A Study on Morality of Consumption; Citizen-Government Interactions from Sociological Point of View

Various explanations are offered about the consumption of goods and services. This study has investigated the sociological explanation of consumption with a new reflexive perspective and has focused on its moral dimension in the citizens’ everyday actions. There are two main goals in this study; the first one is identifying the role of morality in the everyday consumption patterns and the second one is the investigating of the governmental-citizenship interactions on the morality of consumption. By adopting deep semi-structured interview among Urmia citizens, data were collected from 20 informants and by using coding process the authors found that not only there is a lack of attention to morality in consumption choices among the participants but also there is a kind of protesting behavioral pattern regarding structural and governmental policies that is named “reflexive consumption”. Reflexive consumption indicates that current consumption pattern among citizens is a reaction to government’s poor performance in environmental issues and lack of environmental friendly policies in macro level decision making. Reflexive consumption here is a kind of passive political consumption. In a paradigmatic model, casual conditions, predisposing factors and selective strategy that lead to core category are classified.