The Undisciplined Consumer: Collective Action and Akrasia

• In Event: 3551 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: 2. Consumers and Consumption

Abstract

If it is to be at all successful, consumer activism must be a collective project, premised on the joint and consistent coordination of many individual consumers dispersed over time and across space. That is, consumer activism presents collective action problems. Turn-of-the-twentieth century consumer activists were acutely aware of these problems and they devoted considerable effort to awakening the general public to their responsibilities as consumers. They needed to encourage flesh and blood consumers to adopt and remain faithful to the principles and practices of ethical consumerism. After all, the National Consumers’ League, the Co-operative Wholesale Society, and the Women’s Co-operative Guild were member-based organizations. While activists’ could write off the general public as ignorant or misinformed, they expected that their fellow members were at the very least awake to their duties as consumers. In this paper, I demonstrate three things. First, the National Consumers’ League, the Co-operative Wholesale Society, and the Women’s Co-operative Guild confronted akrasia, or weakness of the will as an obstacle to collective action. Because they trusted that members’ knew and valued the appropriate way to act, activists’ highlighted the failure to act with sufficient self-control as a crucial obstacle to coordinated purchasing. Second, I show that the issue of insufficient self-control presented distinctive obstacles to ethical consumption. The problem was not simply to provide reasons to act collectively, but to transform and discipline the desires of individual consumers. Third, I show that the attempts to overcome this collective action problem were shaped by organizational differences between the Co-operative groups and the National Consumers’ League. Because of the centrality of the store to co-operative culture, co-operators drew much stronger distinctions between members and non-members. Whereas co-operators often identified members’ failure to purchase as weakness of the will, the National Consumers’ League identified failure to purchase ethical goods as an organizational failure. Thus, co-operators confronted weakness of the will as an especially worrisome problem.

Author

• Tad P. Skotnicki, University of North Carolina, Greensboro