Richard M. Locke’s thoughtful review of our book makes several important points. I am very honored to see the contributions of the book he identifies and very appreciative of the critical discussion he offers concerning areas that need further research. In my response, I would like to address two major issues raised by Locke.

Locke is right in questioning how far political consumerism can go in changing underlying patterns of overconsumption that are behind exploitative business practice. Overconsumption is an important theme and aspect of political consumerism that we cover mostly by a look at the simplicity and slow movements in Chapter 5. The buy-nothing day organized in part by Adbusters is an institutionalized attempt to spread such ideas in the population. However, there is almost no cross-national data on citizens’ interest in reducing their personal consumption, either in form of buying second-hand products or buying simply less. Moreover, when such items exist in national surveys—e.g., reducing water use while taking a shower, taking public transport to leave the polluting car at home, or rejecting to buy a product for the sake of stopping overconsumption—we deal with a lot of social desirability answers. While citizens are well aware of the problem of overconsumption, the challenge is how to turn this attitude into real behavior. Locke wants to push this point even further though and argues that in order to address complex global problems citizens need to not just focus on their individual shopping choices but at aggregate patterns of consumption. This is indeed a good point and one that clearly belongs to the research agenda of political consumerism. While educating citizens more about the consequences of consumption more generally is taken up by many consumer movements, it is very difficult to link these attempts to overall shopping patterns. Moreover, this is also where we meet the real limits of political consumerism, which we discuss at the end of the book. While it might be possible that political consumer movements mobilize people to live a life less dominated by consumption, these small steps will not be enough to change the current economic system that is solely based on continuous consumption. Political consumerism can give the direction of change and support new perspectives on consumption that need to be manifested by broader political structural change.

A second (related) point that Locke addresses has to do with the origin of exploitative labor practices. In his review, Locke seems to suggest that when it “comes to many consumer products (e.g., electronics, garments, footwear, foods) exploitative labor practices originate in our own consumer behavior.” He claims that consumers are prompted to want new products, particularly in fashion clothing and footwear. In this view, it is corporations that feel the consumer desires and transmit these pressures to the workers in the form of added hours and poor working conditions. We think that putting the consumer at the root of this problem is maybe too one-sided: As we show in the chapter on organizational setting for political consumerism, they often attribute the responsibility of hyper-consumption to corporations who want higher profits by getting consumers to buy more and more. In fact, corporations can also mold demand by promoting sustainable shopping choices. By locating the responsibility for overconsumption solely with citizens, we let corporations off the hook. Corporations do not just need to wait for consumer demand for sustainable products, they can also take the lead in promoting certain sustainable styles as fashionable, for instance. We could research this effect in field or lab experiments that vary promotions and advertisements by corporations and movement messages to look at individual and potentially aggregate consumption patterns. These kinds of studies will bring the research agenda on political consumerism forward.