Beyond governmentality: Towards a critical political economy perspective on responsible consumption

Abstract

The concept of consumer responsibilization challenges conventional thinking around responsible consumption, draws attention to its political dimensions, and situates the emergence of responsible consumers within the realm of neoliberal governance. In this article, we critique and amend the theoretical anchoring of consumer responsibilization in the concept of governmentality and the Foucauldian theory of power that underpins it. We argue that governmental theorizing implies flattening the power relationship between the state, the market and consumers, and that it thereby marginalizes and eclipses the top-down exercise of power under neoliberal governance. This produces theoretical inconsistencies in the transformative consumer literature on responsibilization that risk impeding theory development and silencing critical empirical trajectories. At worst, it may end up reifying the neoliberal governance it sets out to scrutinize. We draw on Karl Polanyi’s writings to advance a critical political economy perspective on consumer responsibilization designed to address these concerns. We develop these ideas by introducing the concept of “embedded responsibilization” to the field of consumer research. Theorizing responsible consumption as being embedded in the Polanyian sense will solidify consumer responsibilization as a theoretically consistent transformative research project and encourage necessary trajectories for empirical research on responsibilization.