(Working Title) Escaping consumer culture: anti-consumerism and voluntary simplicity
In a time of increasingly pressing environmental and economic challenges, over-consumption in Western societies continues to present risks to the planet, social justice and human happiness. Against a backdrop of compelling evidence that warns of catastrophic environmental and demographic disruption, the axiomatic equation of quality of life with material wealth is beginning to be questioned. Although this is not a new sentiment, the last decades of consumerism have meant that few have challenged the notion that the ‘good life’ is one of ever-increasing living standards and continuing material consumption. Throughout history, people have voiced what might be considered anti-consumption rhetoric. Greek thinkers, religious writings, academic criticism that traverses disciplinary boundaries, and best-selling paperbacks yield much that warns against the futility of an existence that rests upon ‘having’ as a means to happiness or a meaningful life. More recently, new and varied forms of resistance to the dominant consumer ideology are emerging, from wearing symbols of rebellion, to community boycotts, alternative ‘festival’ events (Gabriel and Lang 2006; Kozinets 2002; Belk and Costa 1998) new consumption communities (Bekin, Carrigan and Szmigin 2005) as well as some religious and organisational consumer activism. The current body of sociological and consumer behaviour literature suggests that emancipation from the market is almost impossible; opting out of being a consumer still may not mean escaping the personal discontent that fuels dreams of a better life, and psychological escape attempts serve only to reinstate and support the everyday routine of paramount reality (Cohen and Taylor 1976).
However, academic investigation of consumers who resist mainstream consumerism continues to develop in the light of a resurgence of interest in simple living or ‘downshifting’. One such social movement, characterised by placing an ecological ethic, personal fulfilment and a more meaningful life above careerism and material wealth, is voluntary simplicity; a fairly well-researched social phenomena in the United States but far less well understood in the UK. There is still a need to research the ways in which these ‘invisible rebels’ (Gabriel and Lang 2006) attempt to escape or subvert the ‘work and spend’ (Schor 1998) treadmill of their everyday life and the meaning they make of such experiences. If the Fordist Deal of alienating work in return for increasing living standards is dissipating, how these people describe their practices and experience of their responses to consumer culture allows greater understanding of the state of late-stage capitalist consumerism as well as enabling some glimpses of how a post-consumerist, post-materialistic society might look.
