Morality and the Marketplace

Is it right for church leaders to sell an antique bible from the church’s library so they can pay for an advertising campaign to attract new members? Is it OK for a consumer to buy a company’s wonderful new smartphone even if the company’s CEO has made racist comments? And if a company contributes financially to a charity, is it proper for the firm’s managers to make demands regarding how the charity recognizes the donation? Contributors to the Journal of Consumer Research have been asking whether market behaviors are proper, right, or OK since the journal’s inception. In JCR’s first issue, Jacoby, Speller, and Berning (1974) explored how marketers should balance the moral imperative of providing full product information against the psychological effects of information overload. Striking a balance between moral concerns and market considerations is often difficult because the logic of the “moral economy” and that of the “market economy” are each based on different and sometimes conflicting assumptions (Thompson 1993). For example, the market economy privileges the pursuit of profit and self-interest, while the moral economy highlights the value of meeting social obligations and serving the greater good. Consumers and marketers therefore often experience a tension between the two logics, and must often decide whether one or the other should dominate. The factors that prompt, influence, and moderate this decision have consistently captured research interest in the pages of JCR for 40 years, and the five articles in this curation represent the spectrum of current research on these issues. Building on Fiske’s (1991) theory of social relations and taboo trade-offs, McGraw, Schwartz, and Tetlock (2012) examine why organizations with more communal obligations can prompt consumer backlash when they behave in ways that appear to have more commercial aims. Their results shed light on the different psychological mechanics that underlie the logic of the moral economy versus that of the market economy. Bhattacharjee, Berman, and Reed (2013) examine how consumers respond when someone they support (for example, a company CEO or celebrity endorser) behaves immorally. They demonstrate an important difference between two kinds of responses (“moral rationalization” and “moral decoupling”), each of which sheds light on how consumers cope with moral considerations when judging the actions of marketplace participants. In their research on the financial underpinnings of Mardi Gras in post-Katrina New Orleans, Weinberger and Wallendorf (2012) not only demonstrate the strategies people use to keep market economy considerations separate from the moral economy but also illustrate when and how consumers can minimize (at least temporarily) a tension between the two. Tensions between social obligations and self-interest can influence not only how consumers assess the morality and appropriateness of others but also how they themselves behave. Kristofferson, White, and Peloza (2014) explore how and when a consumer’s initial charitable contribution provides an excuse (or “moral licensing”) for not giving again, as well as the factors that might minimize moral licensing. Saatcioglu and Ozanne (2013) show that, despite an unavoidable tension between the moral and market economies, the two nonetheless constantly interact and intermingle. By documenting the moral thinking and behavior (that is, the “moral habitus”) of members of a poor, working-class neighborhood, they demonstrate that performance in the market economy influences perceptions in the moral economy, and