Tensions in the Enactment of Neoliberal Consumer Responsibilization for Waste
研究基于法国废物责任化数据，揭示家庭在履行废物责任时面临时空、指导和破坏性张力，消费者通过将废物留在家中应对这些张力，并指出新自由主义治理的边界。
Abstract Research has explored consumer responsibilization processes, yet there is a lack of understanding about the tensions that consumers might experience when enacting their responsibility. Using a large data set collected in France around waste responsibilization, we demonstrate how waste pathways can generate spatiotemporal, guidance, and destructiveness tensions in households. Consumers respond to such tensions by keeping waste at home, which allows them to suspend, clarify, or reappropriate their waste responsibility. In delineating the waste responsibility tensions, our study reveals the boundaries of neoliberal governance’s success in mobilizing entrepreneurial consumers’ actions, namely, community structure/shared vision, emotions, and market demand. These boundaries illustrate the challenges for neoliberal governance in providing and maintaining for consumers an illusion of control through the crafting of heightened uncertainty, abstraction, and risk–benefit categorizations. This study has implications for waste management actors, as well as consumer researchers interested in neoliberal governance, consumer responsibilization, consumer activism, sustainability, and waste disposal.