Poetizing to improve consumer representation

The notion of the identity project fosters a persistent emphasis on consumer goals and plans and has dominated many interpretations of consumers undergoing transformation. This article contrasts this self-will view by introducing the lived experience of poetizing. Poetizing represents our moments of humble vulnerability when we wonder about life circumstances that we do not control or understand as we experience transformation. In those moments of humble vulnerability, we are possessed by our identities, rather than owning an identity project. By adopting the theoretical lens of poetizing, we enrich our capacity to represent the messiness of life and make space for a critical understanding of the accidentality of identity in creation and its embedded vulnerability.

Consucrats Have Agency: What Next for the Profecrat? Comment on "The Rise of the Consucrat"

The trend in ensuring adequate consumer representation across diverse activities and sectors, not least in healthcare, has been speedily implemented, sometimes at the expense of strategy. This commentary explores the concept of the consucrat as a consumer representative, presented by de Leeuw, which raised important questions regarding the way in which individuals and health services interact and collaborate. Adopting a complex services marketing lens, the position of the consucrat is discussed in relation to agency underpinning three tensions identified by de Leeuw: designation; professionalization, and; representation. For equality, professional service providers are referred to as ‘profecrats.’ Supporting de Leeuw, challenges are made to the underlying assumptions implicit in terms used around representation, the perspective that it is the consucrat only who needs to adapt, and the discourse around the competence of the consucrat. We should not be too cautious in our approach to consumer representation. Consucrats have agency – what next for the profecrat?

A Consumers’ Europe? Common Market Governance Between Consumers and Commerce, 1960s-1990s

With the creation of the common market, citizens of the member states became European consumers. The history of consumer governance in the EEC therefore touches upon the legitimation of European integration. In that light, this article traces the institutionalisation of consumer representation in the EEC from the 1960s to the 1990s, and connects this development with the way in which EEC institutions conceptualised the consumer interest. It shows that during the 1970s, the emerging structures for consumer governance came with representations of the consumer as a powerless figure vis-à-vis big corporations, reflecting the powerlessness of the structures of consumer governance within the EEC. Although the consumer was portrayed as a pivotal figure in the completion of the internal market from the mid-1980s onward, this increase in power was merely rhetorical, and institutional changes largely cosmetic. All in all, consumer protection governance remained a relatively weak force of social protection within the EEC.

Reproducing or Contesting the Global? Belgian Organized Consumerism and its International Entanglements (1957–1995)

Between 1957 and 1984, Belgian consumers were represented by two comparative testing organizations: Test-Achats and the Union Féminine pour l’Information et la Défense du Consommateur. These two consumer organizations were fundamentally dissimilar in terms of their staff, their audience, and their ideological framing of consumer interests. Only the “politically independent” Test-Achats joined the International Organization of Consumer Unions (IOCU), even though it was initially smaller and weaker than the Union Féminine, the social-democratic alternative for consumers. A comparative analysis of Belgian organized consumerism reveals how, after 1957, the consumer interest was gradually reframed to fit a hegemonic definition. A private and commercial model of consumer representation was actively promoted over and against a public model through a complex transatlantic dialogue. Moreover, I argue that the international connections – or lack thereof – of the two organizations are essential to explain their success (or failure). The diffusion of organized consumerism during the 1950s and 1960s was financially and ideologically connected with the Keynesian-Fordist regulatory framework. The attack on embedded liberalism in the late 1970s thus posed serious challenges. Mapping the choices and trajectories of Belgian consumer activists in an international context helps us to understand these challenges better.

A Computational Methodology to Support Reimbursement Requests Analysis Concerning Electrical Damages

In light of the growing number of reimbursement requests processed from consumers for electrical damage to equipment, supposedly caused through the manifestation of anomalies on the power grid, there comes the need for reliable means for providing a decision on the issues highlighted herein. Through the recognition that in the current context, the procedures used are based on reviews, information and records of occurrences in the field, there has been significant inadequacy and fragility in the issuing of conclusive advice or opinions. In particular, the search for mechanisms grounded in classical principles and accepted in electrical engineering presents itself as an important challenge on which to base the decision making process in full awareness of its incumbent science and technology. Therefore, with the aim of meeting these assumptions, the study in question excels in its presentation of the principles that guided the software analysis, which intend above all else to correlate cause and effect. The elaborated strategy involves modelling stages as well as studies aimed at: distribution supply reproduction; characterization of the distribution network to the complainant consumer; representation of the diverse electro-electronic appliances and lastly, a proposal for correlating the disturbances impacting on equipment with their dielectric and thermal supportability requirements. For the purpose of illustrating the software process, an actual case study coupled with a loss and claim scenario is presented.