Green governance? Local politics and ethical businesses in Great Britain

• Author: Tony Bradley,Curtis Ziniel
• Date: 01 January 2017
• Published date: 01 January 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/beer.12134

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Green governance? Local politics and ethical businesses in

Great Britain

Tony Bradley

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Curtis Ziniel

Liverpool Hope Business School, Liverpool

Hope University, Hope Park, Liverpool L16

9JD, UK

Correspondence

Curtis Ziniel, Liverpool Hope University,

Hope Park, Liverpool L16 9JD, UK.

Email: zinielc@hope.ac.uk

Abstract

One of the least understoodaspects of the world-wide “greening of markets”is the emergence of

local “ethical marketplaces”and the subset of alternative business models described as “ethical

businesses.”But previous research has demonstrated the ability of local politicians to encourage

their regions toward more ethical marketplaces. This paper explores the impact radical centrist

third party representation has on the emergence of ethical businesses across Great Britain. To

understand this relationship, we utilize a noveldata set of organizations with membershipin Ethi-

cal Junction, the United Kingdom’s largest network for ethical businesses. We use a zero-inflated

Poisson regression to model the connection, and find a meaningful relationship, between third-

party politicalrepresentation on British localcouncils and the presence of ethical businesseswithin

local authorities.This presents an example of the way in whichradical political change may be part

of a wider socialmovement toward greening markets.

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INTRODUCTION

Political landscapes and industrial markets are changing very rapidly

across Great Britain. In particular, the “greening of markets”(Kuhn,

2005),that is taking placeworld-wide in responseto the global ecological

crisis (Kotchen, 2006; Krosinsky & Robins, 2008),is having an impact on

Britishbusiness and wider socio-politicalculture. These marketdevelop-

ments are not only to do with shifts from manufacturing to services to

knowledge toconceptual economies (Pink, 2005). They reflect a move-

ment, which has been identified for the pasttwo decades, of placingeth-

ical markets closer to center-stage (Bennett, 1991; Henderson, 2006).

Within this context of change, we investigate the connection between

localcouncil governanceand the distributionof ethical businesses.

In the period, immediately prior to the 2010 U.K.General Election,

there was a surge of third party “radical centre”members elected to

local council seats. This political movement had been predicted many

years before by those,such as Anthony Giddens (1998), who envisaged

the rise of a Third Way, although it had been, contrastingly, seen by

others as further evidence of a crowding of the center ground (Lee,

2013). This new radical center focused in 2010

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more on ethical busi-

ness, among a range of green and social democratic political practices

not usually associated with either the traditional right or left of British

politics (Harvey,2012; Wintour & Stratton, 2010).

Given the politics of the radical center, we demonstrate that

greater numbersof third party members on local councilshelps to pre-

dict the appearance of more ethical businesses within local authority

areas. This correlation between party representation and the appear-

ance of new “green business”types is an important first step in eluci-

dating the effect that local politics can have on the development of

ethical marketplaces. As su ch, this relationship is best understoo d as

part of the larger social movement for greening society taking place

across Great Britain. Understanding such a movement is helped by

understanding how it spreads. This research identifies the local social

trends that may be both “greening markets”and, at the same time,

restricting the spread of greener modes of production and consump-

tion patterns withinthe United Kingdom. As such, our findings need to

be understood within the context of changes taking place within both

the economic andpolitical spheres across Britain.

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EXPLAINING THE GREENING OF

MARKETS

Conventional business studies havefocused on the microeconomics of

greening markets. On the demand side, green consumerism was

explained in earlystudies as intrinsically motivated by a mix of altruism

and egoism (Hollander, 1990; Rauscher, 1997). But, more recent stud-

ies have pointed to a persistent “attitude-behaviour”/“values-action”

gap. This suggeststhat the increasing predominanceof intrinsically ori-

ented green consumers, across U.K.and European populations, maybe

something of a myth, in terms of consistent market behavior, despite

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V

C2016 JohnWiley & Sons Ltd wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/beer BusinessEthics: A Eur Rev 2017; 26:18–30

Received:26 February 2016

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Revised: 9 August2016

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Accepted:12 October 2016

DOI 10.1111/beer.12134