“Do Something Simple for the Climate”: How Collective Counter-Conduct Reproduces Consumer Responsibilization
研究消费者对气候友好食品选择责任化的集体抵抗，通过分析瑞典家禽生产商的营销活动，发现四种反行为形式，并揭示这种抵抗反而强化了责任化逻辑。
Abstract This paper studies consumers’ reactions and resistance to being responsibilized for making climate-friendly food choices. While resistance to consumer responsibilization has been studied from an individual experiential perspective, we examine its collective characteristics. We do this by tracing the controversial marketing campaign of a Swedish poultry producer, encouraging consumers to “do something simple for the climate” by eating chicken rather than beef. In our analysis of social media comments and formal complaints to the consumer protection authority, we mobilize Foucault’s notion of counter-conduct to analyse subtle forms of resistance to consumer responsibilization. We identified four interrelated yet distinct forms of consumer counter-conduct: challenging truth claims, demanding ‘more,’ constructing ‘the misled consumer,’ and rejecting vilification. By theorizing these counter-conducts, we demonstrate how consumers collectively contested both the means and ends of responsibilization—but not the underlying premise of individualized responsibility. Thus, our study helps to explain how consumers’ resistance reproduces, rather than undermines, responsibilization.