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National Varieties of Consumerism

With growing economic prosperity in the post-World War II period, affluent consumers across the advanced industrialized countries organized into coherent movements that advocated new policy initiatives to protect consumers against product-related damage, against disappointment in their purchases, against declining purchasing power in the form of inflation and price gouging. This often meant confronting established societal economic groups whose interests appeared to oppose those of consumers, and allying with others. How these consumer groups organized, and how their organized interests became integrated into the policymaking process, has become the focus of recent historical and policy study.' This growing body of work has emphasized the Puzzles of consumer mobilization: the mobilization of resources, the creation of new institutions and Standards, the formation of a coherent consumer identity. Through a dose analysis of strategies of Organization and political engagement, these researchers have traced the economic and social embeddedness of national consumer movements. The goal of this article is to pull back; to look more broadly at the trends in consumer mobilization and protection across the advanced industrialized countries; and to draw some tentative conclusions about the variety and logic of the consumerism phenomenon. The term 'consumerism' is used here specifically to refer to the collective, organized actions of consumers in their own interest.^ The core challenge of postwar consumerism was to construct a collective political and economic identity for an economic group that had not previously been identified as a coherent interest group. Who was the postwar consumer? What was his/her interest, and how could it be expressed and represented in economic and social pohcy formation? Answers to these questions took the form of a set of discourses about the consumer's status, and about the legitimate claims they could make on producers and on society. These discourses implicated the very social and economic identity of the newly affluent consumer. They set the terms of political debate over consumer Protections, eventually placing their mark on the new institutions and regulations that emerged in response to consumer grievance. The outcome was a set of national consumption regimes exhibiting systematic differences in their approach to institutionalizing the consumer interest.