Thesis advisor: Charles Derber / This thesis examines the relationship between consumption and politics. It focuses on how ethical consumption can be positioned to be part of political participation. It also pays attention to how it can serve as a pathway for creating a better society in which ethical, individual consumers are mobilized toward the collective activism and the conventional political participation that influences social change in the context of globalization and individualism. To demonstrate this, the study examines the case of a consumer cooperative: iCOOP in South Korea based on data from in-depth interviews with members of iCOOP. The findings show that ethical consumption practices can be understood in the context of life politics. Participants in this study constantly make attempts to readapt their consuming patterns and choose their lifestyles based on a changed consciousness of the self, the world, and the interrelations between both at the individual level. By extension, participants analyzed as political agents of life politics show that they can become more engaged in collective activism and conventional political participation. What makes this mobilization possible is that they were able to be involved in rehearsal phases for citizens' roles at the collective level, and to gain easy access to social issues and a set of political tools in iCOOP. It is significant that iCOOP provides a platform for collecting and maintaining the state of this collectivized consumer power by organizing individually scattered consumers. It is not an `imagined community' for mobilizing scattered consumers, but rather a practical and real community established by consumers themselves in which they try to become aware of interrelations between the self and the world, rearrange their ways of living, and further expand their interests and actions to large-scale social and political issues for making social change. These findings not only support the alternative views of ethical consumption as political participation, these also offer a fresh perspective by showing the process and the mechanism of the connection between consumption and politics. This study ultimately leads to the possibility that ethical consumption can become a vehicle that brings about a meaningful change in both life and conventional politics. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology. / Discipline: TO ADD.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BOSTON/oai:dlib.bc.edu:bc-ir_103537 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Lee, Hyemi |
| Publisher | Boston College |
| Source Sets | Boston College |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, thesis |
| Format | electronic, application/pdf |
| Rights | Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. |
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