“Consumers should not rely on shopping to change the world,” write Tim Bartley, Sebastian Koos, Hiram Samel, Gustavo Setrini, and Nik Summers in Looking Behind the Label, asserting that “an overarching ideology of conscientious consumerism as a vision of social change is vacuous” (p. 5). Trailing in the wake of the neoliberal ascendance of the 1980s and the growing reality of a globalized economic future, the 1990s saw the birth of consumer-driven manufacturing and production codes as a proposed solution to the excesses of international capitalism. The unrestrained deforestation of historic woodlands for furniture and paper industries and Victorian-era levels of squalor and child exploitation perpetrated by fashionable apparel manufacturers in the global South drew widespread public condemnation in Western liberal democracies severely curtailed in their capacity to influence compromised governments in countries like Bangladesh and Vietnam. Both retailers and progressive activists publicly acknowledged that there was a problem and a need for oversight while contesting the means and methods by which to monitor production standards.

With some of these programs now more than two decades old, and consumer activism having spread to encompass certain forms of agriculture and electronics, the authors offer a valuable appraisal of the impact of these initiatives. They seek to plot an objective path between literature that has accepted production codes at face value and skeptics who have derisively dismissed the consumer agenda as a system of smoke and mirrors that mainly serves corporate public relations, coining terms such as “greenwash” and “fairwash.” Offering two opening chapters on conscientious consumerism as an approach in different countries and four sectoral studies, Looking Behind the Label, in spite of its multiplicity of authors, provides a sustained and focused critique of what some have referred to as the “NGO–industrial complex.”

Employing a wide range of survey data, the authors link support for conscientious consumerism to a postmaterialist political philosophy, more commonly found in affluent parts of North America and western Europe. Individuals in urban locales are more likely to have options when it comes to making purchasing decisions based on more than economic self-interest. The authors find the ideology of conscientious consumerism to be in itself vacuous, naïve, and even counterproductive: if “good people” make the moral decision to purchase organic products, it unavoidably follows that those who purchase value products are less moral or even “bad people” (p. 72). While criticizing this philosophy, the authors nonetheless recognize that conscientious consumer practices have, under certain circumstances, been implemented in an impactful manner (p. 82).

In the four ensuing chapters, we see how NGOs, auditors, and even business-sponsored monitors have wrangled with complex and powerful local political forces and economic structures, often achieving no more than modest results. The Forest Stewardship Council, supported in large part by philanthropic foundations, has created a prominent and “fairly credible eco-label,” but had to make compromises in order to become mainstream and has at times had to decertify producers (pp. 102–103, 109). Regrettably, it has also proven incapable of reversing the broader overall trend of deforestation when faced with governments set on converting woodlands for agricultural use (p. 110). In the same period, the organic food sector has grown exponentially, with upstream retailers like Whole Foods often holding the power to dictate downstream agricultural practices. Bartley and colleagues assert that, in certain circumstances, a fair trade approach has benefited smallholders in the face of larger agribusiness concerns, yet point out that many fair trade cooperatives “inhabit rural economies with deep histories of inequality and authoritarianism” (134).

The sections on apparel, footwear, and electronics production similarly describe arenas of production that offer limited prospects for the conscientious consumerist model. “Promoting ‘fair’ labor in the apparel and footwear industry has mostly meant slapping standards onto existing, highly unequal, structures of production,” they write (p. 147). Moreover, consumers’ demand for “fast fashion” has created further downward pressure upon sweatshop wages, even in facilities that were subject to audited production codes (p. 162). Rana Plaza itself had been subject to inspectors from the Business Social Compliance Initiative, who were left to explain that “audits do not include building construction or integrity” (p. 164). The electronics industry likewise represents a sector in which consumers have made no consequential mark. While some shoppers may forgo a pair of Tommy Hilfiger jeans, there is no evidence to suggest they are willing to part with iPhones in favor of less fashionable alternatives. The levels of secrecy that shroud the release of high-profile consumer electronic products and lead to massive spikes in output during final assembly have created what the authors describe as “an odd amalgam of ‘lean production’ principles and traditional Taylorist work practices” (p. 203).

Having assembled this somewhat withering review of conscientious consumerism, the authors might be fairly expected to propose an improved set of measures by which recourse might be sought. However, there is no wish list here of policy prescriptions or blueprint for a consumer code that would really deliver worker justice. Yet the book clearly and convincingly lays bare the limits of “stateless regulation.” In observing that mass worker-driven industrial unrest and government reform have succeeded where Western consumers have failed in the apparel and electronics sectors in the coastal regions of China, the authors give a nod to possible remedies while elsewhere noting the potential power of agrarian reforms and international trade policies that support labor rights (p. 224). A discomforting read for practitioners in the nonprofit world, this clear and objective study challenges strategists to reevaluate where the sources of power really reside and how these sources can be more effectively marshaled.