Calendar of Events

Consumers, Consumption and Sustainable Happiness: New Visions of Consumers Sovereignty

Annotation:

In his widely known work La société de consommation, the French cultural critic Jean Baudrillard thus summed up contemporary society: ‘Just as medieval society was balanced on God and the Devil, so ours is balanced on consumption and its denunciation’. The notion of the consumer, contested as it has always been, has itself become an important cultural category. Especially from the late nineteenth century onwards, a number of economic, cultural and political agencies increasingly claimed for themselves the right and duty to address consumers and to speak for them. Advertising and marketing as well as state welfare agencies, consumer defence organisations, women’s groups, consumer boycotts, and more recently the European Union, environmental groups, and new global movements have all contributed, together with social scientific discourses, to situate the ‘consumer’ as a fundamental subject-category within public discourse. This paper starts by considering the cultural representation of consumption and the consumer focussing on sustainable consumption and alternative food networks, proposing a theoretical systematization aimed at charting the emergence and consolidation of a relational view of consumer sovereignty.