cases constraining, them (Devinney et al., 2010). Such research has sought to understand how consumers make sense of responsible consumption (Caruana et al., 2014) and explore the ways in which they integrate it into their complex and intricate lives (Carrington et al., 2021). In other areas, the focus has been on exploring the role of markets and market agents and institutions in defining, organising and channelling the responsibility choices that consumers come to make (Caruana and Crane., 2008; Bajde and Rojas-Gaviria, 2021). Here, some have sought to understand the role of public discourse (e.g. media/communications) in framing issues for consumers such as climate change or slave labour, examining how these communications influence consumer understandings of their responsibility choices (McDonaugh, 2002). Finally, there also remains a more foundational set of questions about the morally ‘correct’ level of consumption, prompting debates about more excessive and destructive forms of ‘overconsumption’ (Borgmann, 2000) whilst exploring more beneficial and benign alternatives to them (Soper, 2008). This research project would not address all these aspects but would instead focus in on a specific research question set within a relevant domain of consumption linked to one (aspect) of the Grand Challenges outlined above. Questions or topics to consider could include (but are by no means limited to);

–             What does consumer responsibility mean to individual consumers and how do they integrate it into their lives?

–             How do consumers rationalize (ir)responsible forms of consumption?

–             How and why are consumers responding to concerns about overconsumption?

–             In what alternative ways are consumers achieving more sustainable patterns of consumption (e.g. via resistance, avoidance, production)?

–             What do terms like ‘climate change’, ‘overconsumption’, ‘sustainability’ or ‘modern slavery’ mean to consumers?

–             How is responsible consumption effected by apathy, confusion, and/or complexity surrounding a given Grand Challenge (e.g. climate change)?

–             How do marketers and/or institutions shape consumer responsibility?

–             How is consumer responsibility shaped in the media and public discourse?

–             Do certain market models, processes or practices cause (or alleviate) human exploitation (e.g. modern slavery)?

–             What theories are useful for investigating responsible consumption? (e.g. framing, categories, decision making, social movements, consumer wellbeing, consumer resistance, consumer identity etc.)

How to apply:

You need to apply for a PhD in Management at the University of Sussex, including a research proposal addressing one of the research topic above. Please enter the name of the studentship in the funding section. Guidance on applications is available here: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/study/phd/apply  

Contact us:

·        For questions relating to the application process, contact business-researchstudents@sussex.ac.uk.

·        For informal enquiries in relation to ideas for research topics, contact Robert Caruana R.J.Caruana@sussex.ac.uk.

Timetable:

Deadline for applications – 4th June.

Shortlisting – 12/13th June.

Interviews – (online panels) – 25th June.

For more information on the studentship, please see the full advertisement here.