TY - JOUR

T1 - Vulnerability and Response‑Ability in the Pandemic Marketplace: Developing an Ethic of Care for Provisioning in Crisis

AU - Geiger, Susi

AU - Galasso, Ilaria

AU - Hangel, Nora

AU - Lucivero, Federica

AU - Watts, Gemma

N1 - Funding Information: This paper draws upon data collected in the context of the multinational study “Solidarity in times of a pandemic: What do people do, and why?”, coordinated by the Center for the Study of Contemporary Solidarity (CeSCoS) at the University of Vienna, Austria. For a list of country leads and partners, see: https://digigov.univie.ac.at/solidarity-in-times-of-a-pandemic-solpan/solpan/team-solpan/ The SolPan research commons has conceptualized and designed the study, including the interview guide and the coding scheme. However, we used a separate coding scheme for this paper. We are grateful for Christian Koenes’ contribution in tagging German interviews and contributing to the analysis and supplementary material for this article. We also thank the SOLPAN team of TUM and our student assistants Eric Paul, Paul Stephan and Magnus Tibbe for data tagging of the Germany interviews. We thank Luca Marelli, Paolo Corsico, Maria Emilia Sacchetti and Arianna Marchetti for their contributions in conducting the Italian interviews and managing the data. A particular thank you goes to our Senior Editor Michal Carrington as well as to three anonymous reviewers who provided us with highly constructive and thought-provoking feedback throughout this revision process. Finally, Susi Geiger, Ilaria Galasso and Gemma Watts gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 771217). Funding Information: This work is supported by the H2020 European Research Council, 771217 to Susi Geiger, Ilaria Galasso, and Gemma Watts, Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, Germany, 01KI20510 to Nora Hangel. Collection and management of Italian data were supported by the University of Oxford COVID-19 Research Response Fund ref 0009534.

PY - 2023/10/23

Y1 - 2023/10/23

N2 - This paper draws on the ethics of care to investigate how citizens grappled with ethical tensions in the mundane practice of grocery shopping at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. We use this case to address the broader question of what it means ‘to care’ in the context of a crisis. Based on a qualitative longitudinal cross-country interview study, we find that the pandemic transformed ordinary shopping spaces into places fraught with a sense of fear and vulnerability. Being forced to face one’s own vulnerability created an opportunity for individuals to relate to one another as significant others through a sense of “response-ability”, or the capacity of people to respond to ethical demands through situated ethical reasoning. We argue for a practical ethos of care in which seemingly small decisions such as how often to go shopping and how much to buy of a particular product serve as a means to relate to both specified and generalized others—and through this, ‘care with’ society. Our study contributes to displacing the continuing prevalence of an abstract and prescriptive morality in consumption ethics with a situated and affective politics of care. This vocabulary seems better suited to reflect on the myriad of small and unheroic care acts in times of crisis and beyond.

AB - This paper draws on the ethics of care to investigate how citizens grappled with ethical tensions in the mundane practice of grocery shopping at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. We use this case to address the broader question of what it means ‘to care’ in the context of a crisis. Based on a qualitative longitudinal cross-country interview study, we find that the pandemic transformed ordinary shopping spaces into places fraught with a sense of fear and vulnerability. Being forced to face one’s own vulnerability created an opportunity for individuals to relate to one another as significant others through a sense of “response-ability”, or the capacity of people to respond to ethical demands through situated ethical reasoning. We argue for a practical ethos of care in which seemingly small decisions such as how often to go shopping and how much to buy of a particular product serve as a means to relate to both specified and generalized others—and through this, ‘care with’ society. Our study contributes to displacing the continuing prevalence of an abstract and prescriptive morality in consumption ethics with a situated and affective politics of care. This vocabulary seems better suited to reflect on the myriad of small and unheroic care acts in times of crisis and beyond.

KW - Consumption ethics

KW - Covid-19

KW - Crisis

KW - Ethics of care

KW - Relational ethics

KW - Response-ability

KW - Shopping

KW - Solidarity

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85174639294&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1007/s10551-023-05541-7

DO - 10.1007/s10551-023-05541-7

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85174639294

JO - Journal of business ethics

JF - Journal of business ethics

SN - 0167-4544

ER -