1
In Search of the Citizen-Consumer
Martin Powell (Stirling University), Shane Doheny (University of Stirling) and
Ian Greener (Manchester Business School)
Citizenship and Consumption: Agency, Norms, Mediations, and Spaces
Thursday 30 March – Saturday 1 April 2006
Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, UK
Nothing in this paper may be cited, quoted or summarised or reproduced
without permission of the author(s)
Cultures of Consumption Research Programme
Birkbeck College, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HX
Tel: + 44 (0) 20 7079 0601
Fax: + 44 (0) 20 7079 0602
www.consume.bbk.ac.uk
2
In Search of the Citizen-Consumer
Martin Powell (Stirling University), Shane Doheny
(University of Stirling) and Ian Greener (Manchester
Business School)
Martin Powell
Department of Applied Social Science
University of Stirling
Stirling
Scotland FK9 4LA
Tel: 01786 467693
E-martin.powell@stir.ac.uk
Paper presented at Conference on ‘Citizenship and
Consumption: Agency, Norms, Mediations, and Spaces’,
Thursday 30 March – Saturday 1 April 2006,
Trinity Hall, Cambridge.
3
Introduction
Both the citizen and the consumer have been the subject of a considerable investment
of time and energy over the past three decades. Indeed, many writers observe an
increase in interest in these concepts. The citizen has become important in view of the
rise of a neo-liberal ideology, increased population flows, the fragmentation of
national polities and so on (see Heater, 1999: 2, 3, Hall and Held, 1990). The broad
contours of the consumer has been associated with the focus on an individualised
subject (Bauman, 2000), a ‘rational actor’ (Aldridge, 2003) or ‘choosing self’ (Slater,
1997), which accompanied the rise of a consumer culture (Gabriel and Lang, 1995,
Zukin and Maguire, 2004). Both the citizen and the consumer have become
increasingly important in health, education, local government and so on. However, the
concurrent employment of these concepts in such services is neither without
implication for these concepts nor without a basis in the policy discourse employed by
both Conservative and New Labour governments. It is precisely these implications
that we are interested in here. Specifically, many commentators have pointed to a
hybridisation of the citizen and consumer to explain both how these concepts are
deployed in practice, and systematically to specify the meaning attached to these
concepts by both Conservative and New Labour governments.
Combinations of citizen with consumer have been used in a variety of ways by policy
commentators. For instance, Harris (1999: 923) sites the ‘consumer citizen’ [all
renderings of this combination in this paper, for example to include or exclude the
hyphen, to position one before the other, or to use as a verb or the noun, are wholly
deliberate] as a subject created by the New Right to form some kind of equivalence
between the active citizen in the community and the citizen in receipt of social
services. According to Harris (1999), this consumer-citizen is subsequently promoted
in John Major’s Citizen’s Charter (Prime Minister, 1991) which formed “a set of
proposals to advance the interests of the individual consumer-citizen in accordance
with the principles of liberal economics”. Thus, it appears that the consumer-citizen is
understood as some kind of individual who acts within the environs of a liberal
economic theory, and is created for the political purposes of forming a citizen who at
least mimics some of the features associated with the active citizen (on whom Harris,
1999 cites Lister, 1990). But Harris (1999) does not specify which kind of consumer
is associated with which kind of citizen, or why we should speak of a consumercitizen and not a consumer citizen or citizen-consumer.
The link between a combined consumer and consumer and the active citizen is
repeated by Symon and Walker (1995) who cite Pollitt (1988) as discussing a
consumer-citizen. Curiously, in Pollitt (1988) we find a short discussion of the
citizen-consumer (in reverse order) begging the question whether Symon and Walker
(1995) see both of these combinations as equal. Such confusion may actually be
caused by Pollitt (1988) who first points out that the “linking of consumerism with
citizenship prompts a further question as to what kind of values might drive a
distinctively public service model of consumerism” (1988: 122) and goes on to say:
4
… the dominant value of private sector consumerism, is important but, by
itself, inadequate. The concept of the citizen-consumer suggests additional
values, such as equity, equal opportunities and, of course, representation and
participation themselves. (1988: 122)
Therefore, on the one hand, Pollitt (1988) points to a combination of consumerism
with citizenship and then talks about the citizen-consumer suggesting that the citizenconsumer somehow represents the subject that emerges from the combination of
consumerism with citizenship.
More recently still we find both reference to the citizen-consumer as a product of New
Labour thinking, alongside some discussion of the context in which this concept may
make sense, but little work on the concept itself. For instance, under the heading
“Creating the citizen-consumer”?, Clarke (1998) discusses how New Labour has gone
about forming a new kind of citizen/consumer through relations with local
government, but does not actually engage with the concept of the citizen-consumer.
Lister (2001) cites New Labour as highlighting “the rise of the demanding, sceptical,
citizen-consumer” (DSS, 1998a: 16), but goes on to say that New Labour’s:
proposals for ‘an active modern service’ appealed to a consumer rather than a
citizenship ethos, ignoring the ‘citizen’ in the ‘citizen-consumer’. (2001: 104)
Thus Lister (2001) connects the citizen-consumer with government discourse and then
retains this ordering of concepts while arguing that the couplet actually involves a
suppression of the citizen. Williams (2002) points out that:
New Labour’s central welfare subject is the sceptical citizen-consumer who
acts in the pursuit of enlightened self-interest, expecting value for money and
quality services tailored to individual needs. Crucially, however, this citizen
enacts his/her responsibilities of citizenship through paid work. Where the
principle of the market was central to the New Right’s agenda, the principle of
paid work articulates New Labour’s. It is the first duty of citizenship, rather
than one of its central rights (with the exception of disabled people for whom
it is both a duty and a right). (2002: 504)
Thus, Williams (2002) associates the citizen-consumer with the values associated
with the consumer and the responsibilities of the citizen, but provides no reasons for
this particular order of the couplet. Needham (2003), who provides an extensive
commentary on the citizen-consumer, constructs this couplet as articulating how the
“citizen is being treated as a consumer” (2003: 14) and contrasts the citizen-consumer
with the participatory citizen associated with civic republicanism. But if the citizenconsumer articulates how the citizen is treated as a consumer then perhaps this subject
may better be called a consumer-citizen? Indeed Dagger (2002: 153) similarly
discusses the “citizen as a consumer” but then retains some of the logic of this
formulation by talking about the consumer-citizen adding that, for many republicans,
the “consumer-citizen is a citizen in name only” (2002: 153).
In this paper, we set out to critically and systematically examine the subject generated
by combining the citizen and the consumer. We begin with the assumption that, given
the extensive body of thought associated with both concepts, they cannot be combined
5
in an obvious and unproblematic fashion. Instead, we hypothesise that their
amalgamation must, perforce, change either or both by accentuating some aspect of
both concepts, or contribute to the formation of a wholly new concept. To investigate
this, we first look at the hyphenated citizen consumer as a member of a class of
hyphenated citizens. Thus we start by examining the hyphenated citizen as a type of
creatively reconstructed citizen, but one who is fractured and recombined with other
concepts. The hyphen is simply a punctuation mark used to separate some compound
words, or to link other words. Here we focus on the hyphen in its function as a mode
of combining words. Significantly, the hyphen is not a subject of academic debate
within sociolinguistics or linguistics and no definition of the hyphen appears in The
Linguistics Encyclopedia (Malmkjaer, 1991), or The Routledge Dictionary of
Language and Linguistics (Bussmann, 1996). Nevertheless, we focus on the hyphen
as a way of signalling a deliberate and meaningful combination of terms. By focusing
on the use of the hyphen, we look closely at modes by which the citizen is combined
with other terms with the intension of situating its combination with the consumer.
Thus we ask whether there have been changes in the use of the hyphenated citizen,
whether the hyphen is being used creatively to construct new subjectivities out of the
combination of the citizen with other terms, and how combinations of the citizen with
the consumer is situated within these uses. We go on critically to investigate the
hyphenation of citizen with consumer using two linked approaches. The first draws a
simple distinction between the citizen-consumer and consumer-citizen that
hypothesises that a deliberate ordering of these concepts would place the conceptual
repertoire that is of greater importance in front. Using this hypothesis we can examine
whether the way these terms are combined using the hyphen is at all meaningful.
Following on from this, we seek to determine the dominant way in which these terms
are understood. Thus, we set out a conceptual grid of eighteen variations on how the
hyphenated citizen consumer may be understood, and examine the uses of these terms
to see if they can be categorised in terms of this grid. As it turns out, the hyphenated
citizen consumer is associated with weak conceptualisation where the ways in which
the two may be combined appear to make little impact on the intended meaning.
The citizen and the hyphenated citizen
In order to situate the hyphenated citizen consumer, we first look at how this
hyphenation compares with other hyphenations of the citizen. To begin, we look at
the frequency with which the citizen is hyphenated in books and articles on
citizenship. To do this, we constructed the universe of documents defined as articles
that appear on the Social Sciences Citation Index in which the title, abstract or
keyword contains a truncation of the term citizen, and books that appear on the British
Library catalogue whose titles contain a truncation of the term citizen. The universe
was circumscribed to documents published after 1981. This final definition was made
necessary by the fact that neither database supports a search which includes a hyphen,
and therefore all relevant documents needed to be downloaded into a form of
bibliographic management software (in this case, Endnote). Briefly, the procedure
used here was as follows: firstly, both the Social Sciences Citation Index held on the
Web of Science, and the document supply of books held by the British Library, were
searched for the truncated term citize*. Hence, any document that contained any of
the terms citizen, citizenly, citizenry or citizenship were identified and downloaded
into the bibliographic programme Endnote. In the case of the articles held on the
Social Sciences Citation Index, the search included the title, abstract and keywords
6
whereas the search of the Document Supply Books was restricted to titles only and
not including chapter titles. This provided us with a total universe of 9,961 articles.
Finally, given that the Social Sciences Citation Index only extends from 1981, the
search of the British Library was also restricted to those published after the same year
providing us with a database of 3,281 books. Thus, any potential source of key terms
in books and articles were included while titles of book series and of authors were
excluded from the search of books. This procedure was carried out in January 2006,
thus a small number of documents published in 2006 were included in the database.
From the search of the Social Sciences Citation Index we can assert that 3.4% of
citizenship articles use a hyphenated form of citizen in their titles’, abstracts or among
keywords. That is, 377 articles contained a hyphenated form of citizen (excluding 25
uses of a hyphen to create a name such as “Methow-Valley-citizens-Council”) within
a total database which contained 9,961 articles. The proportion of uses of hyphenated
forms of citizen within the titles of articles drops to 3.3% (98 of 2,925 articles –
employing similar exclusions as above). In effect, hyphenated forms of citizen are
employed in a very minor proportion of articles. Turning to the situation in books, out
of the 3,281 books containing the truncated term citiz* and published between 1981
and 2006, only 38 or 1.1% contain hyphenations of the citizen. Thus the citizen is
hyphenated in a very minor proportion of the citizenship literature.
Graphs 1 and 2 below present the analysis of the relative use of hyphenated forms of
the citizen within the total universe of citizenship articles and books. Significantly,
graph 1 shows that there has been a large amount of variation in the relative use of
these terms in the 1980s, and a levelling off of hyphenations at around 4% of articles
published after 1995. but little sign of a settled trend in books. The situation in books,
however, is altogether more varied with 0% of hyphenations appearing in fully eight
years (or in six periods of time), and a peak of 5.6% in 1987 with the next peak of any
significance not occurring until 1999 at which point hyphenated forms of citizen were
employed in 3.7% of book titles.
7
Graph 1: Hyphenations of citizen appearing in articles
between 1981 and 2005
12%
10%
8%
6%
% of articles
4%
2%
19
81
19
83
19
85
19
87
19
89
19
91
19
93
19
95
19
97
19
99
20
01
20
03
20
05
0%
Graph 2: Hyphenations of citizen appearing in books
between 1981 and 2005
6%
5%
4%
3%
% of books
2%
1%
19
81
19
83
19
85
19
87
19
89
19
91
19
93
19
95
19
97
19
99
20
01
20
03
20
05
0%
In absolute terms, the number of hyphenations has increased significantly in articles.
For instance, the 3.8% of hyphenations appearing on graph 1 in 1985 involved just
two occurrences, in 1998 4% of hyphenations involved 24 occurrences, while in 2003
4.2% involved 41 occurrences. The relative value reflects the changing number of
journals included in the Social Sciences Citation Index together with the decision
made by the database managers to include abstracts in citation details after 1993.
Even so, both graphs demonstrate that hyphenated forms of the citizen are used a
small minority of documents whose number tends to vary over time.
Hyphenated terms
Having established that the citizen is hyphenated in only a small minority of
documents, we can look more closely at the terms joined with the citizen using the
hyphen. However, given that our focus here is on the subjectivities generated by
hyphenating the citizen, we include only those hyphens that refer to nouns. Therefore
we exclude uses that refer to processes or procedures like citizen-initiated, citizencentred, or citizen-based. In each of these cases the citizen is clearly the subject and
the term combines some form of verb with this subject to render the citizen active in
some way. As tables 1 and 2 show, a number of terms and their variations are linked
with the citizen using the hyphen. Table 1 presents the number of articles in which
8
particular terms were connected with the citizen, and presents this data as a
percentage of the total number of hyphenations.
Table 1: Hyphenations of the citizen in articles on citizenship
Hyphenations
Variations of
No.
Total
hyphenations
Non-citizen
37
37
Senior-citizen
29
29
Police-citizen
28
28
Citizen-candidate
14
14
Citizen-consumer
8
12
Consumer-citizen
2
Consumer-citizenship
1
Citizen-as-consumer
1
Citizen-government
6
11
Government-citizen
3
Government-and-citizen
1
Government-to-citizen
1
Citizen-soldier
9
10
Soldier-citizen
1
Citizen-subject
6
7
Subject-citizens
1
Citizen-state
5
7
State-citizen
2
% of
hyphenations
9.81%
7.69%
7.43%
3.71%
3.18%
2.92 %
2.65%
1.86%
1.86%
As table 1 shows, only the non-citizen comes close to accounting for 10% of articles,
police-citizen and senior-citizen are each used in roughly 7% of articles, while the
terms state, subject, soldier, government, consumer and candidate are each connected
with the citizen in between 1.5% and 4% of articles. Curiously, the term workercitizen occurred just three times (or 0.8% of occurrences) in this database and so does
not appear in table 1 above. Table 2, however, is both made up of far fewer terms and
shows that the citizen-soldier is by far the most important of the hyphenated forms of
citizen.
Table 2: Hyphenation of the citizen in books on citizenship
Hyphenations
No
% of hyphenations
Citizen-soldier*
9
23.7%
State-citizen
3
7.9%
Consumer-citizen*
2
5.3%
Citizen-consumer
1
2.6%
As these tables show, a wide variety of terms are linked with the citizen using the
hyphen. Only in the titles of books does any term emerge as more important – the
citizen-soldier – but this same term appears in less than 2% of the titles abstracts or
keywords of articles. Indeed, in the titles, abstracts and keywords of articles a wide
array of terms are linked with the citizen using the hyphen. The implication of this is
that there is no term whose link with the citizen is more important than any other.
Thus, between the fact that hyphens are used in a small minority of documents on
9
citizenship, and the array of terms linked with the citizen by a hyphen, we may infer
that a hyphenated citizen bears little impact on our understanding of the citizen.
Table 1 can be used to make the point that the terms consumer, government, subject
and state can be placed either before or after the citizen. Indeed, the appearance of
terms like citizen-as-consumer or government-and-citizen indicates that more
complex relationships are also possible. Given that no reverse orderings appeared in
relation to the remaining terms we may conclude that the order of terms does play
some role at least where the citizen is related to these four terms.
The conceptual work of hyphenated terms
Thus far we have established that a minority of documents link terms with the citizen
through the hyphen but that a number of such terms are linked. At this point we may
investigate the effect that these terms have on the citizen. In specific, we seek to
identify terms that effect a change on how the citizen is conceptualised. To identify
such terms, we read the title and, where possible, the abstract in which the term
appears, looking for situations in which the hyphenation conceptualises the citizen in
some way. We isolate non-conceptual work as those where a hyphenated citizen is
merely referred to in a list, as an example, or as a way of identifying a person. For
example, Ellis and Allaire (1999) report on a study in which “[a] sample of 330 older
adults from local senior-citizen apartment buildings completed a survey …” Here, the
senior-citizen is used simply to refer to a kind of dwelling and no inference is made
on this subjectivity. We isolate conceptual work as those situations in which the
hyphenated citizen is subject to some kind of qualification, discussion, or who is
described in some way and so has characteristics or dispositions. For example Pastello
and Saxton (1996) state that “[c]itizen-scholars integrate their academic activities of
teaching, research and service into a coordinated whole”. Here, the citizen-scholar is
presented as one who integrates certain activities, and therefore is a subject who
possesses certain skills.
The most hyphenated form of citizen was the non-citizen. Fully thirty six of the thirty
seven uses of this citizen was to a person who does not have citizenship status (the
asylum seeker, alien, refugee, economic migrant, undocumented workers, immigrant
or emigrant). These uses situated the non-citizen as an individual who did not need
any conceptualisation. For instance, Fujiwara (2005) discusses the ‘counter-rhetorical’
strategies present with the discourses used by immigrant rights groups and how
“[t]hese strategies invoked a rhetoric of moral reasoning in order to promote the
entitlement of non-citizens to remain eligible to public benefit”. Fujiwara (2005) does
not subject the non-citizen to any further qualification, but uses this term within a
discussion of immigration and therefore, to refer to immigrants who do not hold
citizenship status. A interesting variation can be found in Wallerstein (1997) who
takes the category of citizenship as referring to a status to which value is ascribed
within the world-system: “Once there were citizens, there were non-citizens as well.”
But Wallerstein (1997) does not conceptualise the non-citizen, does not ascribe
qualities, capacities or resources to it, but views the non-citizen as a by-product of
citizenship. Only Maletz (2003) conceptualises the non-citizen. This is already
indicated in the title of Maletz’s (2003) paper – “Making non-citizens” – thus alluding
to the idea of the non-citizen as a construct which Maletz (2003) then associates with
an individualism made possible by the centralisation of government administration. In
10
a sense, what Maletz (2003) offers is a radical version of this gradated view of
citizenship wherein certain individuals are positively disinterested in political matters
and may be conceived of as non-citizens.
Senior-citizen emerged as the second most hyphenated version of citizen, but was
only used to refer to older people in general. The term police-citizen was used twentyeight times. This term was used to refer to a variety of contexts – police-citizen
encounters/relations/violence/killings/interaction/contact/injuries/conflicts/ traffic
stops and to a police-citizen partnership (Cheurprakobkit 2002) and a police-citizen
association (Neliba, 1992). Of these, the ‘police-citizen encounter’ accounted for half
(fourteen) of the uses of this hyphenation. Nevertheless, this hyphenation was
structured to make reference to various situations while the combination of police
with citizen does not involve the qualities, capacities or roles of a subject.
The citizen-candidate was used fourteen times to refer to the citizen as a candidate in
democratic elections/democratic decision making. All of these fourteen hyphenations
referred a citizen-candidate model of electoral competition (see Osbourne and
Slivinski, 1996, Besley and Coate, 1998). As a model, the combination of citizen with
candidate involves drawing on certain qualities attributed to the citizen. Specifically,
this model beings with the citizen’s choice of whether to run as a candidate, and
therefore involves the use of a number of citizenship rights (to act as a representative,
to vote, to form political parties and so on). In addition, precisely because this
combination specifies a model of action, it identifies roles that this subject may play,
resources he or she may wish to draw on and so on. Therefore this combination draws
our attention to how a hyphenation can articulate a highly managed conceptualisation
which draws on certain qualities of the citizen and deploys them within a specified
action context.
The consumer and citizen were put together using a hyphen in three different ways in
the literature. Together, they account for twelve of the three hundred and seventy
seven hyphenations of the citizen. Like the citizen-candidate, the combined citizen
and consumer was used to refer to an action situation or social process. For instance,
both the consumer-citizen and citizen-consumer can be understood as an actor who
can make choices or decisions (Dowding 1992) or who can form opinions using the
media (Iosifides 1999). Munson (2000) argues that the language of consumercitizenship has been used to justify the public presence of women thus enabling a
certain kind of action situation. Moreover, the citizen-consumer is presented by some
writers as an increasingly important actor who has been brought into being by the
individual’s ability to harness their consumer power to political ends (Scammell,
2000, see also Keum et al. 2004). Here, the hyphenation is used to refer to a
discourse, topic or actor therefore attaching certain roles or qualities to the combined
citizen and consumer, while the combination citizen-consumer does not equal the
combination consumer-citizen or consumer-citizenship.
Like its hyphenation with consumer, the combination of citizen with soldier serves as
a method of identifying the specific qualities or roles associated with a subject. On the
one hand, the citizen-soldier was mentioned in relation to a specific ethos (Frank,
1991), but such ethics are culturally and historically located (Grollyaari, 1994). This
link between the citizen-soldier, ethics, and responsibilities implies an isolation of
certain characteristics that may be accompany different ethics. However, while this
11
may be implied, it was not clearly connected with the citizen-soldier. The situation
becomes more uncertain in a “of attitudes that bear on the way citizen-soldiers are
likely to play the role of peacekeeper” (Segal and Tiggle, 1997) because here the
citizen-soldier is used to refer to soldiers, and not to any quality that is imputed to a
specifically citizen-soldier. Finally, the reverse form of this combination, the soldiercitizen, was used just in one article, and used interchangeable with the soldier citizen,
the military citizen, and the soldier (Cowen, 2005). Hence the citizen-soldier is
loosely associated with some specific qualities, while the soldier-citizen appears as
but one among a number of ways of referring to the soldier without associating any
specific qualities with this term.
The citizen-subject was used to refer to view, or quality, of the individual whish is
promoted by the governing ideology of the state. Thus Balagopalan (2003a, b)
associated the citizen-subject with a rational outlook while Jamieson (2003) and
Korteweg (2003) use this term to refer to the open and undefined subjectivity
promoted by ideology. However, the one use of subject-citizen was made by Sioh
(2004) but in the same fashion as the above combinations. Shaprio (2000), by
contrast, discusses the citizen-subject as a temporally located citizen, and so in a
completely different way but without associating any further qualities or roles with
this subject. Finally, the hyphenation of state and citizen refers to relationships and
interactions between the two, and therefore refers to a situation or process and does
not carry out any conceptual work. Thus, as table 3 shows, only five combinations of
terms involve some conceptual work and, of these, the citizen-candidate receives the
most conceptualisations, followed by the citizen-consumer and citizen-subject.
Table 3: Number of times combinations involve or do not involve
conceptualisation
Hyphenations
Variations of
No. not
Number
hyphenations
conceptualised
conceptualised
Non-citizen
36
1
Senior-citizen
29
0
Police-citizen
28
0
Citizen-candidate
14
14
Citizen-consumer
8
6
Consumer-citizen
2
1
Consumer-citizenship
1
1
Citizen-as-consumer
1
1
Citizen-government
6
0
Government-citizen
3
0
Government-and1
0
citizen
Government-to-citizen
1
0
Citizen-soldier
9
2
Soldier-citizen
1
0
Citizen-subject
6
4
Subject-citizens
1
1
Citizen-state
5
0
State-citizen
2
0
12
The foregoing analysis has demonstrated a number of points. The citizen is
hyphenated in a small minority of the titles, abstracts and keywords of social scientific
documents. The relative proportion of the total universe of citizenship documents
contained on the Social Sciences Citation Index and by British Library indicate a
certain levelling off of a trend only in the articles published after 1995. More
interesting still is how the hyphen is deployed to combine citizen with other terms in
general. The analysis of these uses demonstrates that the hyphen is frequently used to
combine the citizen with another term to form a noun, but only half of the subjects
suggested by this noun are distinguished using the qualities, roles or dispositions of a
subject. In addition, the order of terms which are thereby combined does not appear
significant with terms like citizen-soldier and soldier-citizen, or citizen-subject and
subject-citizen attaining equal meanings. Nevertheless, there is some evidence that
combined terms may be granted with a systematic meaning. In particular, the citizencandidate makes use of a hyphenated citizen that refers to a model of action which is
closely defined and related with a very specific situation, but does represent an
example of a highly managed hyphenation of the citizen. Within all of this the
combination of the citizen with consumer shares a number of characteristics. This
combination was associated with distinguishing characteristics in nine of the twelve
relevant articles, and different meanings appeared to be at issue in different
combinations. Nevertheless, the meaning associated with this combination appears to
be less managed than those associated with the citizen-candidate.
Highlighting the Hyphen
At this point, we can look more closely at the combination of the citizen with the
consumer. To begin we may inquire as to the variations placed on this connection. As
table 4 shows, eight combinations of these terms appear in the SSCI and British
Library databases.
Table 4: Hyphenated and non-hyphenated combinations of citizen and consumer
in the social scientific literature
Hyphenated
Articles
Books
Consumer-citizen(s)
2
1
Consumer-citizenship
1
1
Citizen-as-consumer
1
0
Citizen-consumer(s)
8
2
Not-hyphenated
Consumer citizen
3
0
Consumer citizenship
2
1
Citizen consumer
2
0
Citizen as consumer(s)
1
1
Total documents
20
5
Tables 4 shows up a number of points. Firstly, there is a relatively even split within
the literature in using and omitting the hyphen to combine the citizen with the
consumer. Secondly, there appears to be slightly greater emphasis placed on
combining the citizen with consumer rather than the consumer with the citizen. Also,
there is no overlap in the use of hyphenated and non-hyphenated terms in the titles,
abstracts or keywords at least indicating hyphens are held separately. Combinations of
the citizen with consumer appear twelve times in the titles, abstracts and keywords of
13
articles and three times in the titles of books, while combinations of the consumer
with citizen appear eight times in articles and again, three times in books. While it is
impossible to generalise from such a small number of documents, there certainly
appears to be an indifference in the literature to how these terms may be combined.
But the point remains that the citizen and the consumer are both key terms in the
social sciences and the way these terms are combined must, surely, have significant
conceptual implications. In order to tease out any such implications, we proceed to
investigate sources of thinking on these combinations and to compare their associated
arguments.
The analysis of references on the combinations of consumer and citizen in books and
articles may provide an indication of the issues that are dealt in these various contexts.
Thus, such an analysis may indicate whether different concerns or conceptual
frameworks are at stake in the various combinations.
Table 5: Books and articles citing and cited in reference to various combinations
of citizen and consumer
Hyphenated
Citator
Citation
CitizenBollinger et al. (1998)
Bradford et al. (1969)
consumer(s)
Birchall (1992)
Webb (1891)
Cronin (2000)
Bauman (1990, 1992)
Cronin (2000)
Prime Minister (1991)
Cronin (2000)
Taylor (1994)
Independent Commission (2004)
Giddens (1993)
Keum et al. (2004)
Scammell (2000)
Lister (2001)
DSS (1998: 16)
Loxley and Thomas (2001)
Clarke et al. (1994)
Trentmann (1998)
Hobson (1897, 1900, 1914)
Wible (2004)
Rose (1999)
ConsumerHarris (1999)
Pollitt (1990)
citizen(s)
Harris (1999)
Bartlett and Le Grand (1993)
Harris (1999)
Prime Minister (1991)
Harris (1999)
Taylor (1989)
Henry et al. (1997)
Yeatman (1990)
Independent Commission (2004)
Giddens (1993)
Birchall (1992)
Webb (1891)
Symon and Walker (1995)
Pollitt (1988)
ConsumerHilton (2003)
Cross (2000)
citizenship
Hilton (2003)
Cohen (2001)
Hilton (2003)
Jacobs (1997)
Hilton (2003)
Jacobs (2001)
Nothyphenated
Citizen
Hill (2000)
Pickvance and Preteceille (eds) (1991)
consumer
Taylor and Woollard (2003)
Miller and Rose (1993)
Taylor and Woollard (2003)
Kenway and Bullen (2001)
Consumer
Ball (1998)
Stronach (1993)
citizen
Evans and Harris (2004)
Plant (1991)
Evans and Harris (2004)
Bartlett and Le Grand (1993)
14
Evans and Harris (2004)
Prime Minister (1991)
Evans and Harris (2004)
Labour Party (1991)
Humphries (2003)
Powell (2001)
Richardson (2005)
Bell and Binne (2000)
Richardson (2005)
Evans (1993)
Richardson (2005)
Cooper (2004)
Consumer
Evans and Harris (2004)
Glennerster and Midgley (1991)
citizenship
Evans and Harris (2004)
Johnson (1999)
Evans and Harris (2004)
Beihal, Fisher and Sainsbury (1992)
Evans and Harris (2004)
Harris (2003)
Key: Citation – document to which reference is made
Citator – writer making the reference
Table 5 shows up the absence of a consensus on the important source documents for
combining the citizen with the consumer. Only a proportion of those discussing a
combination of the terms citizen and consumer actually make a reference to another
document. Also some authors extensively discuss subjects like the citizen-consumer
but make no reference on this combination (for example, Spaargaren, 2003) This table
is constructed using any document that we could identify in which the combined
citizen and consumer is discussed. It shows that a small number of authors make
reference to a variety of sources. However, of those referenced, only Giddens (1993),
Bartlett and Le Grand (1993) and Prime Minister (1991) were referred to by more
than one author. But these were all referred to in the context of different combinations
of terms. In addition, whilst most make reference to documents published after 1988
which are concerned with either or both managerialist and political reforms, two
authors refer to documents from before this period – Bradford et al. (1969), Hobson
(1897, 1900, 1914), and Webb (1891) indicating that the citizen-consumer in
particular has been of interest at other times.
A point of order
First we want to investigate the literature to identify the extent to which the hyphen is
deliberately deployed. To do this we use a simple continuum outlined in figure 1
below:
Figure 1: Simple continuum between citizenly and consumerist characteristics
Citizen
Citizen-consumer
Consumer-citizen
Consumer
The continuum presented in figure 1 draws a simple distinction between the citizenconsumer and the consumer-citizen. On the left hand side we find the citizen. Broadly
speaking this citizen can be seen as an individual who has rights (to vote, to act as a
political representative, to own and control property and so on), responsibilities (to
pay taxes, to monitor the activities of government or otherwise become involved in
governing) and may be conceived of as both a status (to possess and maintain the
rights of citizenship (see Oldfield, 1990: 2)) or as a practice (where the enactment of
citizenship duties are socially supported (Oldfield, 1990: 5). At the other end of the
continuum lies the consumer. The consumer can be seen broadly as one who is a
rational actor seeking to realise their own selfish interests (Aldridge, 2003: 17, 18), as
communicators “trying to convey to one another messages about their lifestyle and
15
identity” (2003: 19), a victim of mis-selling (2003: 20), or a readily manipulable dupe
(2003: 20). Our hypothesis here is that the citizen-consumer places greater weight on
the citizen and draws its main concepts from this conceptual resources. Conversely,
the consumer-citizen draws primarily from concepts of the consumer. Underlying this
hypothesis is the argument that these combinations are deliberately formed and there
are reasons for prioritising one concept over the other.
Table 6: Documents in which the combination of consumer and citizen lays
emphasis on concept one over the other
Emphasising the citizen
Emphasising the consumer
Citizen-consumer Consumer-citizen Citizen-consumer Consumer-citizen
1. Goldblatt
1. Harris (1999)
1. Hisschemoller
1. Sassatelli and
(2005)
and Midden
Scott (2001)
2. Sassatelli and
(1999)
2. Spring (2003)
Scott (2001)
2. Lister (2001)
3. Scammell
3. Needham
(2000)
(2003)
4. White (1999)
5. Wible (2004)
Table 6 summarises just those documents in which either combination were used with
an emphasis on the citizen or the consumer. Clearly this is a short list, which points to
how these terms are used in a far less systematic manner in many other documents.
Table 6 lists five documents that emphasise the citizen and three that emphasise the
consumer in the formulation citizen-consumer. Just one document is listed where
citizen is emphasised and two where consumer is emphasised in consumer-citizen.
Even fewer of these actually present a case for emphasising either concept in this
couplet and only Needham (2003) presents an argued account. Thus, for instance,
Harris (1999) discusses the consumer-citizen in relation to John Major’s Citizen’s
Charter where he introduces this concept as providing some kind of equivalence to
the active citizen for the New Right, and quotes this Charter promising that the citizen
will be able to put more pressure on government (1999: 923). It is only in these weak
senses that Harris (1999) makes the uses the consumer-citizen to emphasise the
citizen. Hence, we can assert that there is no consensus regarding the ordering or
meaning that may be attached to this conceptual couplet, and that little regard is paid
to the relations the hyphen draws between the citizen and the consumer.
Conclusions
In this paper we have examined the use of a term that, some would say, closely
approximates a new or emergent kind of citizen or consumer. We have looked at the
combined and hyphenated citizen and consumer in terms of its membership of a class
of hyphenated citizens, finding that a small but changing proportion of citizenship
books or articles use a hyphen in titles, abstracts or keywords. A closer examination
of the use of the hyphen situates the combined citizen consumer as one that is
conceptualised (associated with certain characteristics, dispositions and so on) in most
of the situations where it is used, but the meanings associated with this term are not as
managed as those associated with other uses of the hyphen. However, there is neither
a consensus on the documents that are important to cite in relation to the hyphenated
citizen consumer, nor is there any evidence of a deliberate deployment of either term
16
to emphasise one concept over the other. All in all, for a term that appears to be of
recent importance, the citizen-consumer and the consumer-citizen are particularly
poorly conceptualised within the academic literature.
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