Consumer Citizenship - Privatization of Citizenship?

Studies on political participation (e.g. Inglehart 1997; Norris 2002; Putnam 2000) state the separation of political action from the institutionalized arenas of the nation state. At the same time, consumption appears to be a structural principle of modern societies. Hence, consumption shapes both individual and collective processes of identity construction; patterns of consumption demonstrate social affiliation and networks: “consumption is less clearly the outcome of the intersection of class and culture but rather actively shapes it” (Friedland et al. 2007: 33). Corporations make use of the social impact of consumption for so-called “life-sytle-branding” (Cohen 2003: 299) in order to give their products a cultural and moral appeal. At the same time, processes of globalization make the consumer the last link of transnational production cycles that bring about transnational connectivities and interdependencies (e.g. Young 2003: 103-105). Promises of life-style-branding such as beauty, tolerance or self-fulfilment conflict with realities of corruption, lacking transparency or the exploitation of natural resources. Thus, they become a starting point for a political role of the consumer. Consumers raise their voices and to call for corporate policies that are consistent with the moral loading of their products and assume responsibility for the external costs of their transnational production processes. Those political consumers act in a twofold role of consumer and citizen and oppose the power of multinational corporations: „[…] Consumer critique is fundamental to citizenship in the age of globalization. It brings into the daylight the dangerously hidden issue of political power of corporations. […] it exposes the potential power of consumers as citizens and provides incentives to businesses, which regulation increasingly does not, to mind corporate responsibility to and dependence on democracy” (Scammell 2000: 354). The term consumer citizen implies a reconfiguration of citizenship that will be analysed with regard to the blurring boundaries between notions of ‘the public’ and ‘the private’. Can citizenship be realized in private, economically structured arenas and which role does ‘the public’ play in those arenas? Conceptions of consumer citizenship may not only be met with general scepticism regarding an excessive extension of citizenship which has been brought forward by scholars such as Dahrendorf (2000: 133) for example. Applying the ideas of citizenship on consumers rather raises questions concerning the extent to which citizenship is a suitable category to conceptualise political action within the market sphere. Hence, the paper aims at scrutinising recent notions of consumer citizenship against the backdrop of the historical and philosophical principles of citizenship in order to reveal both the constraints and the normative or analytical potentials of this tendency of reshaping citizenship. Cohen, Lizabeth 2003: A Consumers’ Republic. The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America, New York, NY. Dahrendorf, Ralf 1995: Über den Bürgerstatus, in: van den Brink, Bert/ van Reijen, Willem (Hrsg.): Bürgergesellschaft, Recht und Demokratie, Frankfurt a.M., S. 29-43. Friedland, Lewis/Shah, Dhavan V./Lee, Nam-Jin/Rademacher, Mark A./Atkinson, Lucy/Hove, Thomas 2007: Capital, Consumption, Communication, and Citizenship: The Social Positioning of Taste and Civic Culture in the United States, in: The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 611, 31-50. Inglehart, Ronald 1997: Modernization und Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in 43 Societies, Princeton, NJ. Norris, Pippa 2002: Democratic Phoenix. Political Activism Worldwide. New Social Movements, Protest Politics and the Internet, Cambridge. Putnam, Robert D. 2000: Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, New York, NY. Scammell, Margaret 2000: The Internet and Civic Engagement. The Age of the Citizen Consumer, in: Political Communication 17, S. 351-355. Young, Iris M. 2003: From Guilt to Solidarity. Sweatshops and Political Responsibility, in: Dissent, 50 (2), S. 39-44.