The Role of Individual- and Contextual-Level Social Capital in Product Boycotting: A Multilevel Analysis

Grzegorz Zasuwa
Additional contact information
Grzegorz Zasuwa: Department of Economics and Management, Faculty of Social Sciences, The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, al. Racławickie 14, 20-950 Lublin, Poland

Sustainability, 2019, vol. 11, issue 4, 1-16

Abstract: Product boycotts represent an important form of sustainable consumption, as withholding purchasing can restrain firms from damaging the natural environment or breaking social rules. However, our understanding of consumer participation in these protests is limited. Most previous studies have focused on the psychological and economic determinants of product boycotting. Drawing on social capital literature, this study builds a framework that explains how individual- and contextual-level social capital affects consumer participation in boycotts of products. A multilevel logistic regression analysis of 29 country representative samples derived from the European Social Survey (N = 54221) shows that at the individual level product boycotting is associated with a person’s social ties, whereas at the country level, generalized trust and social networks positively affect consumer decisions to take part in these protests. These results suggest that to better understand differences among countries in consumer activism, it is necessary to consider the role of social capital as an important predictor of product boycotting.

Keywords: product boycott; consumer boycott; consumer activism; social capital; sustainable consumption; social ties; generalized trust; trust (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/4/949/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/4/949/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:11:y:2019:i:4:p:949-:d:205393

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().