ABSTRACT
The idea of a consumer movement is widely regarded to have been born at the dawn of the twentieth century, embodied by the formation of theNationalConsumers League (NCL)which was established in 1899 (Glickman 2009). While there is a long history of harnessing the purchasing power of consumers (in the form of boycotts, for example) in an effort to impact a myriad of social causes, the rise of a consumer movement is a different and more recent occurrence. As embodied by the NCL, for the first time, consumers themselves came to be recognized as a distinct group that required its own lobby to protect consumer interests and define consumer responsibilities and behaviors. The NCL emerged as the first organization with a mission squarely focused on the consumer, aiming to protect and teach “an ignorant, overmatched, and largely indifferent public new rules of ethical consumption” (ibid.: 161). As can be seen from the above quote from the organization’s first leader, the NCL sought to lead a movement aimed at transforming the consumer into a responsible citizen. Based on the idea that the consumer, just like the worker in the Marxian narrative, was a
victim of a highly complex economic system controlled by powerful business elite, leaders of the newly formed consumer movement sought to transform the consumer from helpless victim to societal savior (Glickman 2009; Murray and Ozanne 1991). To do this, the NCL, as a leading organization in the early days of the consumer movement and self-proclaimed ‘expert’ in consumer matters, sought to resolve what they saw as consumer vulnerability and ineptitude by investigating moral and safe consumption options for consumers, agitating consumers to alter their consumption behavior accordingly, and then lobbying government to legislate restrictions on the
power of business as a means of protecting the consumer. As consumer movements continued to evolve throughout the twentieth century, the “investigate, agitate, legislate” mantra has, until recently, continued to capture the scope of the consumer movement (Glickman 2009). However, in the digital age of the twenty-first century where the disintermediated nature of
the Internet has democratized the voice of the consumer, and where localized meaning and micro-emancipation have emerged as the postmodern mantra (Firat and Venkatesh 1995; Holt 2002), the “investigate, agitate, legislate” mantra with its implied hierarchical, paternalistic, topdown approach may no longer capture all aspects of the consumer movement. As developed in this chapter, online consumer movements in a digital age may best be captured by the mantra pontificate, moralize, obfuscate, speaking to changes in how we come to understand and research online consumer movements.
