From Targets to Recruits: Consumers within the Political Consumption Movement

In recent years, various social movement organizations have urged consumers to become more responsible for defending causes such as environmentalism and social justice, calling for boycotts, using labels to steer consumers towards more ethical products, or developing new types of exchange systems, consumption habits or lifestyles. Changing modes of consumption or lifestyles therefore seems to be a key objective in this consumer-targeted, collective action framework. While mobilization of consumers to collective action is by no means new, these relationships are nevertheless still ambiguous: are consumers targets of blame, agents of change or potential constituents? In this proposal, I explore these ambiguities, drawing on empirical analyses of various approaches by French groups engaged in the promotion of political consumption. First, I argue that rather than being targets whose individual practices are to be blamed and modified, consumers are in fact recruits to collective action. Political consumption movements wish to recruit consumers to collective action in order to put pressure on companies and governments. The intent is therefore less about changing consumption practices and lifestyles than about organizing collective action that is able to effect profound normative, cultural and political modifications in society through change in regulation, economic and company practices. This draws to a discussion of the notion of political consumerism. Although political consumption groups address mass consumers broadly, either to blame or exhort them to change their consumption patterns, their collective action framework is actually dedicated to recruiting consumers who share an understanding of the changes for which they are advocating, the intention being to involve consumers in collective actions targeting companies and governments. They do not address strangers but recruit friends, they rely less on the occurrence of a hypothetical political consumerism by mass consumers than seeking to organize collective action by already politicized consumers.