The Motives of Consumer Activists: Late 19th Century Approaches to Ethical Consumerism

• In Event: 240 - Section on Consumers and Consumption Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Paper Session: Table 03. Political and Ethical Consumerism Then and Now

Abstract

In England and the United States, turn of the twentieth century consumer activists identified much shopping as thoughtless and they sought to remedy this thoughtlessness by depicting, literally and figuratively, the conditions under which goods were produced, distributed, and sold. In short, they shared a grammar of motives. I begin with a brief methodological discussion of motives in historical sociology, one that can establish a framework through which to interpret consumer activists’ convergence upon similar ideologies and strategies. I suggest that Kenneth Burke’s grammar of motives provides a useful frame for specifying how, with reference to available archival evidence, capitalism, Christian reformism, and naturalist psychology formed consumer activists’ motivations. From here, I provide an account of why consumption and consumers seemed like a plausible and desirable site for political and ethical struggles during this period. I do not claim that these actors were uniquely motivated by those concerns—capitalism, Christian reformism, and naturalist psychology—or that these concerns select consumption as the site for ethical intervention. Rather, I want to demonstrate that these were largely limiting mechanisms, defining the terrain upon which consumer activists sought to motivate others to join their project. The central analytical issue is this, to what concerns might we attribute the shared motives of consumer activists? What were they responding to and how did these concerns work themselves into their actions as consumer activists? By developing Burke’s framework for discussing motives and action, we can avoid some of the dualisms that haunt sociological discussions of action.

Author

• Tad P. Skotnicki, University of California-San Diego