Between Complacency and Paternalism

Consumer culture researchers need to acknowledge theoretical problems that can arise when ethical assumptions inform social scientific claims. To identify the origins of these problems, the sociologist Andrew Abbott has developed a framework to illustrate how social scientific claims are continually mapped and remapped onto rival moral perspectives. These perspectives are defined by the relative emphasis that they place on freedom and determinism, agency and structure. When consumer culture researchers attempt to diagnose or influence people’s political and consumer choices, they emphasize either one side of these dichotomies or the other. This article adapts Abbott’s framework to show how these differing emphases lead to different conclusions about the techniques that educators, social scientists, activists, marketers, and policy-makers should use to improve people’s political and consumer choices.