Journal of Consumer Research 2026
Consumer Responsibilization Work: The Everyday Making of Responsible Subjects
Abstract
How do consumers make themselves responsible for social change? Consumer responsibilization refers to the institutional shaping of individuals into responsible subjects tasked with driving social change through market participation. Prior research shows that responsibilization generates tensions for consumers but says less about how they work through these tensions to craft responsible subjectivities. Drawing on a multi-sited ethnography of zero-waste lifestyles in Denmark, this study examines consumers’ efforts to act responsibly amid uncertainty, balance personal well-being with the common good, and promote responsible consumption without appearing judgmental. The analysis reveals that consumers address these tensions through consumer responsibilization work—a threefold process of self-problematization, moralization, and intensification. Consumers enact this process through self-techniques that enable them to scrutinize the adequacy of their conduct, interpret consumption as a moral obligation, and strengthen their commitment to a responsible lifestyle. These self-techniques draw on local understandings of responsibility and are sustained through mundane interactions in which consumers hold themselves and one another accountable. The findings shift attention from institutional responsibilization to the culturally situated self-techniques through which consumers enact it in everyday life. They thereby recast responsibilization as a technical, situated, and relational process that reproduces neoliberal governmentality through consumer lifestyles.
- DOI
- 10.1093/jcr/ucag036
- Language
- en
- Sources
- crossref openalex