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International audience; This article examines the engagement of consumers in alternative direct selling systems: community-supported agriculture (CSA) programmes. It relies on an ethnographical study and the use of an anthropological analytical framework, cultural theory, which aims to shed light on the worldviews of actors. CSA programmes appear as community enclaves that operate outside and against the market. The analysis also reveals the coexistence of different cultures within the CSA movement. This diversity of worldviews generates tensions but their complementarity proves to be positive for the movement.

This article provides an analysis of the militant rhetoric used by consumer activist movements through the lens of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT). This theory, developed in the field of cognitive linguistics, highlights the fact that our metaphorical language is not only literal. It also orders our thoughts and actions. We begin by demonstrating the extent to which this theory is useful in developing a detailed understanding of consumer activist movements when compared to other conceptual approaches. Specifically, CMT makes it possible to better identify how actors experience their militant activities. We then conduct a virtual ethnographic study to examine the content of verbal and non-verbal communication produced and published online by activists. Various cases of real consumerist activism are studied through the metaphorical language used by these activists. The results of our observations enable us to identify those aspects of activism that are emphasised to consumers with a view to informing and persuading them. Finally, we discuss the conceptual and methodological perspectives stemming from this research.

Set in the field of consumer activism movements, this article investigates criticisms addressed to firms whose practices (in our case, food imitating product practices) are judged as irresponsible. It reveals that different approaches to structuring criticisms lead to different persuasive effects on consumers’ attitudes towards the incriminated firm. We first argue that both persuasion and justification issues underpinning militant criticism can be grasped through Boltanski and Thévenot’s ‘polity model’ (1991). Second, we report the results of an experiment that explores the impact of the structure of activists’ discourse structure (quality and logic of argumentation, message sidedness) on both the acceptance of critiques and on consumers’ declared behavioral intentions to boycott respectively the product and the brand. Using these results, we suggest an optimal militant critiques frame from which we outline managerial implications for firms targeted by consumerist activist groups.

The market-oriented ethnography process constitutes an interesting renewal in the study of consumer behaviour. The methodological and epistemological specificities of this process, part of Consumer Culture Theory (CCT), may compel researchers to adopt certain stratagems and ingenuity in order to access the field, carry out their fieldwork and report their findings. These tactics, which are rarely revealed yet constitute the ‘tricks’ of this method, are outlined in this article in the hope of providing pedagogic insight for marketing researchers interested in this approach, by offering solutions to circumvent certain obstacles.

Over and beyond questions of familiarity with the offering, purchase intention and willingness to pay, fair trade actors are currently questioning the motivations of consumers and the cognitive representations that they develop. Pursuing the same track as the initial academic investigations into this problematic, this study examines the semantic content of the signifier “fair trade” by clarifying the various semio-narrative programs associated with it. An original method of inquiry, the micro-mythanalysis of discourse, is proposed and the findings, drawn from ten types of narrative, are discussed.