Consumer Regulation

Long-standing debates about the power of consumers, in relation to production, social distinctions, and global inequalities, are in many ways also debates about consumer regulation, about how people in their capacity as consumers are being formed, framed, influenced by, and influencing social institutions and processes. But, increasingly, regulation is used more narrowly, taken to represent mechanisms that intentionally steer people's actions in certain directions. Such regulatory interventions are about disciplining and exercising power over people, making them more efficient and responsible as members of society. But they are also about welfare, protection, justice, and, closely linked to that, social order. The history of consumer regulation is a history where people's loyalty and active support alternate with considerable creativity and resistance. The definition and understanding of consumer regulation depends not only on how we understand the concept of regulation but also on what is meant by “consumption” and “a consumer.” Theoretical and political approaches to regulation may have highly variable views on the interrelationships between regulatory agents and consumers.

Regulation impacts on and represents an integrated part of consumer culture, the expectations, meanings, and habits of consumption. Some even [Page 306]claim that consumption only exists as regulation. In some sense, that is a useful starting point. Because what we do in everyday life is not to “consume.” We buy, drive, fill up, and maintain a car, and we shop for food, cook meals, eat meals, and dispose of food. Or we use collective transportation and eat out instead. Such activities are formed as and within social practices. Practices represent dependencies and power relations, as expressed in social, cultural, and economic distinctions, as well as in imbalances of power and knowledge in systems of provision. To regulate consumption means to influence concrete practices and the objects involved. Consumer regulation is closely associated with the construction of the consuming subject; an unwary yet rational figure to be protected.

Yet to capture the specificities and power relations of consumer regulation, regulation and practices of consumption should be kept apart. John Searle makes a useful distinction between regulative and constitutive rules. Regulative rules regulate already existing action via different explicit rules, laws, and sanctions, whereas constitutive rules “create the very possibility of certain activities” (Searle 1995, 28). Constitutive rules are the “rules of the game,” sets of dispositions that develop through collective agreement and acceptance. People are typically not conscious of these rules, and they may also have false beliefs about them. This distinction between constitutive and regulative rules is a good opening for analyzing how practices regulate actions and, at the same time, that regulative rules are imposed on practices and become institutionalized. A discussion of consumer regulation is a discussion of the interrelationship between regulatory efforts and consumption practices: how regulative rules may be transformed into the constitutive rules of daily practices, how constitutive rules form taken-for-granted frames for regulatory intervention, and how resistance and creativity emerge against and in-between the rules.