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The goal in this research is to offer a new interpretation of activism by focusing not on the various ideologies but on the order of worth that coordinates activism.

Ethnographic approaches of participant observation and nondirective interviewing were the methods used in this study.

Drawing on the order models (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1991), the authors introduce the existence of an “activist order.” This order is composed of rules that coordinate activists’ practices. Activists draw on this “activist order” to justify their practices but also to criticize other orders such as the market order.

This “activist order” serves as the structure underpinning both activists’ institutional frameworks (such as CSA and LETS) and their actions (e.g., antiadvertising campaigns). This paper also has implications for our understanding of the relationship between the Marketplace and consumer movements. The authors demonstrate that people navigate between different order of worth, from the market order to the “activist order” and vice versa.

Food sovereignty has increasingly become a common political framework for alternative food movements seeking for radical change in the agrifood system. The transformative potential of food sovereignty is context-dependent, resulting in different approaches and strategies in different territories. In this chapter, we address the case of Catalonia (Spain), as an example of global North food sovereignty movement, in which consumers play a predominant role. Based on five discourses on food sovereignty previously identified as a political proposal for social change in Catalonia, namely “activism,” “anti-purism,” “self-management,” “pedagogy,” and “pragmatism,” we discuss internal divergences within the movement that lead to convergences with other political trends in the agrifood system. Despite the movement converges in several critical points at a conceptual level, such as what is the meaning of food sovereignty, or its understanding of the food sovereignty proposal as a vehicle for deepening democracy, it has strong divergences at the operational level, that is, on how to achieve the social and political change it seeks. A structuralist or agency-focused vision of social change and the relevance assigned to ideological affinity among actors are core elements explaining such divergences. In this chapter, the authors explore these internal divergences within the Catalan food sovereignty movement, which at the same time lead to convergences with other repoliticization concepts within the agrifood studies literature (specifically food democracy, food citizenship, and political consumerism).

The purpose is to argue that market-generated and brand-related phenomena such as fandoms work as a social and institutional force beyond the market and to showcase their influence on the society as a whole.

The influence of fandoms on many societal institutions is explored through the literature on fandom studies and consumer research.

The research indicates that market-generated resources and their related sociocultural dynamics play a significant role in shaping the evolution of many institutions of current societies.

The research is exclusively focused on fandoms despite the varied facets of market-related sociocultural dynamics, opportunity exists for research beyond the exploratory work done here shifting the focus from fandoms to brand systems.

Researchers, especially in Consumer Culture Theory (CCT), may use the perspective shift from market to society to enlarge the scope to new fields of study, out of the market.

The research provides new lenses to understand emerging phenomena in fields such as religion and/or politics difficult to understand with traditional frameworks.

This paper provides exploratory research identifying market-related social and institutional processes and emphasizing how they influence other societal institutions, such as family, religion, corporations, professions, and politics; rather than bringing social and institutional processes into the marketplace.

Can market-based regulation based on consumer pressure and ‘independent monitoring’ serve as the basis for transnational corporation regulation? In an increasingly integrated global economy, many scholars and policy makers fear that mobile capital may force a ‘race to the bottom’; can independent non-governmental organizations and ethical consumers provide a counterweight to cost-cutting pressures? This paper compares three of the best known examples of transnational monitoring – the Sullivan Principles in South Africa, the Rugmark social labeling program in India, and the Commission for the Verification of Codes of Conduct's monitoring experiences in the apparel industry of Guatemala – to consider some common features of transnational monitoring.

This paper discusses whether subcultural activism can play a role in the delegitimation of mainstream markets.

The authors conducted a content analysis of press articles on the subject using FactivaTM database and searching the three most read newspapers in Brazil (Ertimur & Coskuner-Balli, 2015; Humphreys, 2010a, 2010b). Data was collected both retrospectively and concurrently. Analysis used open and theoretical coding, moving up from the emic meanings extracted from the texts to an etic account of the phenomena (Cherrier, H., & Murray, J. B. (2007). Reflexive dispossession and the self: Constructing a processual theory of identity. Consumption Markets & Culture, 10(1), 1–29; Thompson, C. J. (1997). Interpreting consumers: A hermeneutical framework for deriving marketing insights from the texts of consumers’ consumption stories. Journal of Marketing Research, 34(4), 438–455; Thompson, C. J., & Haytko, D. L. (1997). Speaking of fashion: Consumers’ uses of fashion discourses and the appropriation of countervailing cultural meanings. Journal of Consumer Research, 24(1), 15–42.).

The authors seek to explain in what way the relationship that Brazilians had with the 2014 FIFA World Cup reflects how the soccer industry has entered a delegitimation process.

We sustain that regulatory legitimacy is less relevant than normative, cognitive, and pragmatic legitimacy in the context of an evolving society. In fact, further studying the long-term consequences of this evolution in the market-system would shed light on whether or not social movements can have a lasting impact on society (Zizek, 2014).

We contribute to the literature on market systems by studying an often-neglected aspect of market systems literature, the delegitimation of a mainstream market.

Many traditional economists view trade unions as monopolies; unions challenge capital by having control over labor as a production input and threatening to withhold it to achieve union goals. Yet, unions also strategize around citizenship and consumer roles with political action and consumer boycotts. Little researched is how unions challenge corporate authority by encouraging workers to defer consumption and become owners of capital through pension funds. This new role as capital owners is leveraged through pension fund activism, which challenges corporate decisions that are not much affected by political action, organizing, or collective bargaining. This chapter puts these developments in the context of familiar theories of the economic effect of trade unions and the history of union pension activism.