"I regularly weigh up just getting rid of Facebook": exploring restriction as a form of anti-consumption

Recent years have witnessed increased interest in anti-consumption with various conference and journal special issues devoted to clarifying our understanding of the concept (Lee et al. 2011; Lee, Cherrier, and Belk 2013). This body of research reveals that anti-consumption is manifested in a variety of ways, some more extreme than others. Lee et al. (2011) identify three non-exclusive types of anti-consumption: reject, restrict and reclaim. A review of relevant literature reveals theoretical advancements in relation to rejection and reclamation, but restriction has received significantly less attention. To address this imbalance, this paper aims to gain a deeper understanding of restriction as a form of anti-consumption. The context for our study is Facebook. Social networking sites have been shown to facilitate anti-consumption (Hutter and Hoffman 2013), but research has yet to investigate anti-consumption of social networking sites themselves.

The contribution of our paper is twofold. First, we demonstrate that restriction may be more wide-ranging than currently acknowledged and we illustrate how restriction enables consumers to negotiate tensions between their anti-consumptive discourses and their decision to continue to consume. Second, while previous research favours more extreme examples of anti-consumption such as dumpster diving (Fernandez, Brittain, and Bennett 2011), Freeganism (Pentina and Amos 2011) and boycotting (Friedman 1999), we contribute by demonstrating how anti-consumption develops within mundane, daily practices.