Ethical Luxury Services: A Conceptualization, Key Premises, and Future Research
(A2025-126387)

AUTHORS

Domenic Winfrey, KEDGE Business School; Jonas Holmqvist, Kedge Business School; Sertan Kabadayi, Fordham University

ABSTRACT

Despite luxury service brands increasingly engaging in ethical practices, to date little is known about what makes luxury services ethical or unethical. This paper conceptualizes ethical luxury services, key premises of what characterizes ethical luxury services, and provides future research avenues. We find that an understanding of how luxury services can maintain ethicality is missing, despite the increase of the sustainable luxury and luxury service industries. Key aspects of luxury (i.e. the anti-laws of luxury) and services (i.e. IHIP) have major, unique ethical implications, especially when combined to form luxury services. We analyze how this complex interaction of ethics, luxury and services requires careful balance to maintain ethicality, especially in terms of intangibility and considerations related to social sustainability.