A Brief History of Consumer Activism

A brief history of consumer activism. Consumption and consumerism are tricky words in the English language. They are replete with positive and negative attributes, implying on the one hand that people are free to vote with their feet, and on the other that they are manipulated by superior market forces. The rich literature on consumers, consumerism and consumption all thrive on this ambiguity. In our book The Unmanageable Consumer (Gabriel and Lang, 1995), we set out to explore this ambiguity, trying to make sense of the diverse forms that consumption assumes in modern societies and the variety of meanings assumed by the term ‘consumerism’. In this chapter we reflect and build on the analysis we offered in our book on what we called the active consumer: those people and movements setting out to promote the rights, consciousness and interests of either all or particular groups of consumers.