Can Market Based Alternatives be Transformative? Plenitude, Participatory Markets, and Rhizomatic Resistance

• In Event: 178 - Regular Session. Consumers and Consumption 2

Abstract

In this paper we tackle the question of whether alternative consumer initiatives such as time banks, CSAs, cooperatives, and downshifted lifestyles, or what Juliet Schor has termed the “plenitude” model (Schor 2010, Schor and Thompson 2014) can be socially transformative, or whether these are, in the views of some critics, merely instances of neo-liberal governmentality, destined to further tighten the noose of an exploitative and unjust global capitalist system (Guthman 2008a).

Author

• Juliet B. Schor, Boston College