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The Consumer Revolution
In this ground breaking book, Naren Nath provides a sweeping narrative of revolutions since the dawn of human civilization, leading up to the current and most impactful of them all—the consumer revolution. The book paints a gripping picture of consumers melding together, akin to nuclear fusion, to unleash unprecedented amount of energy and creativity, setting in motion a stunning transfer of power from traditional institutions. In doing so, it tosses up myriad new business ideas, and also highlights some of the sinister implications if the revolution is not harnessed correctly. The Consumer Revolution provides a fascinating context and rationale for some of the biggest current events and trends around the world. It is a stirring call for action to billions of everyday consumers to express their will and wield power in this ultimate doctrine of consumer empowerment.
eBook
Shopping for Change
Consuming with a conscience is one of the fastest growing forms of political participation worldwide. Every day we make decisions about how to spend our money and, for the socially conscious, these decisions matter. Political consumers \"buy green\" for the environment or they \"buy pink\" to combat breast cancer. They boycott Taco Bell to support migrant workers or Burger King to save the rainforest.
But can we overcome the limitations of consumer identity, the conservative pull of consumer choice, co-optation by corporate marketers, and other pitfalls of consumer activism in order to marshal the possibilities of consumer power? Can we, quite literally, shop for change? Shopping for Change brings together the historical and contemporary perspectives of academics and activists to show readers what has been possible for consumer activists in the past and what might be possible for today's consumer activists.Contributors
Kyle Asquith, University of Windsor; Dawson Barrett, Del Mar College; Lawrence Black, University of York; Madeline Brambilla, Northeastern University; Joshua Carreiro, Springfield Technical Community College, Springfield, MA; H. Louise Davis, Miami University; Jeffrey Demsky, San Bernardino Valley College; Tracey Deutsch, University of Minnesota–Twin Cities; Mara Einstein, Queens College, CUNY; Bart Elmore, University of Alabama; Sarah Elvins, University of Manitoba; Daniel Faber, Northeastern University; Julie Guard, University of Manitoba; Louis Hyman, ILR School, Cornell University; Meredith Katz, Virginia Commonwealth University; Randall Kaufman, Miami Dade College–Homestead Campus; Larry Kirsh, IMR Health Economics, Portland, OR; Katrina Lacher, University of Central Oklahoma; Bettina Liverant, University of Calgary; Amy Lubitow, Portland State University; Robert N. Mayer, University of Utah; Michelle McDonald, Stockton University; Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy, John Carroll University; Mark W. Robbins, Del Mar College;
Jessica Stewart, Cornell University;Joseph Tohill, York University and Ryerson University; Allison Ward, Queen's University and McMaster University; Philip Wight, Brandeis University
eBook
Consumer Movements and Collective Creativity
Consumer movements are resolute and persistent efforts by organized consumer collectives to reimagine elements of consumer culture. Such movements often use creative public performances to promote their causes and to make movement participation more ludic and fun. However, collective creativity within consumer movements has rarely been an explicit focus of research. Using ethnographic methods and assemblage theory, this study elaborates how collective creativity organizes a consumer movement and facilitates its quest for market change. Findings show how the Restaurant Day movement initially emerged as a resistant response to market tensions relating to constraining food culture regulation in a Nordic market context. Findings then illuminate the movement’s appropriation of collective creativity as its chief mode of organization and participation. Collective creativity builds on iterative and co-constituting deterritorializing and territorializing processes of consumer production that fuel transformative and explorative creativity, respectively, within the market context. The study provides new insights to consumer movement mobilization, organization, member recruitment, and market legitimacy. The study also provides novel theoretical insights to the study of consumer creativity.
Journal Article
Consumer Movements and Value Regimes
Consumer movements strive to change markets when those markets produce value outcomes that conflict with consumers’ higher-order values. Prior studies argue that consumer movements primarily seek to challenge these value outcomes by championing alternative higher-order values or by pressuring institutions to change market governance mechanisms. Building on and refining theorization on value regimes, this study illuminates a new type of consumer movement strategy where consumers collaborate to construct alternative object pathways. The study draws from ethnographic fieldwork in the German retail food sector and shows how building alternative object pathways allowed a consumer movement to mitigate the value regime’s excessive production of food waste. The revised value regime theorization offers a new and more holistic way of understanding and contextualizing how and where consumer movements mobilize for change. It also provides a new tool for understanding systemic value creation and the role of consumers in such processes.
Journal Article
Food for Dissent
In the 1960s and early 1970s, countercultural rebels decided that, rather than confront the system, they would create the world they wanted. The natural foods movement grew out of this contrarian spirit. Through a politics of principled shopping, eating, and entrepreneurship, food revolutionaries dissented from corporate capitalism and mainstream America.
In Food for Dissent, Maria McGrath traces the growth of the natural foods movement from its countercultural fringe beginning to its twenty-first-century \"food revolution\" ascendance, focusing on popular natural foods touchstones -- vegetarian cookbooks, food co-ops, and health advocates. Guided by an ideology of ethical consumption, these institutions and actors spread the movement's oppositionality and transformed America's foodscape, at least for some. Yet this strategy proved an uncertain instrument for the advancement of social justice, environmental defense, and anti-corporatism. The case studies explored in Food for Dissent indicate the limits of using conscientious eating, shopping, and selling as tools for civic activism.
eBook
Perceptual Ranges, Information Gathering, and Foraging Success in Dynamic Landscapes
How organisms gather and utilize information about their landscapes is central to understanding land-use patterns and population distributions. When such information originates beyond an individual’s immediate vicinity, movement decisions require integrating information out to some perceptual range. Such nonlocal information, whether obtained visually, acoustically, or via chemosensation, provides a field of stimuli that guides movement. Classically, however, models have assumed movement based on purely local information (e.g., chemotaxis, step-selection functions). Here we explore how foragers can exploit nonlocal information to improve their success in dynamic landscapes. Using a continuous time/continuous space model in which we vary both random (diffusive) movement and resource-following (advective) movement, we characterize the optimal perceptual ranges for foragers in dynamic landscapes. Nonlocal information can be highly beneficial, increasing the spatiotemporal concentration of foragers on their resources up to twofold compared with movement based on purely local information. However, nonlocal information is most useful when foragers possess both high advective movement (allowing them to react to transient resources) and low diffusive movement (preventing them from drifting away from resource peaks). Nonlocal information is particularly beneficial in landscapes with sharp (rather than gradual) patch edges and in landscapes with highly transient resources.
Journal Article