Would you rather spend your time sipping a latte in a small, dimly light bohemian coffee shop or a bright, shiny Starbucks? Would you rather drive a fuel-efficient Prius or a powerful, four-wheel drive gas guzzling SUV? Would you rather buy your groceries at a Walmart superstore stocked to the ceiling with nationally advertised brands, or at a Whole Foods with a meticulously arranged produce display and an enticing selection of niche-oriented organic brands, or at a farmers market or CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) program where you can form a direct face-to-face relationship with the person producing your food?

From a conventional consumer behavior perspective, these different scenarios are no different from the myriad other choices that consumers make on a daily basis. Accordingly, they can be explained as the outcome of a given consumer's evaluation of the respective attributes offered by each alternative. Another prominent line of explanation would suggest that these choices are a form of identity signaling through which consumers present a desired self-image to others (i.e., the socially conscious shopper, the sophisticated culinary omnivore; the frugal, down-to-earth consumer). Research that I have conducted with various colleagues over the last 15 years suggests that neither of these dominant explanations tell the full story about the motivations and meanings that underlie practices of political consumerism.

My conceptualization of political consumerism builds upon the works of the historian and social theorist Michel de Certeau, who analyzed the micro-politics of everyday actions. That is, practices through which individuals attempt to change the social conditions that organize and constrain their everyday actions. To illustrate the concept of structural constraints, consider the vast number of Americans who embark on a daily commute from their suburban homes to their place of work; a commute which consumes time, money (fuel costs, automobile depreciation) and often that generates frustration as one negotiates traffic delays and the like. And many Americans would love to forego this costly and stressful routine but they have few practical alternatives owing to a lack of convenient public transportation or housing costs which make living in the distant suburbs more affordable than center city neighborhoods which would be closer to their workplaces. While consumers can choose alternative modes of transportation (such as biking to work), a network of structural relations push consumers to accept, as a default choice, the standard practice of commuting and to bear its associated costs.

Political consumerism refers to situations where consumers seek to consciously resist these structural constraints through alternative consumption practices and do so with a critical-reflexive knowledge of the specific conditions being challenged. My colleagues and I have consistently found that these resistant consumer choices and practices are collective rather individual in nature. In other words, consumers become socially linked to particular consumption communities that are mobilized by their opposition to some dominant structural influence and act upon a shared understanding (or ideology) of the ethical and cultural implications of their resistant consumer practices.

For example, Gokcen Coskuner-Balli and I conducted a study of community-supported agriculture; an alternative market system whereby consumers buy a share in a local farm (which typically costs between $300 to $600) and in return, they receive a weekly box of produce that they acquire at a centralized drop off site or in some cases, the farm itself. In this exchange relationship, the CSA farmer's planting decision and the success (or failure) of the crops determine what goes in the weekly basket as well as the volume of goods provided. Hence, consumers are foregoing their conventional ability to choose what they buy and CSA's "buy a share" pricing model makes it difficult to accurately determine just what they are paying for any particular item in their basket. Why do consumers enter into such an unconventional market relationship? In many cases, CSA consumers first become sensitized to the often-reported health risks associated with processed foods and the pesticides used in conventional agriculture. Thus, CSA offered these concerned consumers a means to incorporate fresh, organic produce into their diets. Importantly, many of these consumers were also responding to the evangelizing recommendations of friends and neighbors who were already members of a CSA. Once consumers commit to a CSA program, they gradually become socialized into the shared ideological values, beliefs, and ideas of the CSA community through their interactions with farmers, other CSA consumers, participation in farm events (e.g., tours, watermelon tasting events, apple picking) and last but not least, the newsletters that many CSA farms include in their weekly baskets. Over time, these consumers come to understand their participation in a CSA as a means to gain some degree of autonomy from the structural influences exerted by large agri-business firms and the array of consumer packaged goods they promote.

A very different ideological expression of the politics of consumption is offered by an analysis of avid Hummer owners that I conducted with Marius Luedicke and Markus Giesler. Prior to our study, Hummer owners had largely been stereotyped as ardent status-seekers who were oblivious to the socially irresponsible nature of their oversized version of conspicuous consumption. In contrast, we discovered that devout Hummer owners had constructed a collective identity in which they were proponents and defenders of liberty. Upon further investigation, we found that their understanding of freedom and its symbolic linkage to a mass-produced SUV was grounded in the ideology of American exceptionalism. This ideology portrays the United States as a proverbial City on the Hill that stands as beacon of freedom and liberty to the world. American exceptionalism further venerates the ideal of rugged individualism and promotes a belief that the United States, as a divinely blessed land, enjoys a boundless frontier of natural resources. For Hummer owners, their environmental critics were not only an affront to these hallowed values but were even akin to communists and socialists, in posing a threat to the sacrosanct American way of life. Paradoxically, the cultural backlash against the Hummer galvanized these owners' belief that driving a Hummer was a principled act of resistance against un-American "tree huggers" who sought to impose tyrannical constraints on their rugged individualist lifestyles and their capacity to experience the American frontier through their off-roading endeavors. Although the Hummer's cultural moment has passed, my colleagues and I believe that this underlying ideology of American exceptionalism can help to explain phenomena such as the high rate of climate change denial among political conservatives and even more extreme versions of politicized fossil fuel consumption, such as the automotive subculture known as "rolling coalopens in a new tab."

For example, Chipotle's award winning animated short filmThe Scarecrowopens in a new tabincorporates critiques of corporate farming that have been central to the ideology of community supported agriculture and other variations of the local food movement. Similarly, Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty reiterates feminist criticisms of the so-called beauty industry in the course of promoting its line of cosmetic and skin care products. One school of thought deems marketers' appropriation of resistant consumer ideologies and marketing strategies to be an inherently hypocritical and exploitative action that misleads consumers, as in so-called greenwashing campaigns. Others counter that such campaigns can contribute to positive social change by building broader social awareness of the problems and concerns being represented.

Dr. Thompson's vignette mentions the term "political consumerism," as a type of consumer behavior in which consumers seek to consciously resist structural constraints through alternative consumption practices. In thinking about marketing segmentation strategies, which type of segmentation would "political consumerism" represent?