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The purpose of this paper is to pursue the following two objectives. First, this study examines how social capital indicators (reciprocal norm and social network) cause ethical consumption behavior by conceptualizing it as value co-creation specific to socially responsible firms. Second, it aims to verify whether corporate trust, which is another core indicator of social capital, mediates between social capital indicators and ethical consumption behavior.

For study subjects, the author selected general public located in the city of Seoul. A total of 307 respondents were used for statistical analysis after discarding unusable questionnaires. For the purpose of judgment sampling, the author selected those respondents who had prior purchase experience of the products or services provided by socially responsible firms.

This study tested core elements of social capital (reciprocal norm, social network and corporate trust) as predictors of ethical consumption behavior. In particular, the study newly conceptualized and validated ethical consumption behavior as one encompassing the civic engagement behavior whose premise is well encapsulated by value co-creation principle. The results demonstrate that the social network and reciprocal norm significantly influence ethical consumption behavior directly as well as indirectly through corporate trust.

The significance of this study may be that it adds to current literature on ethical consumption behavior by validating an empirical model of ethical consumption behavior from the perspective of consumer engagement paradigm. No previous studies of ethical consumption behavior empirically tested this model previously, only offering conceptual similarity between ethical consumption and consumer engagement. The study’s result may provide some insights as to the utility of value co-creation strategy for socially responsible firms as a useful way to promote ethical consumption behavior.

This study’s result may provide some useful insights as to how socially responsible firms can improve their performance by understanding what makes their customers voluntarily engage in favor of the firms to create shared values. In particular, the finding on the corporate trust mediating between bonding network and ethical consumption behavior sheds useful insights for the firms on how they should garner customer trust to trigger ethical consumption behavior. In this sense, socially responsible firms need to focus their resources on publicity or endorsements by highly respected celebrities designed to stress the firms’ trustworthiness and create favorable corporate image.

The finding that reciprocal norm has a significant impact on ethical consumption behavior also provides strategic implications on how to enhance the effectiveness of corporate messages. That is, the socially responsible firms should implement some corporate strategies designed to raise authentic corporate image of the firms by hiring the socially disadvantaged and returning some portion of profit back to society. By doing this, the socially responsible firms can expect to instill some sense of reciprocity into their current as well as potential customers.

Despite this conceived linkage, no previous research has empirically approached ethical consumption from the perspective of civic engagement to examine whether ethical consumers voluntarily engage in firm-specific engagement behavior that fulfills their civic responsibility. Therefore, the present research embarks on a new approach to conceptualize ethical consumption as a construct that embodies civic engagement that is conceptually encapsulated by the principle of value co-creation.

In view of the increasing importance of creating values that require shared societal responsibilities to be borne by not just firms but customers as well, the purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate whether customers’ social capital plays a role in creating shared values for South Korean firms directly or indirectly through social identity and corporate authenticity.

To understand the effects of social capital on value co-creation, the authors conducted a face-to-face questionnaire survey with a selected group of 400 adult respondents aged more than 20 years. To verify precision in wording and sentence structure and the validity of questions in reflecting the study objective, the authors conducted a pretest on 40 respondents before administering the main survey. Ultimately, 50 questionnaires considered inappropriate and with inconsistent response patterns were discarded, leaving 350 questionnaires for the statistical analysis.

This research adopts the consumer-centric as well as societal perspectives to conceptualize value co-creation behavior, and tests the moderating roles of psychometric measures of self-monitoring and corporate trust. Next, the research confirms whether social identity and perceived corporate authenticity mediate the relationship between social capital and value co-creation.

The study results shed new insights into the societal, psychological and normative aspects of value co-creation.