الفهرس 
INTRODUCTIONOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
The chapter begins with a background pertaining to the research objectives and problem. Second, I highlight the underlying motives that triggered the empirical investigation of consumers’ ethical decision-making in the clothing and electronics contexts. Next, I briefly discuss the overall aim and objectives of the present research. I also explain the contributions to the literature especially to the study of power, ethical marketing, and consumer behavior, as well as potential contributions to managers and policy makers. Finally, I provide an overview of the dissertation organization.
1.1 Introduction:
“The purpose of marketing is …. the process through which economy is integrated into society to serve human needs”
— Kotler (2011, pg. 135)
The rise of the clothing retailers and electronics manufacturing has enabled consumers to increasingly adopt a habit of buying disposable clothing and electronic devices. The average consumer is buying 60% more pieces of garments compared to 15 years ago (United Nations 2018). In addition, consumers continuously upgrade their electronic devices making electronic waste the world’s fastest growing solid waste stream (Semuels 2019). These developments presents high environmental costs not only in the production phase but also in the postproduction stages of use and disposal. In response, companies and policy makers are studying or already adopting approaches to ensure a shift towards ethical production and consumption. For example, Vodafone implements “Go Green” initiative to encourage employees to go paperless, save power, conserve water, and recycle waste inside the firm and at their homes. Similarly, VeryNile initiative aims to develop sustainable means to clean the Nile, recycle solid waste through partnership with local stakeholders, decrease the usage of single use plastic bags, and reduce water pollution. Although companies move towards more ethical products and processes, the prevalence of these products and the ensuing economic consequences for consumers makes understanding the factors that drive consumers’ ethical decision-making of great interest and importance.
Ethical products refers to products with at least one positive environmental or social attribute (Edinger-Schons et al. 2018; Paharia 2020; Reczek et al. 2018; Yan, Keh, and Chen 2021). Previous research has studied a range of factors that influence consumers’ responses to ethical products including moral concerns prominence in consumers’ minds (Chernev and Blair 2021), reminders of resource scarcity (Goldsmith, Roux, and Wilson 2020), exposure to beauty related words (Yang, Deng, and Bhadauria 2020), consumer participation in production (Paharia 2020), combination of intrinsic and extrinsic appeals (Edinger-Schons et al. 2018), gender pay gap disclosure (Schlager et al. 2021), and product transformation salience (Winterich, Nenkov, and Gonzales 2019; Kamleitner, Thurridl, and Martin 2019). In the present research, I examine the role of power as an additional factor that may influence consumers’ perception of and intention for regular and ethical products.
Power is defined as asymmetric control over valued resources in social relationships (Dubois, Rucker, and Galinsky 2016; Rucker, Galinsky, and Dubois 2012). Although a great deal of research has demonstrated that power have important consequences on how consumers behave, little research examined how power influences consumers’ preferences or tendencies to buy ethical products. The majority of prior research on consumer behavior that has touched on power has examined issues such as the role of power in influencing risk perception regarding websites’ information privacy practices (Bornschein, Schmidt, and Maier 2020), increasing consumers’ healthy food consumption