Globalising consumers: the history of consumers as a socio-political movement
Matthew Hilton (Birmingham)
This paper will overview the developments in modern consumer associations, from their rise in the United States and Europe from the 1950s through to developments at the international development and the growth of consumerism as a social movement throughout the world. It will examine the rise of the global consumer movement and will demonstrate that consumers played a crucial role in the development of global civil society in the 1970s and 1980s, articulating consumer concerns – based as much on basic needs as on the concerns of the affluent – in bodies such as the United Nations. The consumer movement in the 1980s became a broad-ranging NGO, leading other social movements in world-wide attacks on the use of pesticides, the activities of pharmaceutical companies, the marketing of breast-milk substitutes and in a concerted effort to develop a code of conduct for the activities of transnational corporations. Such a type of consumer agency highlights a very different model that that which has been imagined in models promoted by both economics and cultural studies.
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