Anti-consumption and Consumer Resistance: Concepts, concerns, conflicts, and convergence - ICAR/ NACRE 2010 Proceedings

Abstract

Consumer resistance and anti-consumption are without doubt topics of growing interest not only in consumer behaviour studies but also in the fields of sociology and cultural studies. Marseilles and the whole Mediterranean Basin appears to be a relevant place to discuss these topics. Indeed, as Thierry Fabre a major thinker from Marseilles coined, “the American way of life, which defines a consumption standard that exists at a global scale, is not our destiny. Markets and exchanges may have always been at the heart of Mediterranean societies, but money has never been our main value. Trading things involves first and foremost trading with other people, and we feel that the economic domain continues to be subordinated to the human one”. The Mediterranean way of life has not surrendered to this new world order. In the wake of the late Michel de Certeau, we can state that whereas certain pundits assert that an economic logic is the best way to organise life, assigning everyone and everything a place and a role, Mediterranean people react by silently extracting themselves from this conformist equation. They seek to invent their own daily lives through the way they do things, using subtle ruses and tactical resistance to divert products and codes for their own benefit, re-appropriating space and the utilisation thereof. The mission of Euromed Management takes into account of this Mediterranean way of thinking. Euromed Management not only has a vision of a business school, but it has indeed rather an understanding and interpretation of an economic reality. The Euro-Mediterranean history and tradition, that is one of multiple appearances and different truths, gives today a rich perspective to what is identified as the Euro-Mediterranean region. Marseilles and its region, crossroads of different worlds and a European capital city, has acquired a truly European sociology with a typical managerial and social thinking. The purpose of this first symposium hosted by Euromed Management is to provide a forum for international researchers sharing interest on Anti-consumption and Consumer Resistance, in order to identify redundancies and differences between these two topics. While they are still in the early stages of a growing interest, scarce research has examined their various conflicts and/or convergences in accounting for consumers’ ways of opposing, escaping or altering consumption. Concepts, frameworks, theories and fields settings that can advance their study and fresh examination of their tensions will be debated.