-
4. Good Housekeeping: Green Products and Consumer Activism
- NYU Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
76 | 4 Good Housekeeping Green Products and Consumer Activism Jo Littler “Green products” in many ways seem to embody what this book terms “commodity activism” par excellence. Every year more products labeled as “green” hit the shelves, raising questions about the extent to which environmental awareness is changing the quality of objects and services for the greater or greener good, and to what extent environmental anxieties are merely (and ironically) being seized upon and channeled into encouraging us to buy more and more stuff. Furthermore, the extent to which such products can be understood to be “environmentally friendly” or as exemplary of corporate greenwash is often notoriously fraught and subject to vigorous contestation. (To take but one example, the British Advertising Standards Association recently ruled that ads by car manufacturer Lexus and petrochemical giant Shell should be banned, as they both misled the public with their green claims.)1 This chapter explores green consumption as a form of commodity activism in a number of ways. First, it contextualizes green consumption in the context of both historical changes to consumer culture and the environmental movement. Second, it offers an overview of key theoretical paradigms through which “green products” either have been, or might be, conceptualized , including “green governmentality,” “productive democracy,” and “cultural ecology.” Third, it considers some of the contradictions of the green commodity—that deeply ambiguous agent of activism—by focusing on one particular product: the nappy. This example is used to tease out and navigate through the historical, environmental, and theoretical paradigms in the earlier section. To do this, it highlights the role of cultural and media discourse in the construction of what “green commodities” mean today by drawing from specific examples, including contemporary popular fiction aimed at mothers (or “henlit”) in which such commodities have a persistent presence, alongside the theories of Felix Guattari expressed in The Three Ecologies, Good Housekeeping | 77 which, I argue, can help theorize the relationship between such discourse and other social and ecological aspects of environmentalism and consumption . In doing so, the chapter aims to move beyond simply stating that the terrain is “complex,” and to move further toward an understanding of which particular aspects of green products are worth buying and which aspects are themselves worth disposing of. Green Products: Some Contexts To understand the contemporary expansion in the production, branding, and selling of “green products,” we need to have a sense of significant shifts that have taken place in two main areas: first, in environmentalism and its surrounding politics, and second, in the nature of contemporary consumer capitalism (phenomena that are also in a number of ways intimately connected). One key context for the expansion of “green” products has been the emergence of the fragmented niche markets of post-Fordism. The shift, roughly from the 1970s, from “producer-led” to “consumer-led” manufacturing, from class-based demographic research to increasingly complex forms of lifestyle branding, the use of emotional selling points, and the expansion of spatial and sensory marketing techniques, has been widely documented in cultural studies and the social sciences.2 As Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have shown, “alternative” and bohemian values were themselves used to fuel the culture of late or post-Fordist capitalism.3 The proliferation of “alternative ” and green products and sensibilities in the 1970s was by the close of the decade seized upon and turned into commercial opportunities, spawning megabrands like the Body Shop and Celestial Seasonings tea, a process Thomas Frank terms “the conquest of cool.”4 Corporations have since this time channeled ethical consumption in ever more specific lifestyle niches for a variety of interest groups, moving toward the highly variegated paradigm of “mass specialization” known in the business sector as the “long tail” model.5 In other words, we now have a very eclectic marketplace where you can buy hyperexploited goods or extremely sound goods depending on your education, mood, and the weight of your wallet. In addition, green consumption, just like the wider field of ethical consumption in which it can be located, has expanded after the rise of the new Right from the 1970s and of so-called free-market neoliberal ideologies. The reorganization of global trade rules and the erosion of public provision in favor of corporate interests led to a widening gap between rich and poor both within and across [3.238.87.31] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 14:20 GMT) 78 | Brand, Culture, Action nations. This is the background against which many of ethical consumption’s...