Representing the political consumer: liquid agencies in the production of consumer voice

Abstract

This paper explores the consumer role in marketplace transformation by examining how political consumers become produced in food retailing. It attends to situated representational practices in a Swedish consumer cooperative that seeks to strengthen consumer voice in markets. Combining notions of political and symbolic representations, the paper demonstrates the production of spokespersons for the cooperatives’ owners who, in turn, work to engage other consumers to voice and enact concerns in the cooperative. Four stages of representational practices are identified: (s)electing, equipping,engaging, and enacting. These practices are conceptualised as part of processes of agencing and concerning: (s)electing and equipping work to arrange consumer agencies, while engaging and enacting refer to ways of concerning others that put agencies into motion. Agencies are proposed as liquid in character and the capacity of consumers to shape markets comes into effect depending upon how agencies continuously become connected to each other.