O fenômeno consumerista e os movimentos sociais no Brasil

Abstract

The consumer movements have been observed in Brazil and worldwide since the midnineteenth century. Due to the interpretative scope of the concept of consumerism, the notion of consumer right enables the opening of spaces for further research that consider both the nature of those rights and the way in which consumers make them effective, constituting an important source for analysis of collective action. The theme of social movements has achieved significant development in the sociological literature, especially since the 1960s, from a clear break with traditional approaches. In the United States, the Resource Mobilization theory (RM) emerges from an explicit break with two pillars of these approaches collective behavior and mass society and, in spite of being based on Olsons approach, it started a profitable discussion with European theorists in the 1980s. This led to significant changes in the focus of this theory giving rise to more researches oriented by questions that also consider the central issues of the most expressive theory in Europe, the New Social Movement theory (NSM). In this dissertation, we approach these movements from categories of the theory of Political Mobilization - whose main source lies in the Political Opportunity theory. This analysis of consumer movements in Brazil, which takes the example of the Housewife and Consumer Movement of Minas Gerais, shows the representativeness of this unit in relation to the phenomenon.