In this edited volume, the leading scholars in the field engage with consumers, marketers, corporations and policymakers as well as space dynamics and network formation to provide an in-depth examination of anti-consumption: a voluntary behavioural inclination to minimise rather than grow, to decelerate and simplify and to reduce the unnecessary exploitation of resources fuelled by consumer culture. This book does not place anti-consumption on the high moral ground but rather demonstrates its complexity to spur innovative and critical thinking on how people, organisations, businesses and governments can treat consumption more as a necessity for survival than as a tool for self-expression, pleasure and economic growth.
The first part of this book looks at anti-consumption from a diversity of perspectives. It analyses voluntary simplicity, a self-motivated engagement in consumption reduction, and boycotting, a politically-motivated reaction against unacceptable corporate practices, as distinct manifestations of anti-consumption that nonetheless remain rooted in the logic of the market. Paving the way to critical perspectives on the interface between anti-consumption, people and the environment, the second part of the book projects anti-consumption to issues of waste production and provides possible answers to global challenges of resources depletion, social inequalities and global warming. In this section, anti-consumption is critically assessed as an actor of change, both in terms of social change and paradigm change. To move the field forward, the third part of this book presents several theoretical frameworks that help set a roadmap for future research.
Anti-Consumption will be of direct interest to scholars and researchers within the fields of marketing, consumer research, business studies, environmental studies and sustainability. It will also be of value to those researching the economics and/or sociology of markets.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
Hélène Cherrier and Michael S.W. Lee
Part 1. What Is Anti-Consumption?
Chapter 1: Consumer Boycott Participation: Evidence for the Trigger/Promoter/Inhibitor Model
Stefan Hoffmann
Chapter 2: The evolution of Voluntary Simplicity: From Soulful Search for Meaning to Extreme Lifestyle Experiments
Stephen Zavestoski and Marilyn DeLaure
Chapter 3: How Green Demarketing Brands Can Successfully Support Anti-Consumption
Catherine Armstrong Soule and Tejvir Sekhon
Chapter 4: "I am NOT a Consumer" or "I Don't WANT to be a Consumer" or "I CAN'T be a Consumer": A Fresh Look at the New Strategies Consumers Use to Avoid the Marketplace
Susan Dobscha
Chapter 5: Anti-Consumers, Pro-Consumers, and Two Social Paradigms of Consumption
Jim Muncy and Rajesh Iyer
Part 2. Why Is Anti-Consumption Important?
Chapter 6: Anti-Consumption and Our Current Crisis of Care
Andreas Chatzidakis
Chapter 7: Different Sides of the Same Coin? Political Ideology Inflects How Symbolism Relates to Mask Avoidance or Adoption in the Age of COVID-19
Charles S. Areni and Hélène Cherrier
Chapter 8: Anti-Consumption In Emerging Markets
Pragea Geldoffy Putra and Michael S.W. Lee
Chapter 9: The Trio of Religiosity, Materialism, and Anti-Consumption in Explaining
Life Satisfaction
Betul Balikcioglu and Faith Mehmet Kiyak
Part 3. The Future of Anti-Consumption Research
Chapter 10: The "Fake It Till We Make It" Path to a Shared, sustainable society
Karen V. Fernandez
Chapter 11: Promoting Consumption Reduction: A Behaviour Change Challenge
Ken Peattie
Chapter 12: Socially Oriented Anti-Consumption
Nieves García-de-Frutos and José Manuel Ortega-Egea
