Consumer Boycotts as Instruments for Structural Change

Consumer boycotts have become a frequent form of social protest in the digital age. The corporate malpractices motivating them are varied, including environmental pollution, lack of minimum labour standards, severe mistreatment of animals, lobbying and misinformation campaigns, collaboration or complicity with illegitimate political regimes, and systematic tax evasion and tax fraud. In this article, I argue that organised consumer boycotts should be regarded as a legitimate and purposeful instrument for structural change, provided they conform to a number of normative criteria. In order to show this, the practice and empirical context of consumer boycotts are first outlined. I then lay out and refute three general objections to this practice. Although each of these objections fails, their discussion generates insights concerning the normative standards with which boycotters must comply if they want their campaigns to be both legitimate and successful. These normative criteria are detailed along the lines of two guiding principles, proportionality and transparency. In the final step, I elaborate on structural change as the deeper purpose of consumer boycotts.     

Is understanding regret dependent on developments in counterfactual thinking?

Children's understanding of counterfactual emotions such as regret and relief develops relatively late compared to their ability to imagine counterfactual worlds. We tested whether a late development in counterfactual thinking: understanding counterfactuals as possibilities, underpinned children's understanding of regret. Thirty 5‐ and 6‐year‐olds completed tasks assessing counterfactual thinking and understanding regret. Performance on the counterfactual task was better than that on the regret task. We suggest that thinking about counterfactuals as possibilities is a necessary but not sufficient cognitive development in children's understanding of regret. We discuss how other developments in counterfactual thinking may underpin children's emotional understanding.     

How should we question young children's understanding of aspectuality?

In two experiments, we investigated whether 4‐ to 5‐year‐old children's ability to demonstrate their understanding of aspectuality was influenced by how the test question was phrased. In Experiment 1, 60 children chose whether to look or feel to gain information about a hidden object (identifiable by sight or touch). Test questions referred either to the perceptual aspect of the hidden object (e.g., whether it was red or blue), the modality dimension (e.g., what colour it was), or the object's identity (e.g., which one it was). Children who heard the identity question performed worse than those who heard the aspect or dimension question. Further investigation in Experiment 2 (N= 23) established that children's difficulty with the identity question was not due to a problem recalling the objects. We discuss how the results of these methodological investigations impact on researchers’ assessment of the development of aspectuality understanding.     

Habermas,mass communication technology and the future of the public sphere

This paper focuses on Habermas’s analysis of the bourgeois public sphere and its inextricable relationship to mass communication technology – particularly in relation to his pioneering work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Within this investigation, it will be argued that while Habermas’s views are still to be regarded as being highly insightful and relevant when attempting to gain an understanding of what it is that a legitimate public sphere actually encompasses, along with what the necessary preconditions entail in order for a public sphere to be established, Habermas’s critical analysis is not without its shortcomings. As insightful as Habermas’s views may be, they do require a certain amount of revision and updating. As such, Habermas’s insights are to be understood as providing the contemporary critical researcher with a solid, yet flexible, basis from where it is that the notion of the modern, electronically infused, public sphere of the 21st century is to be critically gauged.