Author Description

Can businesses abandon the axiom that the customer is always right when consumers start questioning the ethics of business practices? The current debate about business ethics and the role of business in society has focused attention on corporate moral and commercial obligations. As a consequence, consumer sovereignty, and its use to determine ethical business practice, has become an important issue. In this review of the relationship between business and society, Professor Craig Smith examines the theory and practice of ethical purchase behaviour, a crucial mechanism for ensuring social responsibility in business. He explains how and why consumers, often in conjunction with pressure groups, have used their purchasing power to influence corporate policies and practices. He argues the case for the social control of business, drawing on perspectives from marketing, economics, politics, sociology, and business policy. In asking what decisions do consumers make in markets?, he concludes that the market may act as an arbiter of good and bad business practice. Focusing on consumer boycotts as a specific form of this consumer behaviour, and explaining how boycotted business.