“Do Something Simple for the Climate”: How Collective Counter-Conduct Reproduces Consumer Responsibilization

Abstract

AbstractThis 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.