The organization of consumer protection - political actors and legal frameworks

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In the first funding period, we analyzed how anti-discrimination law is implemented, adapted and changed in male-dominated organisations, which new collectives have been organized and how they influence the law and its implementation. This is also the starting point for our research in the second funding period in which we ask how collectives are organized at the interface between law and gender in the field of consumer protection. To achieve overall insight for the research group we investigate which imaginations of the general and common are reflected in consumer protection. In order to examine two currently relevant cases, we use a mix of methods that combines a political claims analysis with expert interviews. Because of the taxation of female hygienic articles (1) and the creation of the Model Declaratory Action (a new consumer class-action framework for redress) in the wake of the diesel emissions scandal (2), the question is asked: which collectivization processes can be observed in consumer law and how these processes relate to and change law. In addition, we analyze which international and transnational references are made - in the form of semantics of legitimacy or new networks - and how forms of discrimination are processed or even newly produced in the process. Beyond the common features of both cases, specifics can be identified that make the comparison between them fruitful. Overall, with our project we are addressing a research gap at the interface between organizational, gender and legal sociology, as the significance of law for organizations in institutional fields and in processes of reorganization, is still inadequately researched.