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Abstract
Despite their popularity and significance, there is a paucity of communication scholarship on boycotts and buycotts. This absence may be due to an erroneous assumption that such tactics are merely economic, as well as to a hesitancy to critique consumption. This essay focuses on three contemporary US-based exemplars that address global ecological crises: the Rainforest Action Network boycott of Mitsubishi; the Farm Labor Organizing Committee boycott of Mt. Olive Pickle Company; and the Carrotmob buycott of a liquor store. The circuit of culture framework and a radically contextual approach provide a more nuanced analysis of consumer-based advocacy campaigns.
Acknowledgements
This essay was inspired by the lack of awareness of the significance of boycotts during the 2008 National Communication Association Convention controversy over the Manchester Grand Hyatt. The author would like to thank Ted Striphas, Chuck Morris, Greg Wise, and the anonymous reviewers for their incredibly helpful feedback and encouragement; this is a better essay as a result.
Notes
1. J. Robert Cox, “Nature's ‘Crisis Disciplines’: Does Environmental Communication Have an Ethical Duty?” (keynote address, Eight Biennial Conference on Communication and Environment, Jekyll Island, GA, 25 June 2005). Revised and published under the same title in: Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture 1, no. 1 (2007): 5–20.
2. GreenAmerica, “Boycotts: Economic Action to Stop Corporate Irresponsibility” (Washington, DC: GreenAmerica, 2004–2009), http://www.coopamerica.org/programs/boycotts/ (accessed 21 February 2009).
3. GreenAmerica, “Responsible Shoppers: Your Guide to Promoting a Responsible Economy” (Washington, DC: GreenAmerica, 2004–2009), http://www.coopamerica.org/programs/responsibleshopper/act_hub.cfm (accessed 21 February 2009).
4. Recognizing boycotts as verbal and nonverbal has been pivotal to their legal standing as free speech. Franklyn S. Haiman, “The First Amendment: The Rhetoric of the Streets Revisited,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 68 (1982): 371–83.
5. Charles E. Morris, III and Stephen Howard Browne, ed., “Introduction,” in Readings in the Rhetoric of Social Protest, 2nd ed. (State College, PA: Strata Publishing, Inc., 2006), 1, emphasis in original.
6. Kirt H. Wilson, “Interpreting the Discursive Field of the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Holt Street Address,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8, no. 2 (2005): 299–326; Haiman, “The First Amendment.” An exception would be the groundwork Ronald Walter Greene establishes for studying radical advocacy; see, for example: “Rhetoric and Capitalism: Rhetorical Agency as Communicative Labor,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 37, no. 3 (2004): 188–206.
7. Though I will refrain subsequently, I place “free market” here in quotes because it does not currently exist in the United States; it is a theory that we should not have government intervention (except, perhaps, against force or fraud) in the economic sphere of public life so that supply and demand can dictate the outcome of a capitalistic marketplace. Government bailouts of corporations, for one example, violate this theory.
8. Co-op American changed its name to GreenAmerica. Handbook available at GreenAmerica, “Boycotts” website.
9. Christine Harold, OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 31.
10. Lawrence Grossberg, “Does Cultural Studies Have Futures? Should It? (Or What's the Matter with New York?)” Cultural Studies 20, no. 1 (2006): 19. The reverse also is true: even causes that are imagined as “merely cultural” involve political economy; Judith Butler, “Merely Cultural,” New Left Review 227 (1998): 33–44.
11. Jody Berland, ‘What is Environmental Cultural Studies?’ (unpublished address, Cultural Environmental Studies Symposium, York University, Toronto, Canada, 31 March 2005).
12. Two essays that document this past reluctance and now emergent trend to engage consumption as an ecological matter are: Phaedra C. Pezzullo, “Overture: The Most Complicated Word,” Cultural Studies 22, no. 3 (May 2008): 361–8; Sam Binkley and Jo Littler, “Introduction: Cultural Studies and Anti-Consumerism: A Critical Encounter,” Cultural Studies 22, no. 5 (September 2008): 519–30.
13. Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of this Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (London: Routledge, 1992).
14. Lawrence Grossberg, Bringing It All Back Home: Essays on Cultural Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), esp. 245–71.
15. See, for example, related discussions of “immanent critique” in: Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 143–5; Theodor W. Adorno, ed., “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Samuel Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972), 17–34.
16. For example, Gitlin argues: “an opposition movement is caught in a fundamental and inescapable dilemma” in which standing “outside the dominant realm of discourse” leads one to be “consigned to marginality and political irrelevance” and working within “conventional rules” leads one “to be assimilated… identified with narrow (if important) reform issues”; this, “is the condition of movements in all the institutions of liberal capitalism.” Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 290–1.
17. See, for example: Grossberg, We Gotta; Susan G. Davis, Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).
18. Grossberg, We Gotta, 388; 396. The referent of “the master's tools” comes from a 1979 speech by Lorde and often is cited out of context, though this point exceeds this essay. Audre Lorde, “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), 110–3. For more context, see: Lester C. Olson, “The Personal, the Political, and Others: Audre Lorde Denouncing ‘The Second Sex Conference,’” Philosophy and Rhetoric 33, no. 3 (2000): 259–85.
19. Binkley and Littler, “Introduction,” 521.
20. Jeremy Gilbert, “Against the Commodification of Everything: Anti-Consumerist Cultural Studies in the Age of Ecological Crisis,” Cultural Studies 22, no. 5 (September 2008): 557.
21. Grossberg, Bringing It All Back Home, 254; 257; 256; 257; 259; 261.
22. “Any discourse is constituted as an attempt to dominate the field of discursivity, to arrest the flow of differences, to construct a center. We will call the privileged discursive points of this partial fixation, nodal points.” Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), 112, emphasis in original. On how articulation theory can be a productive way to imagine ecological and social change, see: Kevin Michael DeLuca, Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism (New York: Guilford Press, 1999); Phaedra C. Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Travel, Pollution, and Environmental Justice (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007).
23. Paul Du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay, and Keith Negus, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (London: Sage/Open University Press, 1997).
24. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Stephen Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984).
25. Richard Johnson, Deborah Chambers, Parvati Raghuram, and Estella Tincknell, The Practice of Cultural Studies (London: Sage, 2004).
26. Richard Johnson, Deborah Chambers, Parvati Raghuram, and Estella Tincknell, The Practice of Cultural Studies (London: Sage, 2004), 42, emphasis in original.
27. This fifth point is perhaps most explicitly argued in Paul du Gay et al., Doing Cultural Studies.
28. Haiman, “The First Amendment,” 379.
29. Significantly, these two legacies were born of struggles over globalization, the power economics has to shape our lives and relationships, and the ways that the environment (i.e., farmland, salt, and cotton goods) matters to social hierarchies. N. Craig Smith, Morality and the Market: Consumer Pressure for Corporate Accountability (London: Routledge, 1990), 145; 134–5. This characterization differs from some political theorists, such as Iris Marion Young, who categorizes all boycotts as confrontational direct actions or protests enacted in contrast to deliberative democracy; I believe this dichotomization marginalizes the co-constitutive relationship of boycott—and by extension, buycott—campaigns from the negotiation of deliberative democratic practices, as well as the significance of their nonviolent appeals for social change. Iris Marion Young, “Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy,” Political Theory 29, no. 5 (2001): 670–90.
30. Though I am happy to elaborate elsewhere, the range of my politics related to the meat industry (broadly defined) exceeds the scope of this essay.
31. Friedman categorizes these as expressive rather than instrumental boycott campaigns; his exemplar is one that began in 1973 called “Don't Buy Anything Day.” Instrumental boycotts not only are judged on their execution (i.e., whether or not consumers joined the cause), but also on their consequence (i.e, whether or not the campaign goal(s) were achieved). Monroe Friedman, “Consumer Boycotts in the United States, 1970–1980: Contemporary Events in Historical Perspective,” The Journal of Consumer Affairs 19, no. 1 (1985): 106.
32. Monroe Friedman, “Consumer Boycotts,” 101–2. The reluctance to initiate a boycott is often noted, as former National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) President Kweisi Mfume said in reference to NAACP's boycott campaign against the state of South Carolina after refusing to remove the confederate flag from the top of its capitol: “This is a trigger you don't want to pull until all else has failed. In the case of South Carolina, after 38 years of negotiating even the N.A.A.C.P. has a limit to its patience.” As of 2000, South Carolina's Chamber of Commerce reported the following impact: “more than 100 conventions and other events have been canceled in the state, which has lost at least $18 million in tourist dollars.” Steven Greenhouse, “Ideas & Trends: A Weapon for Consumers; The Boycott Returns,” New York Times, 26 March 2000, 4.
33. Rainforest Action Network, “About RAN,” Rainforest Action Network, 1995–2008, http://ran.org/about_ran/ (accessed 17 October 2009).
34. Rainforest Action Network, Save the Rainforest: Boycott Mitsubishi, Pamphlet, n.d.
35. Rainforest Action Network, “Background: Mitsubishi Case Study,” Boycott Mitsubishi Campaign: International Organizer's Manual (San Francisco, CA: Rainforest Action Network, 1992), 33.
36. Rainforest Action Network, “Press Release: Landmark Settlement Reached in Long-Running Environmental Boycott of Two Mitsubishi Companies.” Rainforest Action Network, 1998, http://ran.org/media_center/news_article/?uid=2645 (accessed 17 October 2009).
37. “Here at mitsubishi.com, we speak of ‘Mitsubishi’ in terms of the member companies subject to the company search on this website, which counts to approximately 200. … The independence of the Mitsubishi companies makes the ‘Mitsubishi’ all but impossible to define and thus a clear number the group consists of cannot be stated. If we simply count the number of companies with ‘Mitsubishi’ in their names existing world wide, that would be around 400. But there are also hundreds of Mitsubishi companies that do not have ‘Mitsubishi’ in their names.” Mitsubishi, “About Mitsubishi,” Tokyo, Japan, mitsubishi.com committee, 2009, http://www.mitsubishi.com/e/group/about.html (accessed 24 June 2009).
38. Claudia H. Deutsch, “Group Ends Its Boycott of Mitsubishi Entities,” New York Times, 12 February 1998, D4.
39. The settlement also helped improve the public image of Mitsubishi Motor Sales of America Inc., which was experiencing “huge losses, a federal lawsuit over alleged sexual harassment and discrimination…, and a threatened boycott of Mitsubishi cars and trucks by … Rev. Jesse Jackson.” Harry Stoffer, “Mitsubishi Hit With Whale of a Problem,” Automotive News, 4 August 1997, 1. Regarding why Mitsubishi claims it was chosen as a boycott target, see: Akihiro Tamiya, “Environmental Action on Corporate Agendas,” The Japan Economic Journal (21 July 1990): 1.
40. “Ask the Globe,” The Boston Globe, 1 November 1994, National/Foreign Section, 74; “Environmental Group Aims at Mitsubishi,” New York Times, 11 May 1993, D6.
41. Rainforest Action Network, “Frequently Asked Questions About the Memorandum of Understanding Between Rainforest Action Network, Mitsubishi Motor Sales America, and Mitsubishi Electric America,” Rainforest Action Network, 1998, http://www.ran.org/ran/ran_campaigns/mitsubishi/QT/q_a.html (accessed 9 May 2000).
42. Boris Holzer, “Transnational Protest and the Corporate Planet: The Case of Mitsubishi Corporation vs. the Rainforest Action Network,” in Environmental Sociology: From Analysis to Action, ed. Leslie King and Deborah McCarthy (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 367.
43. Phaedra C. Pezzullo and Ronald Sandler, “Introduction: Revisiting the Environmental Justice Challenge to Environmentalism,” in Environmental Justice and Environmentalism: The Social Justice Challenge to the Environmental Movement, ed. Ronald Sandler and Phaedra C. Pezzullo (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 1–24.
44. For media coverage of the FLOC Campbell and R. J. Reynolds boycotts, see: Dick Meister, “Harvesters: Tobacco's Other Victims,” Korea Times, 26 November 2007, http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2009/09/160_14378.html (accessed 17 October 2009); Ward Sinclair, “Saucy Union Battles Tomato Giants; Pickers Press Libby and Campbell Soup for Better Wages, Benefits,” Washington Post, 8 July 1982, A7.
45. Farm Labor Organizing Committee, “Farm Labor Organizing Committee AFL-CIO: The FLOC Movement,” FLOC, 2007, http://www.floc.com/FLOCabout.htm (accessed 22 February 2009). See also: Sandi Smith-Nonini, Uprooting la Injusticia: Arrancando de Raiz Injustice (Durham, NC: The Institute for Southern Studies, March 1999); “The ABCs of H2A,” The Independent, February 21–7, 1996, 13.
46. I was a boycott participant from its initial launch. Teaching about it in a rhetoric of social movements undergraduate course at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill also led one of my students, Nick Wood, to become one of FLOC's key organizers in the campaign.
47. Mt. Olive, “Pickle People,” Mt. Olive, 1999–2008, http://www.mtolivepickles.com/ (accessed 22 February 2009).
48. Lynn Williams, email message to author, 1999.
49. As Karl Marx initially defined “alienated labor,” industrial capitalism increases the distance, and therefore makes more abstract the relationship between: (1) the worker and “the product of labor,” which he notably claims also is “the relation to the sensuous external world, to the objects of nature” because people cannot live without nature as “food, heating, clothes, a dwelling” and so forth; (2) the labor and the act of production; (3) the worker and him/herself or “self-estrangement”; and (4) the worker and other people (including workers). Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 74–7.
50. Farm Labor Organizing Committee, AFL-CIO, “Before You Buy this Jar of Pickles, Think of the Tragic Human Cost: Mt. Olive Boycott,” Flier, Corporate Campaign, Inc., 1999.
51. FLOC, “The Story of FLOC,” FLOC, 2007, http://www.floc.com/floc%20history.htm (accessed 22 February 2009).
52. Steven Greenhouse, “North Carolina Growers’ Group Signs Union Contract for Mexican Workers,” New York Times, 17 September 2004, A16.
53. FLOC, “The Story of FLOC.”
54. Greenhouse, “North Carolina Growers’ Group,” 16.
55. Citgo is a subsidiary of Venezuela's state-owned oil company. Buying gasoline from Citgo is framed as an affirmation of the politics of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, known vocal critic of then US President George W. Bush, over oil more directly implicated in US/Mid-Eastern military relations. Jeff Cohen, “Buy Your Gas at Citgo: Join the BUY-cott!” CommonDreams.org, 16 May 2005, http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0516-25.htm (accessed 16 May 2005).
56. Betsy D. Gelb argues boycotts—and I would add buycotts—expand our understanding of “success” in these instances to include not only “boycotts as a bargaining chip,” but also as an expressive act unto themselves to punish a marketer or reduce consumption. Betsy D. Gelb, “More Boycotts Ahead?: Some Implications,” Business Horizons (1995): 71–2.
57. Updated information on Gore's ongoing campaign is available at: Paramount Classics, An Inconvenient Truth, 2006, http://www.climatecrisis.net (accessed 21 February 2009).
58. Carrotmob, “Carrotmob Makes It Rain in Liquor Store!” [YouTube, Video], 21 April 2008, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUz0kM1u_jk (accessed 21 February 2009). Other direct quotes from http://www.carrotmob.org/ (accessed 21 February 2009).
59. “Flash mobs” form when groups of loosely affiliated people converge or assemble in a public space to perform some act and then disperse quickly. Some make no explicit political statement, such as the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Undergraduate Library Flash Mob Rave illustratively depicted in: cackalacky789, “UNC Chapel Hill UL Flash Mob Rave,” YouTube, Video], 10 December 2008, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruEMaDZWRcs (accessed 21 February 2009).
60. See note 51 for video. Harold, OurSpace, 31.
61. If this was a boycott, the concerted refusal to spend money on a secondary boycott target (i.e., a store versus the product that is the focus of the campaign) could be construed as illegal in some states since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act (more formally known as the Labor-Management Relations Act). The National Labor Relations Act of 1987 and earlier noted cases did expand the legal rights of boycotters, however, to publicize disputes between unions and employers. Gelb, “More Boycotts Ahead?” 73.
62. See note 51.
63. San Francisco Energy Watch helped K&D Market reduce their use of electricity by approximately US$968 or .887 Kilowatts, which is roughly equivalent to a little more than 7,000 hours/year, or 3,500 pounds of carbon dioxide or about half of what the average Californian produces in a year. These estimates are based on Carrotmob's claims and the author's calculations. For more details, see: San Francisco Energy Watch, “Home Page,” http://www.sfenergywatch.org/index.htm (accessed 8 March 2010); and Pacific Gas & Electric Company, “Carbon Footprint Calculator Assumptions,” 2010, http://www.pge.com/myhome/environment/calculator/assumptions.shtml (accessed 8 March 2010).
64. “Change We Can Profit From; For-profit Activism,” The Economist, 31 January 2009. LexisNexis; Tanis Taylor, “G2: Ethical Living: Meet the CarrotMob: Forget Negative Campaigning, Why Not Reward Green Businesses Instead—With a Group Spending Spree? Tanis Taylor Joins their First UK event,” The Guardian (London), 18 September 2008, 18.
65. Carrotmob, “Summary of All Past Carromobs Worldwide,” Carrotmob, http://carrotmob.org/past-carrotmobs/ (accessed 6 March 2010).
66. Part of the resilience of capitalism may be attributed to its adaptability; hopefully, future research on boycotts and buycotts will explore further the contradictions and possibilities these campaigns pose for capitalism.
67. Binkley and Littler, “Introduction,” 525.