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This study aims to investigate motivations and human values of everyday consumers who participate in the annual day of consumption restraint known as Buy Nothing Day (BND). In addition, this study demonstrates a hybrid content analysis method in which artificial intelligence and human contributions are used in the data analysis.

This research uses a hybrid method of content analysis of a large Twitter data set spanning three years.

Consumer motivations are categorized as relating to consumerism, personal welfare, wastefulness, environment, inequality, anti-capitalism, financial responsibility, financial necessity, health, ethics and resistance to American culture. Of these, consumerism and personal welfare are the most common. Moreover, human values related to “openness to change” and “self-transcendence” were prominent in the BND tweets.

This research demonstrates the effectiveness of a hybrid content analysis methodology and uncovers the motivations and human values that average consumers (as opposed to consumer activists) have to restrain their consumption. This research also provides insight for firms wishing to better understand and respond to consumption restraint.

This research provides insight for firms wishing to better understand and respond to consumption restraint.

The question of why everyday consumers engage in consumption restraint has received little attention in the scholarly discourse; this research provides insight into “everyday” consumer motivations for engaging in restraint using a hybrid content analysis of a large data set spanning over three years.

Marketing is commonly assumed to be responsible for the consumer society with its hedonistic lifestyle and for undermining other cultures by its materialistic stance. This, for many critics, is the dark side of consumer marketing, undermining its ethical standing. This paper considers the connection between marketing, the consumer society, globalization and the hedonistic lifestyle, and whether marketing is guilty as charged. After all, anything that affects the image of marketing as a profession is important, as this influences both recruitment and social acceptance.

This chapter provides an ethnographic account of the interaction between a professional marketing consulting firm and its client. The interaction is analysed as a ‘narrative archipelago’ or complex of discursive practices by which professionalism is constructed. In this case three narratives predominate: the narrative of instrumental reason, of neo-liberalism and consumer protection. The analysis demonstrates the microprocesses by which wider concepts of professionalism are recreated in daily interactions between professionals and clients.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on whether entrepreneurship is the way forward for marketing.

The approach is to reflect on work undertaken in the area and to make some additional contemporary observations.

Together, both entrepreneurship and marketing offer the opportunity to develop unique and tailored solutions to consumers' needs and wants.

This viewpoint has value in its contribution to stimulating thinking and debate about future directions for research.

Whilst there is a growing recognition of environmental degradation, the policies of sustainable development or ecological modernisation offered by national governments and international institutions seem to do little more than “sustain the unsustainable”. By promising to reconcile growth with the environment, they fail to question the economic principle of endless growth that has caused environmental destruction in the first place. In this context, alternatives based on critiques of growth may offer more promising grounds. The aim of this paper is to explore how the degrowth movement that emerged in France over the last decade resonates with, and can contribute to, green politics.

After locating the movement within environmental politics and providing a brief account of its development, the paper focuses on its core theme – escaping from the economy.

Here it is argued that the movement's main emphasis is not merely on calling for less growth, consumption or production, but more fundamentally, in inviting one to shift and re‐politicise the terms in which economic relations and identities are considered. This politicisation of the economy is discussed in terms of the movement's foregrounding of democracy and citizenship, and it is argued that the articulation of these two concepts may offer interesting points of departure for conceptualising and practising alternatives to consumer capitalism.

The final part of the paper explores how the degrowth movement's stance on democracy and citizenship could help address two problematic issues within environmental politics: that of inclusion, and motivation

This paper seeks to provide an illustrative review of the internet campaigns being waged against a number of large corporate retailers.

The paper begins with a short history of anti‐corporate protest and this is followed by a brief outline of the dominance of large corporations within retailing. The paper draws its empirical material from anti‐corporate retail web sites on the internet.

The findings reveal that in some cases internet campaigns target the policies and behaviours of corporate retailers and in others specific retailers are being singled out for special attention. The campaigns address a wide range of issues including the environment and planning, impacts within local economies and communities, workers’ rights and working conditions and the power of retail corporations.

The paper provides an accessible review of the anti‐corporate retailer campaigns being waged on the internet and as such it will interest retail academics, retail employees, political representatives, planning officers and community and pressure groups.

Consumption is a new central issue, globally, driven by more visible consumption concerns of citizens. For instance, entertainment and the environment rise as political issues, while workplace issues decline. To link individual choice with public and urban context, we outline a theory of consumption in specific propositions. They start with individual and personal influence characteristics in shopping and political decisions, then add socio/cultural characteristics. Three cultural types adapted from Elazar are Moralistic, Individualistic, and Traditional – which shift individual patterns. For instance moralistic persons favor more environmentally sensitive consumption, even boycotting cars, TV, and paper towels, backing green groups and parties. Such protest acts via personal consumption are ignored by many past theories. Individualists instead favor more conspicuous, status-oriented consumption, à la Veblen, or the modernism of Baudelaire and Benjamin. For traditionalists, consumption reinforces the past, via family antiques and homes, ritualized and less individualized. The three types help interpret differences in consumption politics by participants in different social movements, cities, and countries.