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Communities and consumption
Edited by Caroline Bekin, Marylyn Carrigan and Isabelle Szmigin
Increasingly, we witness reports of consumers who actively seek a voice through their purchase "votes" in a similar way to which citizens register their voice through votes in political elections (e.g. [13] Dickinson and Carsky, 2005; [14] Dickinson and Hollander, 1991; [55] Shaw et al. , forthcoming). Consumers voting through practices such as boycotting and buycotting are not new but have been increasingly reported over recent decades and can occur with daily regularity (e.g. [20] Friedman, 1996, [21] 1999). Participation in traditional politics, on the other hand, has been in decline across many Western countries and citizens are restricted to a system of voting in a general election every four years (e.g. [24] Hertz, 2001). Although consumers voting through the marketplace in this way has been criticised as a product of an increasingly individualistic society, [11] Delanty (2003, p. 4) argues that strong individualism is the backbone which sustains collective action. He considers such collective action in terms of community a "collective WE opposing injustice". The nature of collective action, however, is unclear within individualized consumption practices, as is the existence and nature of a community of consumer voters. Given the lack of attention given to the phenomenon of consumer voting, this paper seeks to address this absence through the construct of community, a concept which has received increased attention within consumption behaviour (e.g. [45] Muniz and O'Guinn, 2001; [52] Schouten and McAlexander, 1995).
To best explore the concept of consumer voting communities, we will first discuss the theoretical context of consumer voting before discussing competing theories of community as a preliminary to setting out our empirical data.
Consumer voters
As suggested above the idea of consumer voters is not new. Early last century economist [18] Fetter (1911, p. 394) suggested that "Every buyer ... determines in some degree the direction of industry. The market is a democracy where every penny gives the right to vote". Later, from the perspective of the UK political right, [50] Powell (1969, p. 33) supported the idea of individual perferences through consumer voting when he stated:
Everyone who goes into a shop and chooses one article instead of another is casting a vote in the economic ballot...