Who Came First? The Egg or the Carton? An Analysis of Organic Packaging for Italian Retail Chain Esselunga - Re-Thinking Organic Food and Farming in a Changing World - page 107

critiques Adorno's notion that the buyer or viewer of a certain product is nonetheless
a corporate worker - consumer. By pointing out the results of globalization in
terms of consumers pressing corporations to adapt 'socially responsible' programs,
Scammell ( 2000 ) sees a politicization of the consumer, which leads to a consumer
who is demanding, concerned and socially and politically active. As she notes,
by drawing attention to their capacity to escape state regulation, they (corporations)
inadvertently highlight their own responsibility for good or ill. They are no longer disguised
as an almost nonpolitical fact of life, as they were in the welfare democracies, where the
state is the focus of all politics. In the process they politicize consumption. (p. 353)

Scammell ( 2000 ) argues that activism at the beginning of the twenty-first century
has changed in response to deregulations of the 1980s and 1990s, which led to a
privatization, internationalization, and concentration of corporate power. As a result
of the “corporate hijacking of political power” Klein ( 2001 , p. 340), citizens used
their consumer power to pressure corporations to be more environmental, socially
and politically involved. Example of consumers' power relied on brands' boycotts
(e.g. Taco Bell and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), Monsanto's
products), and a continuous battle to implement food labeling, for example, for
genetically modified organisms 2 (Adamoli 2012 ).
While Scammell ( 2000 ) seems optimistic about the concept of the citizen-
consumer, recently published articles that have explored the citizen-consumer model
of environmental issues such as organic farming and marketing, have concentrated
more on contradictions of coexisting ideologies within capitalistic practices (Smith
1998 ; Guthman 2003 ; Schröder and McEachern 2004 ; Sassatelli 2006 ; Johnston
2008 ; Lockie 2009 ), thus pointing at limitations of the citizen-consumer model due
to the commodification of food and the conventionalization of organic foods (Smith
1998 ;DeLind 2002 ; Johnston 2008 ; Lockie 2009 ).
According to these scholars, despite recognition that consumers play a major role
in decision-making and hence have agency, corporations can co-opt this agency
(DuPuis 2000 ; Guthman 2003 ; Pollan 2006 ). A common assumption is that even
with the emergence of a new socially responsible buyer, food companies have
adapted new marketing strategies to fulfill their corporate agenda (Smith 1998 ;
Johnston 2008 ). Johnston ( 2008 ) leaves the reader by noting that the contradiction
between consumerism and citizenship is problematic to analyze and to resolve. As
he writes,
this articulation of the citizen-consumer engenders profound contradictions that

severely limit its transformative potential. However, it is important to emphasize that
discourses are never homogenous. Possibilities for a more balanced citizenship-focused
hybrid may be found in different modes of food provisioning, particularly when they are
framed by non-profit organizations more able to de-center the idea of consumer choice in
the service of ideals like social justice, solidarity, and sustainability (p. 263).

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Livingstone et al. ( 2007 ) discuss the complexity of the rhetoric and discourse
of the citizen-consumers in UK regulatory apparatus. They identify advantages