Creating consumer-citizens : competition, tradition and the moral order of the mobile telecommunications industry in Fiji

This chapter examines the ways in which liberalisation and the promise of competition has shaped the telecommunications landscape in Fiji by analysing the branding strategies leading up to and immediately following the launch of Digicel Fiji in 2008. Through close attention to these campaigns and the discourses of change that surrounded them, I argue that liberalisation transformed Vodafone Fiji and Digicel Fiji from mere mobile telecommunications companies providing products and services into moral actors responsible for articulating their responsibilities towards Fiji and Fijians as consumer-citizens. Focusing upon the different forms of moral order created by companies engaging with state agencies as well as consumers, I begin by outlining the ways in which Digicel framed itself as a monopoly breaker that would disrupt existing moral relationships between the incumbent and consumers by offering better and more widespread coverage and affordable prices. I then turn to the incumbent Vodafone Fiji’s efforts to both anticipate and respond to the call for a new moral order (Callon, Méadel and Rabeharisoa 2002; Foster 2007, 2011; Slater 2011). In the final section I examine the ways these market conditions and the moral orders associated with them were depicted to the company’s current and future mobile consumers.