Consumer Social Responsibility

Imke Schmidt analyzes from both theoretical and practical perspectives the responsibilities that can be attributed to consumers for sustainable development. She develops a model of shared responsibility that is based on the position and influence of market actors. The author relates the responsibilities of consumers (Consumer Social Responsibility) to those of companies (Corporate Social Responsibility) in order to highlight mutual dependencies in the perception of respective responsibilities and to derive possibilities for shared accountability. The background is that Consumer Social Responsibility, unlike the much-discussed Corporate Social Responsibility, has not yet been systematically integrated into economic ethical considerations and does not have a comparable conceptual foundation.