Agencing ethical consumers: smartphone apps and the socio-material reconfiguration of everyday life

The aim of this paper is to describe and explain how smartphone apps,designed to assist consumers in making informed ethical choices andgreening their everyday practices, enable and shape ethical consumption.Taking a socio-material approach and drawing on an ethnographic studyof three ethical consumption apps – the Green guide, the Fair trade appand Shopgun – the paper shows that these digital devices are scripted tohybridize with consumers and facilitate key ethical consumer actions.When consumers follow the scripts of these apps, using them in everydaypractices, the apps put pressure on consumers to act “ethically” byproblematizing consumption in various ways while also, andsimultaneously, endowing them with the agential capacities required tosolve these problems. Consequently, these devices both motivateconsumers and enable ethical consumption, producing, under the rightconditions, capable and self-reflexive ethical consumer hybrids