Political consumerism

Understanding how people engage in politics, and what motivates them to do so, has been an ongoing concern in the social science literature. Over the past decade, scholarly interest in boycotts and buycotts, which collectively comprise political consumerism—the deliberate purchase or avoidance of products for political or ethical reasons—has increased. However, these activities not been well conceptualized, and it is not clear what motivates people to engage in political consumerism. In this paper, I theorize that postmaterialist values increase the likelihood of engaging in political consumerism in the United States. To test this expectation, I use original, nationally representative U.S. survey data, and I find that postmaterialist values significantly increase the likelihood of engaging in political consumerism, while materialist values not, with controls in place for partisanship, ideology, and other democratic norms.

This article is organized as follows. The background section describes the case of newly legalized recreational marijuana. It introduces Portland, Oregon as a hub of ethical consumerism and environmental mobilization; outlines the status of recreational marijuana in Oregon and in the United States; highlights environmental issues related to the cannabis production; and describes an uptick in ethical consumerism of other recreational drugs in the United States. Next, the theoretical framework organizes extant research on political consumerism and suggests how this study may contribute to knowledge on emerging industries, the role of stigmas in framing, and power dynamics at the retail level of analysis. Following, the methodology section describes the three methods used in this study: qualitative analysis of internet research, networking, and semi­structured interviews; quantitative analysis of data collected at a random sample of 64 dispensaries; and spatial and statistical analysis relating the dispensary findings to socio­demographic indicators. The findings section offers what the author believes to be the first account of ethical consumerism in the licit recreational marijuana sector. It demonstrates that there is, indeed, a nascent “political consumerism movement” in the licit, recreational marijuana sector. The movement is largely industry­driven and is marked by an absence of third sector actors (such as environmental NGOs, fair trade certification organizations, and agricultural justice advocates). Mobilization efforts are challenged by two distinct stigmas: cannabis cultivation as a “natural” (and thus necessarily environmentally­friendly) process, and the marijuana industry as a “criminal” enterprise (which may deter potential allies). Interestingly, the distribution of “ethical” pot is quite consistent across neighborhoods of different socio­economic compositions­­in contrast to most ethically­oriented products. The paper closes with a discussion of these findings, their implications, and suggestions for further research.

Do contemporary governments adapt to rising social movements or do they actually cause them? This paper endeavours to argue that although it is often difficult to determine the origins of social transformations, there are reasons to believe that there exists not only a co-option but also a conscious shaping of social changes by political projects or governments for their own benefit. Building on other contributions that state that popular culture and youth consumerism are used in favour of nation branding, the present study moves beyond this to analyse the active role that governments play in the marketisation and consumption of culture, thus artificially multiplying the effective impact of some cultural waves that ultimately serve political purposes. In particular, I examine the so-called “Cool Britannia” phenomenon that, founded on the flourishing of new creative industries, with Britpop in the lead, had a significant historic impact in Britain.

Abstract
With the diffusion of the Internet, Web 2.0 and online social network usage, consumers’
power has increased against to companies which were seen inaccessible in the past. The
Internet that enables consumers to be producers has an important place in the development
and diffusion of political consumerism. Via the Internet and especially online social networks,
people can easily access information about consumer activism and join the related networks.
So, the purpose of this research is to explore overall perception of political consumerism
among Turkish Facebook users. In this context, the research particularly investigates tendency
of Facebook users to be a political consumer. This empirical paper also examines the
relationship between political consumerism and demographic variables and the effects of the
political consumerism on consumers’ political buycotting and boycotting behaviors.
The study has followed a quantitative approach. For attaining the above aims, an online
survey was conducted in Facebook. The data was collected by a structured questionnaire from
a sample of Turkish Facebook users. The study revealed that there was not a meaningful
relationship between Facebook usage and political consumerism. However, some significant
relationship between gender and political consumerism has founded. The results also
suggested that political consumerism in the cognitive phase has a positive effect on buying
behavior.
Key Words: Political consumerism, political consumers, online social networks, Facebook

As emphasized in the collection of articles for this special issue, clothing and textile production is one of the most polluting industries in the world. Its sustainability challenge involves multiple, interrelated, and complicated issues. Textiles and clothing now play a key role in the global public discourse on climate change, chemical society, water shortage, and human rights. Their production and consumption raise several questions and worries that create challenges about how people live their political, social, and economic lives. Many of the challenges concern several common societal and private practices and the role of various and often conflicting values associated with production and consumption. A large number of different actors and institutions from the corporate, governmental, civil society, media, and private spheres are involved as well. While there are technological solutions that solve some of the challenges, others require committed actions on the part of consumers, NGOs, government, business, and others; and increasingly so on an international scale. Particularly businesses and consumers have been identified as key actors here, due to the nature of the fast textile and fashion industry. Policy makers and activists ponder how businesses and consumers can be encouraged to take responsibility, take voluntary steps towards sustainability improvements, and at times even be outright forced to change their choices and behaviours. The deeper question is, however, whether, how, and to what degree they can take on new responsibility for ensuring that textile and clothing production becomes more sustainable. What mechanisms are currently used and which ones can be devised to make this happen? And how well are the ones presently in place working to solve this industry's sustainability challenge? Scholars stress that the problem areas in globalized textile and clothing production are highly complex. Technological fixes aside, they find that modifying behaviour and practice often requires the more complicated task of working with changing the values associated with production and consumption and doing so in a way sensitive to different cultural, geographic, and political contexts.

Günümüzde küreselleşme ve bireyselleşmenin ortaya çıkardığı değişimlerle pazar, geleneksel işlevlerinin ötesine geçerek bireylerin ve tüketici gruplarının yaptıkları tüketimler aracılığıyla kendilerini ifade ettikleri bir yer haline gelmiştir. Böylece tüketiciler etik kaygılarla yalnızca kendileri için değil tüm dünyada kendi dışlarında da var olan her şey için doğru bulmadıkları uygulamalara, sahip oldukları seçim gücüyle müdahale edebilmektedir. Hızla gelişen teknolojinin sunduğu olanakların da katkısıyla daha önce mümkün olmayan düzeyde pazarı etkileyebilme kabiliyetine sahip olan tüketiciler, üretimde artan oranda söz sahibi olmaktadır. Tüm bu gelişmelerin etkisiyle ortaya çıkan siyasal tüketicilik kavramı son yıllarda özellikle gelişmiş Kuzey Avrupa ülkelerinde oldukça ilgi gören bir konu olmuştur. 

Anahtar Kelimeler: Siyasal Tüketicilik, Siyasal Tüketim, Siyasal Tüketici, Boykot, Seçici Alışveriş.

THE GROWING POWER OF CONSUMERISM: POLITICAL CONSUMERISM

Abstract
Nowadays through the effects of globalization and individualization, market has become an arena where individuals and consumer groups express themselves via their consumptions by going beyond the traditional functions. Thus consumers with ethical concerns may interfere in the practices that they disapprove not only for themselves but also for anything apart from themselves in the whole world by their purchasing power. Thanks to the opportunities of the rapidly advancing technology, consumers who have the ability to influence the market in a level which couldn’t be possible before have a corner on production increasingly. Political consumerism concept emerged by the effects of all these evolution recently has been a quite attractive topic particularly in Nordic countries. 

Keywords: Political Consumerism, Political Consumption, Political Consumer, Boycott, Buycott.

Fair trade, ecovillaggi, transition towns, banche del tempo, slow fashion. È il vocabolario del consumo innovativo, in cui contano non solo il prezzo e la qualità dei prodotti, ma anche il comportamento dei produttori e la sostenibilità ambientale e sociale della filiera produttiva. Stiamo parlando di un movimento eco-solidale, variegato arcipelago di esperienze nate come strumento di autodifesa contro un sistema di scambi globali e concorrenziali incapace di fronteggiare problemi ambientali e sociali: una rivoluzione negli stili di vita, efficace anche per modificare il comportamento delle imprese. Questo libro ripercorre le forme più diffuse in Italia del consumo critico, mostrandone la possibile influenza sui processi decisionali e la capacità di ricreare legami di solidarietà dentro e fuori il mondo del lavoro.

....Inwiefern sind aber die Bürger/innen tatsächlich auch bereit, an der Bewältigung der großen Herausforderungen, vor denen unsere Gesellschaft steht, gestaltend mitzuwirken? Inwiefern sind sie Konsumbürger/innen in dem Sinne, dass sie ihren Konsum auch als Ausdruck ihres Engagements als Bürger/innen verstehen?  Ein Blick auf die politische Soziologie gibt ein gemischtes Bild: So beobachtet die politische Partizipationsforschung seit Längerem eine Stagnation konventioneller Partizipation, zum Beispiel hinsichtlich des Engagements in Parteien oder der Beteiligung an Wahlen. Demgegenüber nehmen jedoch bestimmte „kreative“ Partizipationsformen zu (Micheletti/McFarland 2012). Hierzu zählt auch der „politische Konsum“, das heißt, die Zunahme des Kaufens oder Vermeidens bestimmter Produkte aus Motiven der sozialen und ökologischen Verantwortung, wobei auch kommunikative Akte des Sprechens über konsumbezogene Verantwortungszuschreibungen als diskursive Form politischen Konsums verstanden werden (Micheletti/Stolle 2008). Unter „creative participation“ (Micheletti/McFarland 2012) fallen ebenso aber auch zahlreiche neue Engagementformen im Internet, wie das Schreiben von Weblogs, die Organisation schwarmartiger Kollektivaktionen (Segerberg 2012), der Aufbau von Wissensarchiven durch Crowdsourcing oder die Finanzierung von ethischen und politischen Projekten durch kollaborative Finanzierungsplattformen (Crowdfunding).
Ausgehend von der Annahme, dass gerade die digitalen Medien wesentlich dazu beitragen können, kreative Formen der politischen Partizipation, wie konsumbezogene Aktivitäten, zu fördern und mitzuprägen, widmete sich das von der DFG geförderte Forschungsprojekt "Consumer Netizens“ (2011 bis 2015) dem Nexus von bürgerschaftlichem Engagement beziehungsweise Citizenship, politischem Konsum sowie neuen Partizipationspraktiken im Netz. Konsumbürger/innen, und dabei insbesondere  Bürger/innen, die sich für sozial und ökologisch verantwortlichen Konsum einsetzen, so die forschungsleitende Annahme, sind zunehmend auch online aktiv. Gleichzeitig agieren Internet Citizens, kurz Netizens (Leggewie 1997), das heißt Bürger/innen, die das Internet als wichtige Arena für ihr politisches Engagement nutzen, auch als politisierte Konsument/innen beziehungsweise Konsumbürger/innen. In diesem Sinne sind sie auch als Consumer Netizens aufzufassen. ............

This historical chapter investigates two examples of racist political consumerism in early-20th-century Australia. It found expression in a locally particular form as the ‘White Sugar’ campaign, which declared consumption of cane sugar a moral duty for everyone in support of White Australia. Meanwhile, the ‘Buy Australian-Made’ campaign called on Australian consumers to express their national pride by consuming locally manufactured products. Both campaigns drew on broader logics of commodity racism that, praising ‘white supremacy’ and subscribing to ideologies of national progress, welded together everyday culture with the political programme of the time and contributed to the emergence of an imagined racist community of consumers.

A farmer on a small scale organic farm in rural India uploads images of his latest produce to consumers and retailers via an open source online food hub; a " conscious consumer " in Charlottesville, Virginia uses an app while supermarket shopping to look up the ethical credentials of food producers and product ingredients; a business woman on a work trip to Rio de Janiero is " informed " by a travel and food app on her smartphone where and what she might like to eat for breakfast based on GPS technology and her previous preferences. These three diverse examples speak to the changing nature of our engagements with food today in an increasingly digital world. From home cookery to restaurant going, from farming to food politics, the world of food is being quietly colonised by an array of electronic devices, online content and information and communication technologies. Meanwhile the realm of the digital has been invaded by all things food related, from endless food snapshots on Facebook and Instagram to the rise of YouTube cooking and food channels, the fastest-growing genre on the video-sharing service. This digital " turn " in the lives of many people on the planet has unsurprisingly inspired a huge amount of commentary and reflection, some of it celebrating the capacity of technology to connect and empower us, while other accounts offer a more dystopian vision of data control and surveillance, that is, a kind of " drone culture. " Numerous studies have sought to engage with the emergent role of the digital in shaping our everyday domestic lives, interpersonal relations and consumer practices.

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In recent years, there has been an increased mobilization around vegan and plant-based diets. The chapter will analyze this mobilization, the evolution of the images and practices of vegan eating and what kind of political consumerism they constitute. We show how vegan eating takes place as an assemblage of several actors and platforms, such as consciousness-raising campaigns, vegan bloggers, pledges and festivals and new vegan foods marketed as ‘cool’ and suitable for everyone. The concepts of boycott and buycott are too narrow to adequately describe veganism as political consumerism. Instead, discursive and lifestyle political consumerism and their interplay characterize the current building of new images and communities. The Internet and social media have a central role in shaping the cultural contents of the ‘veggie trend’. Moreover, vegan eating is not always inspired by other-oriented motives, but also by self-regarding motives, such as health, pleasure and distinction.

Socially responsible marketing is practiced by companies engaged in corporate social responsibility as a way to clearly communicate their positive social and environmental behaviors to ethical consumers. The opposite practice, greenwashing, is commonly used by companies attempting to gain undue credit for a lackluster commitment to responsible social and environmental behaviors. While the former is preferable, the latter has become increasingly sophisticated and dominant in the marketplace.

Although social movements are concerned with resistance, there has been a surprisingly little effort towards conceptualizing and problematising resistance within social movement studies. This chapter aims to address such a gap. It shows how a deeper understanding of resistance can in turn allow to better grasp diverse social movements. I give an overview of the social movement studies field, scrutinizing how various currents have been dealing with resistance. Then I show how different intellectual sources outside of the field (e.g. Gramsci, Polanyi, Scott, Foucault, De Certeau) have contributed to fertilize social movement studies literature and conceptualizations of resistance, providing examples of their legacies and limitations. I argue that the dividing line between resistance and alternatives is at best blurring. The new conceptual framework that I draw is able to tackle with diverse “environmental movements” broadly conceived that cannot be fully comprehended through the tools of conventional social movement studies, such as the transition movements, political consumerism or sustainable community movement, and ‘autonomous geographies’, which require a more expansive understanding of what counts are resistance.

The chapter aims at providing a set of interpretive tools to analyze the outcomes of consumer activism when performed through collective action. In the last years, in fact, we have witnessed a shifting from political consumerism understood as a practice of the individual 'citizen-consumer' to political consumerism performed by a growing number of organized collectives like solidarity purchasing groups, consumer-producer cooperatives, ecological communities etc. This implies that a re-conceptualization of political consumerism should be accompanied by renewed interpretive frameworks and methodologies. Drawing from the literature on social movements and their outcomes, the authors come forth with an interpretive 'compass' composed by six main features (type, domain, nature, target, timing, duration) that help understanding the effectiveness of consumer activism in light of the recent developments. In the second and final part of the chapter, the authors underline the importance of taking into account factors like resources, media outreach and alliances as well as the political, socioeconomic and cultural context.

Ethical consumerism theory aims to describe, explain, and evaluate the ways in which producers and consumers use the market to support social and environmental values. The literature draws insights from empirical studies of sectors that largely take place on the legal market, such as textiles and agri-food. This paper takes a first step toward theorizing ethical consumerism in semi-legal sectors where market activities occur legally and illegally. How does extant theory extend to sectors such as sex work, cigarettes, and recreational drugs? This study draws on the case of recreational cannabis (marijuana) in Portland, Oregon (USA). Data from 33 interviews, structured fieldwork at 64 dispensaries, and the US Census Bureau American Community Survey are analyzed using qualitative, quantitative, and spatial methods. The findings are compared to twelve suggestions that emerge from the literature on fair trade, organics, alternative agriculture, and political consumerism. I argue that not all ethical consumerism theory extends to semi-legal sectors. Cannabis closely resembles theoretical expectations in terms of supply/demand, prioritization of ethical issues, and pervasiveness of false claims, but differs in terms of who organizes, which types of strategies are pursued, and how ethical products are framed. The differences stem from several pervasive stigmas about cannabis. I also argue that the stigmas that set cannabis apart from other (more legal sectors) and present challenges to ethical consumerism in cannabis are directly related to the War on Drugs. These insights suggest that prohibition (and its lingering effects) can inhibit the emergence of ethical consumerism.

Winner of the 2013 Michael Ramsey Prize for Theological Writing.
Reviewed in: Journal of Church & State; Studies in Christian Ethics; Politics, Religion & Ideology; Evangelical Journal of Theology; Journal of Practical Theology; Political Theology (review symposium); Regent’s Review; Christian Century; The Church Times; and Modern Theology.

L’appropriation progressive du champ politique par les marques témoigne d’un besoin de conformisme communicationnel spécifique à la société de consommation. Une évolution liée à la dédifférenciation du politique par rapport à l’ensemble des pratiques de consommation. Alors que les médias sociaux induisent un besoin de juger l’action politique en temps réel, l’avènement d’un consumérisme politique peut être décrit comme une action collective individualisée et numériquement consolidée, qui se traduit par l’auto-sélection des benchmarks à partir desquels l’action politique sera jugée. Un consumérisme politique également susceptible d’aboutir à des formes d’activismes structurés et l’émergence de mouvements citoyens autogérés, au statut hybride. L’analyse du phénomène Tea Party aux États-Unis offre une illustration de cette « contre-opinion » cyber-diffusée. En cherchant à donner le la dans la « grande conversation » autour des marques, le Tea Party pose également la question des limites de la participativité et de ses dérives.

This article examines the growing entanglements between the
digital and the world of food while suggesting that food is a
particularly generative space through which to understand the
evolving but often hidden role of the digital in our everyday lives.
The article starts by examining food photography on social media
before discussing the role of ordinary people as participants in
online food culture via video-sharing platforms such as YouTube.
Mapping the shift from web 2.0’s dreams of creativity and sharing
to the monetisation of digital food communities, section 3 focuses
on food politics, and ‘the antinomies of connectivity’. The final
section discusses big food players and their use of social media in
an era of dataveillance and big data. It argues that ‘food citizens’
need to have an awareness of the commercial logics that support
the communicative ecologies in which we increasingly engage with
food and lifestyle practices.

An introduction to the problem of greenwashing, this presentation was given in March 2015 at the Eastern Sociological Society's Annual Conference in Boston, MA. It seeks to answer 5 questions:

1. What is greenwashing?
2. How do we identify greenwashing?
3. Who is doing the greenwashing?
4. Are our indicators adequate?
5. How do we improve our measurement?

This is preliminary work on research that will be submitted for peer-reviewed publication.

The "white Australia policy" has so far largely been discussed with regard only to its political-ideological perspective. No account was taken of the central problem of racist societalization, i.e. the everyday production and reproduction of "race" as a social relation ("doing race") supported by broad sections of the population.
This comprehensive study of Australian racism and the "white sugar" campaign shows that the latter was only able to achieve success because it was embedded in a widespread "white Australia culture" that found expression in all spheres of life.

Food is becoming an increasingly disputed issue, and food movements have emerged in both the Global North and Global South. Food security and food sovereignty are still influencing the everyday life of almost 1 billion people in the World. Indeed, the agro-industrial food system, based on the ‘Green Revolution’ aim to feed the World, presents several emergencies and negative externalities which have been affecting people, the environment, and both global and local economy. The ongoing financial and economic crisis has strengthened the corporate’s economic and political power and it has exacerbated inequalities. It has also reduced the citizens’ perception of security and the State’s policies effectiveness. To face this scenario, it appears necessary to study how global society is facing these negative externalities. Starting from the recent debate around these emergencies, the increasing industrialization of food production and the Great Recession’s consequences, this dissertation ill present several initiatives emerged over the last twenty years providing a sustainable alternative to this panorama.
Specifically, in the first part, through an interdisciplinary approach which overlaps the most recent international scientific contributions, food issues will be presented as the ‘new’ vehicle to re-embed the social within the Market and contention politics. Hence, the literature review allows to better understand the rise of Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) which can lead to a more sustainable way of living and buying food.
In the second part, the theoretical nodes opened by the international literature will be faced going beyond the findings gathered through the empirical research. Following a qualitative approach, the research has been developed in two different case-studies: a middle-sized town of Northern Italy (Bergamo), and a middle-sized town of Southern Brazil (Florianópolis).
The empirical body consists of four chapters, each focusing on a specific aspect of Alternative Food Networks and each one responds to a specific research question. The first empirical chapter focuses on the discussion of AFNs as a social movement. The attention is directed toward the AFNs as an example of what in literature is labelled as Sustainable Community Movement Organizations (SCMOs). The second chapter considers AFNs evolution during the economic, financial, and social crisis. By combining insights from AFNs literature, the contemporary economic, financial and social crisis, this chapter shows how AFNs are evolving in the Global World. The third empirical chapter displays the ongoing state of the sustainable agriculture within the two studied contexts. It shows the AFNs farmers’ profile, thus their claims, and their perspectives. The fourth chapter focuses on the processes of strengthening AFNs through a specific framework such as Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGSs). The study considers two examples of PGSs: the PGS of Lombardy (Northern Italy) and the Rede Ecovida’s PGS (Southern Brazil).
This dissertation aims to collect insights on how sustainable agriculture is shaping new economic social movement organizations and alternative forms of consumption and distribution within the urban areas of both the Global North and the Global South. It focuses on how AFNs were created, who takes part in, and through which pathway they are going to. The key-question behind this work is to investigate how the nature, the organizational form, and the alliances of (and among) different actors, who promote alternative forms of food consumption and distribution, are changing along the time in the urban areas, comparing the insights gathered in both Global North and Global South. This research highlights also how people get collectively engaged in AFNs initiatives, and how these networks are shaped by the economic, social, and cultural institutions. Moreover, this research investigates how the Great Recession has been encouraged or constrained these grassroots collective networks. Finally, specific adopted tools will be considered in a comparative way to understand whether and how they are fostering and strengthening the AFNs framework.

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Do contemporary governments adapt to rising social movements or do they actually cause them? This paper endeavours to argue that although it is often difficult to determine the origins of social transformations, there are reasons to believe that there exists not only a co-option but also a conscious shaping of social changes by political projects or governments for their own benefit. Building on other contributions that state that popular culture and youth consumerism are used in favour of nation branding, the present study moves beyond this to analyse the active role that governments play in the marketisation and consumption of culture, thus artificially multiplying the effective impact of some cultural waves that ultimately serve political purposes. In particular, I examine the so-called “Cool Britannia” phenomenon that, founded on the flourishing of new creative industries, with Britpop in the lead, had a significant historic impact in Britain.

See the following link for a published version  of this article: http://www.palgrave-journals.com/ap/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/ap201527a.html

Van Deth’s (2014) comprehensive ‘conceptual map of political participation’ has reinstated a lively debate about the concept of political participation. One important question raised is whether it actually achieves its main goal of unambiguously identifying and classifying emerging, complex types of participation, like online political activism (Hosch-Dayican, 2014) – or lifestyle politics. Therefore, the goal of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it aims to evaluate the usefulness of van Deth’s (2014) approach for the analysis of lifestyle politics. However, such an evaluation requires a strong notion of what activities lifestyle politics exactly refers to, while a comprehensive overview and classification of different types of lifestyle politics is still missing from the literature. The second goal of this paper is therefore to systematically identify and classify different types of lifestyle politics described in empirical studies. This literature review indicates that lifestyle politics are often enacted throughout different private, public and institutional arenas, and that they are often targeted at various social and political actors at the same time. Applying van Deth’s conceptual map to this empirical reality, then, suggests that it does not seem to grasp its complexity sufficiently. This paper proposes how van Deth’s framework could be adjusted so that it does what it aims to do: to grasp the increased complexity of expanding political participation repertoires.

This article explores the question of how the idea of political consumerism looks from a liberal democratic viewpoint. The question is analysed by looking at the main thoughts behind the liberal, democratic model of society. John Locke’s political philosophy, Adam Smith’s political economic thinking, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s understanding of democracy is contrasted with the idea of political consumerism in order to see how this idea looks in respect to the original arguments for the liberal, democratic model of society. It is shown that the idea of political consumerism is a highly controversial idea seen from a liberal, democratic viewpoint. The main problem is the deliberate mixing of the public and the private spheres and the political and the economic spheres. This deliberate mixing leads to at least three problems: a democratic problem, a problem of legal security and a prosperity problem. These problems raise the question of legitimacy of the idea of political consumerism within liberal, democratic societies. The article suggests that we divide political consumerism up into two forms; one that arises from below, where it is the consumers themselves who wish to supplement their political opinions with political consumerism, or NGOs that go out and encourage political consumerism; and political consumerism that is staged from above, from the state or the formal political system. It is concluded that the former is a legitimate form of political consumerism within liberal democracies whereas the latter is not.

The globalization of production chains has triggered an abundance of political consumer campaigns aimed at promoting global social and environmental responsibility. What is the most effective way to conceptualize and gauge the impact of these campaigns? I explore these issues through an examination of Global Value Chain (GVC) and similar approaches used to assess the impact of codes of conduct and corporate social responsibility on the production end of the chain. After summarizing key GVC research, I examine a range of critiques of both the GVC approach and the limits of political consumerism. I conclude reflecting on two different frameworks, the System of Provision (SOP) and Global Poverty Chain (GPC) approaches, which provide foundational critiques of GVC analysis and open new doorways for research and rethinking political consumerism and the globalization of production and consumption.

Most of the literature treats boycotting and buycotting – which collectively comprise political consumerism – as
homogeneous acts, reflecting a single mode of behavior. However, several key differences between boycotts and
buycotts suggest that the predictors of boycotting should be somewhat different from those of buycotting. In this
article, I theorize that boycotting is more strongly associated with dutiful citizenship norms because it is punishment
oriented and has several key features in common with electoral, interest-based politics. Buycotting, conversely, is more
strongly associated with engaged citizenship norms because it is reward oriented and has more features in common
with civic engagement.To test these theoretical expectations, I use original, nationally representative US survey data.
The findings confirm my theoretical expectations, and they point to the role of changing citizenship norms rather than
more traditional factors such as resources and psychological engagement as important in understanding contemporary
political participation.

Dieses Buch untersucht die kommunikative Konstitution sozialer Bewegungen durch Selbstbeschreibungen. Es versucht damit, die seit den späten 1990er Jahren brachliegende systemtheoretische Perspektive auf soziale Bewegungen konzeptuell und empirisch fruchtbar zu machen und mit der sozialen Bewegungsforschung ins Gespräch zu bringen. Der erste Teil konzeptualisiert die Selbstbeschreibung sozialer Bewegungen und ihre Funktion und illustriert das Argument an zwei Fallstudien: Der Occupy-Bewegung und der nigerianischen Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP). Im zweiten Teil wird das Verhältnis des Systemtypus sozialer Bewegungen zu Interaktion, Organisation und Gesellschaft untersucht

Critical consumption, the purchase or boycott of goods for political, ethical or environmental reasons, is regularly characterised as an example of ‘new politics’ or ‘new’ political participation. However, such analysis often neglects work from the sociology of consumption and social movement studies. This paper argues that consumers express their identity through critical consumption, in the form of a pledge of allegiance to the goals of certain social movements. Cross-national data from the European Social Survey identifies critical consumers as belonging to higher class positions and being generally older, highly educated, and more often women than men. Separating analysis of boycotting from that of buycotting, the positive purchase of goods for ethical or political reasons, suggests that buycotting is more resource-dependent and individualistic than boycotting. Substantial differences are found between the impact of people’s resources in different countries, particularly between Northern and Central European countries and their Southern and Eastern counterparts. The findings thus recommend an approach to consumer politics that remains sensitive to social structural contexts between countries and different forms of consumer participation.

A growing number of environmental groups focus on more sustainable practices in everyday life, from the development of new food systems, to community solar, to more sustainable fashion. No longer willing to take part in unsustainable practices and institutions, and not satisfied with either purely individualistic and consumer responses or standard political processes and movement tactics, many activists and groups are increasingly focusing on restructuring everyday practices of the circulation of the basic needs of everyday life. This work labels such action sustainable materialism, and examines the political and social motivations of activists and movement groups involved in this growing and expanding practice. The central argument is that these movements are motivated by four key factors: frustration with the lack of accomplishments on broader environmental policies, a desire for environmental and social justice, an active and material resistance to the power of traditional industries, and a form of sustainability that is attentive to the flow of materials through bodies, communities, economies, and environments. In addition to these motivations, these movements demonstrate such material action as political action, in contrast to existing critiques of new materialism as apolitical or post-political. Overall, sustainable materialism is explored as a set of movements with unique qualities, based in collective rather than individual action, a dedication to local and prefigurative politics, and a demand that sustainability be practiced in everyday life - starting with the materials and flows that provide food, power, clothing, and other basic needs.

Ovaj rad se bavi analizom duga kao načina funkcioniranja današnje ekonomije i društva. Kako bi se sa svih aspekata analizirao dug, rad kreće od objašnjavanja osnovnih ekonomskih i društvenih uvjeta današnjice koji su u pozadini stvaranja današnje ekonomije duga. To znači da se u radu detaljno razmatraju potrošnja i potrošačko društvo, neoliberalizam i tok novca i akumulacija istoga, te dug kao posljedice razvoja neoliberalizma. S ovim naumom, rad je koncipiran u tri dijela. Prvi dio obuhvaća prikaz osnovnih značajki i razvojne linije potrošnje i
potrošačkog društva, s osvrtom na razvoj potrošačkog društva u Hrvatskoj. Drugi dio rada kreće od neoliberalizma i pojašnjavanja njegovih instanci (neoliberalne države i financijskog
kapitalizma) kako bi se rad nastavio na osnovnoj ideji rada, o dugu kao osnovi funkcioniranja današnje ekonomije. Treći dio rada bazira se na osnovnoj tezi kako je dug izravna posljedica neoliberalizma, koji vodi cijeli društvo u dužničko ropstvo i stvara život na dug. Također, u
rada se analizira dug u Hrvatskoj, njegove posljedice za društvo i državu, te se kroz studiju slučaja o kreditu u švicarskim francima prikazuje neoliberalna ekonomija duga u praksi.

Cannabis (marijuana) is the most commonly consumed, universally produced, and frequently trafficked psychoactive substance prohibited under international drug control laws. Yet, several countries have recently moved toward legalization. In these places, the legal status of cannabis is complex, especially because illegal markets persist. This chapter explores the ways in which a sector’s legal status interacts with political consumerism. The analysis draws on a case study of political consumerism in the US and Canadian cannabis markets over the past two decades, as both countries moved toward legalization. It finds that the goals, tactics, and leadership of political consumerism activities changed as the sector’s legal status shifted. It suggests that prohibition, semi-legalization, and new legality may present special challenges to political consumerism, such as silencing producers, confusing consumers, deterring social movement organizations, and discouraging discourse about ethical issues. The chapter concludes that political consumerism and legal status may have deep import for one another.

While existing studies assert that citizens actively use digital media to exert their political agency, the various roles and impacts of digital media should be further unpacked. Building on the notions of 'digital democratic affordance' and 'cross-platform play', this article uniquely theorises political consumerism as a multi-scalar mode of human-non-human interactions. The concept of multi-scalar cross-platform affordances is formulated to demonstrate how different digital platforms-large or small, corporate or amateur, global or local-co-constitute an environment in which citizens are progressively channelled to engage in multiple platforms, reinvent them in concert with one another, and participate in political consumption across time and space. In the case of the Yellow Economic Circle, against the backdrop of Hong Kong's 2019-2020 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) movement, we examine such cross-platform dynamics and their multi-scalar enactment of everyday political consumption practices across four stages: deliberation, crowdsourcing, materialisation, and habituation.

The deliberate decisions to buy- or boycott a product for political, environmental or social reasons clearly seems to be driven by different factors: Boycotters want to express their discontent with certain market practices and to put pressure for more responsible behavior. In contrast, buycotting relates to the idea that a firm or a product is “good” and thus should be rewarded for this. Hence, boycotts should bring about the “landscape” in which buycotting becomes possible: boycotters may encourage firms to get societally involved and institutions to introduce labeling schemes for “politically correct” products. This then serves buycotters to identify the “good” firms and products.
Yet, buycotting and boycotting as well as firms’ societal involvement (i.e. Corporate Social Responsibility, CSR) and labeling schemes are spread very differently across countries. This suggests that buy- and boycotting interact differently with CSR and labeling schemes. CSR relates to the idea that market actors should take over responsibility and cooperate with civil society. In contrast, labeling schemes indicate a preference for formal rules. Based on this idea, the paper examines whether citizens’ understanding of how cooperation between government, the market and civil society should look like is one guiding factor when deciding whether to boycott and/or to buycott. As the findings indicate, this is actually the case. Furthermore, they suggest a successive relation between boycotting and buycotting connected with trust in firms.

As the prevalence of “conscious” consumption has
grown, questions have arisen about its relationship to
political action. An influential argument holds that
political consumption individualizes responsibility for
environmental degradation and “crowds out” genuine
forms of activism. While European and Canadian
empirical research contradicts this perspective, finding
that conscious consumption and political engagement
are positively connected, no studies of this relationship
have been conducted for the United States. This article
presents ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models
for two datasets, the 2004 General Social Survey
and a detailed survey of approximately 2,200 conscious
consumers conducted by the authors, to assess the
nature of the relationship between conscious consumption
and political activism. The authors find that measures
of conscious consumption are significantly and
positively related to political action, even when controlling
for political involvement in the past. The results
suggest that greater levels of political consumption are
positively related to a range of political actions.

Several recent studies have shown an increase in political consumerism (boycott and buycott) and a tendency towards a new ‘politics in the supermarket’. These developments are usually seen as a transformation of forms of political action towards more individualized participation forms. Little attention has focused on the role of social movement activity in this transformation. In this contribution, which is based on a case study of political consumerism in the clothing sector in Switzerland, I fill this gap by analysing the ways in which political agency and mobilization shape political consumerism. I suggest taking into account the role of campaigning – that is, intentional and coordinated collective action and framing activities – as an incentive, if not a determinant, of individual political consumption. I show how different contentious performances mobilize citizens and consumers and make the consumption and production of clothing a public and political issue. I analyse the mobilizing strategies of a campaign regarding action repertoires and framing activities and ask how they contribute to provide political content to consumer products, creating a venue for political participation in the marketplace.

This paper contributes to an ongoing effort by scholars to bridge the gap between the growing literatures on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and ethical consum- erism (EC) by proposing that these phenomena be considered as two ends of an economic communication system linking companies and consumers. Though some researchers have called into question the data sources that most ethical consumers rely on when making their decisions in the marketplace and others have noted the shortcomings in the accuracy of our systems of CSR measurement, in neither of these cases have researchers been able to uncover viable alternatives to the imperfect solution of third party certifications (aka ecolabels). Emerging consumer-oriented CSR rating systems, being utilized by millions of consumers in the Anglosphere, may represent some of the first alternatives for CSR and EC scholars, as well as for ethical consumers themselves. This research compares the four most popular consumer- oriented CSR measurement systems produced in the US (GoodGuide, Better World Shopper), UK (Ethical Consumer) and Australia (Shop Ethical). While thousands of companies are rated in each system, statistical analyses are focused on comparing the CSR ratings of the 106 companies common to all four systems. The findings reveal that although each system’s goals of measuring CSR are closely aligned, out- comes are considerably divergent.

Il tentativo di questo saggio andrà dunque nella direzione di una problematizzazione dell’etica attraverso gli strumenti della sociologia, al fine di verificare la possibilità per l’etica di configurarsi non tanto come un insieme di principi e norme che regolano la condotta umana (aspetto prescrittivo), quanto come una nuova categoria ermeneutica utile ad interpretare i diversi fenomeni del sociale (aspetto descrittivo). Percorso, tra l’altro, supportato dalla tradizione di pensiero che si rifà ad Aristotele, il quale, invece di tentare una costruzione dell’etica su principi immobili e razionali – come fu per Platone, ha mantenuto un puntuale confronto con il costume, le tradizioni esistenti e le istituzioni politiche.
Piuttosto che tentare di edificare la riflessione etica sulle fondamenta di una società astratta e formale, di una struttura societaria pura e universale, conviene calarla in contesti specifici, in questa o quella società, in questo o quel luogo, in un determinato tempo storico, dove vigono particolari pratiche, costumi e rituali. I nuovi punti di riferimento, e più in generale il tessuto valoriale che è alla base dei nostri comportamenti, si creano dove la vita sociale è più diffusa, più intensa. E’ dunque proprio da  un riconoscimento di quello che è in gioco nelle aree esperienziali centrali  delle nostre società che occorre partire per ridefinire l’attuale rapporto tra etica e società dei consumi.

Although new theories of collective action in the contemporary media environment have provided an expanded view of the structure of action, important questions remain. These questions include how action frames flow between advocacy organizations and individuals on social media, especially in cases in which organizations do not initiate collective action. To address this question, we used Granger tests to analyze roughly 800,000 tweets about a competing boycott and buycott campaign that occurred in 2012. We found that the conversation about the campaigns began postbureaucratically (i.e., through citizen networks). Although organizations' involvement was associated with increased citizen attention to the campaigns, the organizations neither adopted nor influenced citizen frames on the issue. We view this as an illustration of the variable and sometimes unpredictable role of organizations in communication about collective action today.

Ethical consumer discourse is organized around the idea that shopping, and particularly food shopping, is a way to create progressive social change. A key component of this discourse is the “citizen-consumer” hybrid, found in both activist and academic writing on ethical consumption. The hybrid concept implies a social practice –“voting with your dollar”– that can satisfy competing ideologies of consumerism (an idea rooted in individual self-interest) and citizenship (an ideal rooted in collective responsibility to a social and ecological commons). While a hopeful sign, this hybrid concept needs to be theoretically unpacked, and empirically explored. This article has two purposes. First, it is a theory-building project that unpacks the citizen-consumer concept, and investigates underlying ideological tensions and contradictions. The second purpose of the paper is to relate theory to an empirical case-study of the citizen-consumer in practice. Using the case-study of Whole Foods Market (WFM), a corporation frequently touted as an ethical market actor, I ask: (1) how does WFM frame the citizen-consumer hybrid, and (2) what ideological tensions between consumer and citizen ideals are present in the framing? Are both ideals coexisting and balanced in the citizen-consumer hybrid, or is this construct used to disguise underlying ideological inconsistencies? Rather than meeting the requirements of consumerism and citizenship equally, the case of WFM suggests that the citizen-consumer hybrid provides superficial attention to citizenship goals in order to serve three consumerist interests better: consumer choice, status distinction, and ecological cornucopianism. I argue that a true “citizen-consumer” hybrid is not only difficult to achieve, but may be internally inconsistent in a growth- oriented