Rhetorical strategies of consumer activists: reframing market offers to promote change.
| Autor | Scaraboto, Daiane |
| Cargo | Report |
Introduction
With the revitalization of blogs as networking platforms and the popularization of social media, consumer activists have found on the internet a platform to extend their capabilities of promoting social and cultural change--both online and offline. Consumer activism and similar contemporary movements tend to surge not only from political opportunities and organizational structures but also from the shared meanings and cultural resources available to individuals (Pichardo, 1997). New Social Movements theorists explain this form of activism as capable of assuming the shape of the broader cultural context, as well as of developing its own movement culture, one that might eventually be incorporated into the broader cultural context (Goodwin & Jasper, 2009; Pichardo, 1997), although not without effort. Activists usually frame distinct movement cultures as alternatives to the status quo that the movement criticizes or challenges. These acts of framing have been considered a key factor in a movement's ability to successfully promote market and cultural change (Benford & Snow, 2000).
Observing the cultural embeddedness of all forms of consumption, consumer researchers working in the Consumer Culture Theory tradition (CCT) have studied specific groups such as subcultures (e.g. Kates, 2002; Pereira & Ayrosa, 2012; Schouten & McAlexander, 1995) and online communities (e.g. Kozinets, 2002; Kozinets & Handelman, 2004; Muniz & Schau, 2005) and their relationship to the market. This collective body of work has explored "the heterogeneous distribution of meanings and the multiplicity of overlapping cultural groupings that exist within the broader sociohistoric frame of globalization and market capitalism" (Arnould & Thompson, 2005, p. 869). More specifically, CCT researchers have investigated consumer groups that oppose certain market practices or the entire market system, under the labels of consumer resistance (e.g. Fournier, 1998; Penaloza & Price, 1993; Sandlin & Callahan, 2009) or consumer activism (e.g. Hollenbeck & Zinkham, 2006; Kozinets & Handelman, 2004). Although highly relevant to our study, these bodies of work have not sufficiently addressed three important aspects of consumers' collective activism.
First, one of the key theoretical issues addressed by CCT researchers is how consumers draw from available market resources to support their identity projects (Arnould & Thompson, 2005). However, consumer researchers have most frequently looked at the influence the marketplace has on consumers' identity projects (e.g. Arsel & Thompson, 2011; Luedicke, Thompson, & Giesler, 2010; Schau, Gilly, & Wolfinbarger, 2009), while the reverse process--how consumers' identity projects influence the marketplace and general culture--is an issue that has been scarcely investigated (Scaraboto & Fischer, 2013).
Second, observing the potential for resistance embedded in consumers' everyday practices (Certeau, 1984), CCT scholars have investigated how consumers resist by subverting the meanings of market offers (Holt, 2002; Kozinets, 2001; Thompson & Haytko, 1997) or by appropriating marketing tools to support their own causes (e.g. Kozinets & Handelman, 2004). Most of this research, however, does not focus on online forms of consumer activism, which have been said to significantly differ from other, more traditional forms of social movements and consumer resistance (Ward & Ostrom, 2006).
Third, although scholars have investigated the role of consumer practices in promoting market and cultural change (e.g. Ansari & Phillips, 2011; Humphreys, 2010a, 2010b; Thompson & Coskuner-Balli, 2007) consumer discourses have received less attention. More specifically, consumer researchers have not sufficiently explored the rhetorical strategies of online consumer activists. We posit that this is a relevant area of investigation because the discourses employed by consumer activists may help shape new collective identities, and create and disseminate new material culture items to be diffused beyond the social movement's boundaries (Harold, 2004; McAdam, 1997), potentially promoting market and cultural change.
Aiming to advance the understanding of these issues, we conducted a qualitative investigation of the Fat Acceptance Movement, an online-based movement, initiated in the United States, that connects consumer-activists who attempt to change societal attitudes about people who are fat (Cooper, 2009). Our main goal in this study is to investigate how consumer activists, in the context of the social fat acceptance movement, reframe market offers while pursuing identity projects, and attempting to promote market and cultural change. We draw from studies of cyberactivism and the New Social Movements theory (NSM), which suggest the importance of framing acts, to achieve our goal by focusing on the rhetorical strategies employed by consumer-activists in promoting different levels of change, varying from individual to social, and from market-specific to cultural.
Given its focus on understanding how market offers are reframed by consumer- activists, this study's contributions are threefold. First, we complement existing CCT literature by investigating how symbols, meanings, and practices available on the market are actively re- appropriated by consumer activists to serve their causes. Second, we identify the rhetorical strategies employed by consumer cyberactivists to promote individual, social, and cultural change. By doing so, we complement studies that focus on consumer practices with our perspective on consumer discourses to advance understanding of consumer resistance and activism. Finally, we connect individual identity projects to market change, advancing consumer researchers' knowledge on how consumers may initiate and promote market transformation.
Our article is organized as follows. We begin by briefly reviewing relevant literature pertaining to New Social Movements and cyberactivism, more specifically consumer online interactions, and rhetorical strategies. We believe that drawing on these three theoretical streams is valuable, given that the former two streams have made advances in explaining how consumer activists congregate online and the latter has discussed the role of persuasion in promoting change. Following the literature review, we present our research context (blogs associated with the Fat Acceptance Movement), our research methods, and our findings. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings to consumer research.
Cyberactivism and New Social Movements
New social movements dedicated to the most diverse causes are generated, expanded, and sustained online by engaged consumers known as cyberactivists (McCaughey & Ayers, 2003). In these movements, face-to-face interaction, protest marches, and boycotts are substituted for the dissemination of information on websites and blogs, hacking actions, e-mail emission, online petitions, and massive posting on social network pages, among other activities.
Cyberactivism is generally defined as the active engagement of individuals within information-based networks built in computer-mediated environments (e.g. Lamberti & Richards, 2011; McCaughey & Ayers, 2003; Montardo & Araujo, 2012). The Internet, by eliminating distance and time boundaries, brought new features to the process of social change. New forms of social movements occur online, and these new forms raise many questions for scholars studying activism, cyberspaces, and cultural change.
Postmes and Brunsting (2002), for example, suggest that the internet may transform social movements in two ways. First, new members and sympathizers are easily gathered to an online movement. The internet facilitates integration and allows individuals that would be outsiders or peripheral members in traditional movements to participate more actively. Second, meaning is attributed individually to the group by each participant because there is no direct influence of one member over another in deciding groups' motives, courses of action, and boundaries.
Despite being simpler that many forms of offline activism, engagement in online activism also demands time, attention, and special technical resources and skills to be effective. Online movements require from their members constant vigilance, regular searches for references and constant updating (Land, 2009). A vast amount of invisible labour is required from online activists, and, differently from traditional social movements, there is usually no organization involved in coordinating individual efforts online. In addition, it is difficult to determine the amount of resources available to the movement as a whole.
In addition, online movements are fluid, because their activities are embedded in members' everyday lives. Cyberactivism frequently happens when activists are at home, comfortably placed in front of their personal computers. These characteristics associate cyberactivism to more fluid forms of activism, which have been investigated by scholars working under the New Social Movement (NSM) research tradition. As Gusfield (1994) explains, these movements are "less likely to be drawn into collective actions as strikes, boycotts, pickets, or demonstrations. They occur in the myriad actions of everyday life; in micro and less public acts" (p. 64). As NSMs, which "moved away from the instrumental issues of industrialism to the quality of life issues of postmaterialism" (Pichardo, 1997, p. 412), cyberactivism tends to focus on identity and lifestyle issues. Nevertheless, political and economic goals may be sought by online activists, just like NSMs may question the purposes of industrial-societies, and the structures of governments.
A key aspect of NSMs, and, we posit, of cyberactivism, are framing processes. Alongside resource mobilization and political processes, framing has been regarded as a central aspect for understanding the evolution and nature of social...
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