The Consumer Movement

The chapter opener follows the efforts of Senator Gaylord Nelson to advance an environmental agenda. Such events as the Santa Barbara oil spill and Cuyahoga River fire were symbols of manmade environmental disruptions. Nelson inspired Earth Day as a way to engage public opinion. Many on the New Left and the environmental movement now saw consumerism as the source of dirty air and water, toxic fumes, poisoned foods, and littered landscapes. That was a point of view Ralph Nader shared. No book on consumerism could ignore Nader’s role in the rise of the consumer rights movement in the 1960s. This section looks at Nader’s background and the controversy he triggered when he published Unsafe at Any Speed, as well as his commitment to wide-ranging consumer rights and environmental projects. The following section looks at “hip consumerism” to show how the counterculture influenced personal styles and gender identities. It features Stewart Brand, who with Ken Kesey launched the “Trips Festival” in San Francisco and then went on to produce the bible of alternative consumption, The Whole Earth Catalog.

PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT STRATEGIES IN FINANCIAL, LEARNING AND GROWTH PERSPECTIVES THROUGH IMPLEMENTING THE INTEGRATION OF LEAN WITH SIX SIGMA (DMAIC) CONCEPTS IN THE PACKAGING DRINKING WATER INDUSTRY IN MAKASSAR CITY

The growth of bottled drinking water is currently growing in line with the increasing needs of the community, however, in its operational activities, several problems are still found. The problems are related to the problem of activities that are not useful (waste) in the aspects of finance, learning, and growth. Based on these problems, in this study, an analysis was carried out by applying the integration of the concept of Lean and Six Sigma. The research method approach is carried out by identifying the types of activities that are not useful (waste) and analyzed by the stages Define, Measure), Improve, and Control with the abbreviation DMAIC analysis. The method of data collection was carried out by direct survey, interview, and questionnaire instrument distribution. The results of this study identify activities that are not useful (waste) in the form of findings of the amount of non-productive work time, low work motivation, low frequency of employee education and training activities, loss of sales turnover due to consumer movement to buy other brands of products, it is still found that the lowest sales volume occurs. Based on the stages of DMAIC analysis, 10 root causes and strategies of waste are found from a financial perspective, and 8 on the aspects of growth and learning.

The Regeneration of Consumer Movement Solidarity

Consumer research has focused on the various resources and tactics that help movements achieve a range of institutional and marketplace changes. Yet, little attention has been paid to the persistence of movement solidarity, in particular its regeneration, despite a range of threats to it. Our research unpacks mechanisms that help consumer movement solidarity to overcome threats. Drawing on a six-year ethnographic study of consumer movements in Exarcheia, a neighborhood in central Athens, Greece, we find that consumer movement solidarity persists despite a cataclysmic economic crisis that undermines their prevalent ideology and the emotional fatigue that is common in such movements. Three key mechanisms serve to overcome these threats: performative staging of collectivism, temporal tactics, and the emplacement of counter-sites. Overall, our study contributes to consumer research by illuminating how threats to solidarity are overcome by specific internal mechanisms that enable the regeneration of consumer movement solidarity.

Consumer protection in Russia: towards the 30th anniversary of the antimonopoly authority of Russian Federation. (Review)

Consumer protection has become an integral part of life of the population in Russia. The article presents a brief history of the consumer movement, the consumer law as well as the formation of the national system of consumer protection in the Russian Federation at the end of XX century, describing its main elements.