No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Something old, something new: Enabled theory building in qualitative marketing research
Abstract
“Enabled theorizing” is a common practice in marketing scholarship. Nevertheless, this practice has recently been criticized for constraining the creation of novel theory. To advance this conversation, we conduct a grounded analysis of papers that feature enabled theorizing with the aim of describing and analyzing how enabled theorizing is practiced. Our analysis suggests that enabled theorizing marries data with analytical tools and ontological perspectives in ways that advance ongoing conversations in marketing theory and practice, as well as informing policy and methods. Based on interviews with marketing and consumer research scholars who practice enabled theorizing, we explain how researchers use enabling theories to shape research projects, how researchers select enabling lenses, and how they negotiate the review process. We discuss the implications of our analyses for theory-building in our field, and we question the notion of originality in relation to theory more generally.
... The data provide deep insights into how SE behaviors either challenge or support existing institutions and the potential implications for brand meaning. Based on inductive theorizing, and to facilitate sense-making of the data, we use institutional theory as an appropriate and enabling lens (e.g., Dolbec et al., 2021) for simultaneous consideration of institutions within and beyond focal organizations (Scott, 2014). This includes, for instance, organizational service guidelines, social norms and regulatory expectations, and how employees navigate these respective institutions (e.g., Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006). ...
... However, previous research has explored SE behavior that intentionally departs from organizational guidelines to favorably impact either the customer or organization, although neither in a branding context nor specifically taking an institutional lens as a method or enabling theory (cf., Jaakkola, 2020;Dolbec et al., 2021). The concept of positive or constructive deviance describes workplace behavior that violates organizational norms but is undertaken with honorable intentions to benefit the organization, its members, or both (Galperin, 2012). ...
... Thus, institutions frame individual purchase decisions as well as brand interactions. Yet, despite the demonstrated relevance of institutional theory in marketing (Koskela-Huotari et al., 2020), its application as a method theory (Jaakkola, 2020) or enabling theory (Dolbec et al., 2021) in branding studies is only slowly emerging. The interplay between brand-related SE efforts and institutions remains largely unclear. ...
Service employees (SEs) are instrumental in shaping customer brand perceptions. However, to deliver favorable brand experiences, SEs may not always abide by socially constructed norms and guidelines—called institutions—that coordinate service interactions. We explore how SEs navigate internal and external institutions, and the potential implications for brand meaning outcomes. Drawing on qualitative interviews with SEs from five local and international bank brands in Vietnam, and archival data, we discover 10 practices that function as institutional work and identify potential implications for brand meaning outcomes of authenticity, relevance, and legitimacy. Using institutional theory as an enabling lens, we demonstrate how these practices either disrupt or maintain internal and external institutions with dark-side or light-side consequences for brands. Specifically, our findings uncover how dark-side practices may place brand meaning outcomes at risk and how light-side practices, even those that disrupt institutions, can potentially enhance brand meaning, providing significant theoretical and managerial implications.
... Yet many (including Barney Glaser, the coauthor of The Discovery of Grounded Theory) eschew narrow interpretations that attempt to depict grounded theory building in particular, or qualitative research in general, as purely inductive (Walsh et al., 2015). Further, although qualitative research is not purely inductive, it does often rely on a mixture of inductive and abductive theorization (Belk & Sobh, 2019;Dolbec et al., 2021;Grodal et al., 2021). ...
... At this stage, it is not uncommon for the qualitative researcher to seek out an "enabling lens" that might be useful for subsequent stages of analysis and theory building. The term "enabling lens" refers to an existing theory the researcher uses to make sense of the patterns that have emerged during data analysis; while it is not a requirement that an enabling lens be introduced, many consumer researchers have found it useful to do so (Dolbec et al., 2021). If an enabling lens is adopted, the researchers must engage in extensive reading about the theoretical lens if they are not already familiar with the constructs and assumptions it entails. ...
... Attempting to use an enabling lens without understanding its nuance and details will undermine theory-building efforts. And while researchers may find ways of refining or extending the enabling lens itself, this should not be regarded as necessary or ideal (Dolbec et al., 2021). ...
This paper makes the case that there is considerable untapped potential for qualitative research to make theoretical contributions that will advance our collective insights on consumer psychology. The paper explains some features that distinguish qualitative research from other approaches and addresses some common misperceptions about it. It explains why qualitative research – which is geared toward theory development and refinement – can be such as useful took in the kit of researchers seeking insights on consumer psychology. It then outlines a qualitative research process suitable for crafting conceptual contributions to consumer psychology and offers a set of criteria that are appropriate and inappropriate for adjudicating qualitative research of this kind. In all, we make the case that the conditions are in place for JCP to be a vibrant platform for publishing research based on qualitative methods.
... Their rationale is threefold: first, researchers benefit from acknowledging that objects are 'more than one, but less than many', as they can manifest in multiple ways within and across contexts (Law, 2002: 6). Second, because each researcher carries with them a worldview that shapes what they pay attention to and write about in relation to a context (Dolbec et al., 2021), research accounts are always partial, potentially marginalising voices, roles and multiple manifestations of people or objects, thereby limiting or distorting analysis and theory development (Bettany, 2015). Third, different orderings and descriptions of contexts can create different ways of enacting organisations and markets (Bettany 2018;Haraway 2007). ...
... Research is often guided by a desire to understand effects, flows, or processes. Any reflexive researcher should be aware that their choices in such matters will affect the analysis (Bettany 2015), and involve ontological choices that shape insights (Bettany, 2015;Dolbec et al., 2021;Kjellberg and Helgesson, 2006;Zwick and Dholakia, 2006). OOO reminds us that ontological considerations should inform epistemological projects , yet the problem of overmining might also be considered a familiar aspect of research methods and practice for scholars using socio-material theories. ...
Assemblage and actor-network theories explain how markets and consumption are constituted by heterogeneous resources that form part-whole relations at various scales. Marketing and consumer research studies that use these theories, however, often retain human-centred scales and units of analysis, such that objects and forces that exist at unfamiliar (time)scales are overlooked. This paper explains how Object-Oriented Ontology can help to guide ontological, methodological, and analytical considerations in studies of market and consumption assemblages. We offer a framework that helps researchers to consider how far researchers should unpack assemblages into component parts; to what extent studies should trace objects’ effects as part of wider contexts; how ‘objects’ may harbour qualities that are withdrawn from social contexts; and how these hidden features can be encountered through speculative methods. Finally, we critically discuss the place of objects and subjects in socio-material research.
... The characteristics of e-commerce marketing are mainly established in the "B2B mode", enterprise procurement-oriented, long decision-making cycle, decision-making more rational, so the marketing strategy should be based on the user's needs as the standard, according to the different needs, the development of marketing strategy, that is, ecommerce marketing needs to establish a deep connection with the user. The three elements of the 3R marketing theory are shown in Figure 1 [25][26]. The marketing strategy optimization of the e-commerce platform is based on the 3R marketing theory, focusing on the in-depth optimization of the platform in terms of customer retention, product-related sales, and marketing promotion. ...
The technology can fully explore the user’s consumption behavior habits and help the e-commerce platform formulate more precise marketing strategies in a targeted manner. This paper firstly analyzes the optimization of marketing strategy based on the 3R marketing theory, gives the design process of the precise marketing strategy of an e-commerce platform, and analyzes the personalized service based on consumer classification. Secondly, for the shortcomings of the KNN algorithm in the process of accurate classification, the Gaussian function is introduced to weight the optimization of the algorithm, which further realizes the construction of the G-KNN algorithm. Finally, the testing and application analysis of the algorithm model was carried out using the actual user consumption data of the e-commerce platform. The results show that the classification accuracy of the G-KNN algorithm has been maintained at about 95% when the K value exceeds 800, and the F1 composite value of this paper’s algorithm fluctuates around 56% when the K value exceeds 1000. On the e-commerce platform, except for the electrical appliances category classification test, the fit and accuracy of other categories basically match. Using the KNN algorithm incorporating the Gaussian function can effectively realize the accurate classification of user characteristics on the e-commerce platform and provide data support for the e-commerce platform to formulate accurate marketing strategies based on consumer preferences.
... Nevertheless, the extant theorization in the area of brand love was not neglected but pursued to assimilate a variety of perspectives into the methodology. We have attempted to combine distinct theories of brand love into the research design (Dolbec et al., 2021). Instead of applying the completely open techniques suggested in grounded theory (Corbin and Strauss, 2008), we were guided by broad topics discovered in the existing literature. ...
Purpose
This study aims to add to the understanding of the interactive nature of brand love by using a multilayer perspective that incorporates individual, group and societal contexts.
Design/methodology/approach
The qualitative empirical study uses abductive reasoning. Its theories and conclusions are grounded in naturally occurring data from an online brand community. The approach revealed new interactive processes of brand love.
Findings
This study extends our understanding of the interactive nature of brand love by adopting a layered perspective incorporating micro- (individual), meso- (in-group), macro- (in-group vs out-group) and mega-layer (societal) social dynamics that complements the predominant focus on individual psychological processes. It challenges the linear, monodirectional trajectory approach to brand love, suggesting that brand love is in constant flux as individuals move across the layers in their identification with the brand.
Research limitations/implications
This study provides data from one destination brand in Finland. Future studies could consider other types of brands and contexts in other countries and cultures.
Practical implications
This study shows brand managers that brand lovers can be divided into subgroups with distinct drivers of their love to which brand managers should attend.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to describe the interactive nature of brand love through interactions between and within four layers of brand love. Furthermore, this study enhances our understanding of the contradictory aspects of brand love.
... Interpretation of data was informed by insights on attachment theory (Ainsworth, 1979;Bowlby, 1969) to refine codes, assist their categorisation and the final conceptualisation. The use of attachment as an enabling theory helps to better explain processes that lead to previously under-theorised outcomes and concepts, thus furthering an ongoing conversation with new insights (Dolbec et al., 2021). ...
Purpose
This research paper aims to understand how givers characterise and manage their gift giving networks by drawing on attachment theory (AT). This responds to the need to illuminate the givers–receivers’ networks beyond traditional role-based taxonomies and explore their changing dynamics.
Design/methodology/approach
A multi-method, qualitative approach was used involving 158 gift experiences captured in online diaries and 27 follow-up interviews.
Findings
Results show that givers organise receivers into gifting networks that are grounded in a contextual understanding of their relationships. The identification of direct, surrogate and mediated bonds reflects three different dimensions that inform gift-giving networks of support, care or belongingness rooted in AT. The relative position of gift receivers in this network influences the nature of support, the type of social influences and relationship stability in the network.
Research limitations/implications
This study illustrates the complexity of relationships based on the data collected over two specific periods of time; thus, there might be further types of receivers within a giver’s network that the data did not capture. This limitation was minimised by asking about other possible receivers in interviews.
Practical implications
The findings set a foundation for gift retailers to assist gift givers in finding gifts that match their perceived relations to the receivers by adapting communication messages and offering advice aligned with specific relationship contexts.
Originality/value
This study illuminates gift-giving networks by proposing a taxonomy of gifting networks underpinned by AT that can be applied to study different relationship contexts from the perspective of the giver. This conceptualisation captures different levels of emotional support, social influences and relationship stability, which have an impact on the receivers’ roles within the giver’s network. Importantly, results reveal that the gift receiver is not always the target of gift-giving. The target can be someone whom the giver wants to please or an acquaintance they share with the receiver with whom they wish to reinforce bonds.
... With respect to this potential gap, we agree with Dolbec et al. (2021) Thus, understanding the epistemic conditions producing knowledge in consumer research through Assemblage Theory contributes to the CCT field. Accordingly, our study assumes that the assemblage logic indicates how consumers can create sets of marketing resources to represent collectiveness and individuals inside them, since the CCT field tends to portray consumers as co-responsible for the agency that guides them . ...
Objetivo: O objetivo do presente estudo é investigar como a Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) adota a Assemblage Theory como base para produzir conhecimento na pesquisa do consumidor, a partir de um arquivo de artigos publicados nos principais periódicos de marketing.Metodologia: A Arqueologia Foucaultiana foi a metodologia de pesquisa escolhida, pois permite compreender como determinadas epistemes são constituídas de forma sócio-histórica ao longo do tempo, por meio de regularidades discursivas. Os artigos aderentes ao campo da CCT, que adotaram a Assemblage Theory, foram analisados com base nessa metodologia.Resultados: As análises evidenciaram que a Assemblage Theory é uma opção contundente para fundamentar a pesquisa CCT, por sua ligação com outras teorias e por ser uma forma de investigar fenômenos da cultura de consumo. Além disso, está alinhado com um fenômeno central no campo. Esses fatores fundamentam duas posições discursivas que sustentam a Assemblage Theory, seja como uma abordagem externa útil para estudos da CCT ou como uma nova teoria naturalizada neste campo de pesquisa.Contribuições teóricas: O estudo apresenta uma compreensão aprofundada sobre a adoção em curso de uma teoria emergente no campo da CCT; isso foi possível devido à adoção de uma abordagem metodológica de base epistêmica. Implicações e insights para uma agenda de pesquisa são apresentados.Contribuições práticas: O uso da Arqueologia Foucaultiana forneceu uma visão epistêmica sobre a adoção da Assemblage Theory no campo da CCT. Assim, a pesquisa atual fornece as bases para se pensar sobre aplicações e potencial consolidação dessa teoria no campo de pesquisa da CCT.
... Understanding the atmosphere of consumption involves the dimension of everyday life. Dolbec et al. (2021) show how theories of social practice contributed to the advancement of knowledge of ontological theories; Hill et al. (2014) suggest the importance of the details of everyday life to reveal the sensitive networks constituting the market and consumer culture. ...
Supported by non-representational theories (NRTs), we focus on the atmosphere of consumption and use a creative method to carry out this research. We consider the details of everyday life not represented, highlighting the roles of the elements in this fluid network. In order to understand how the atmosphere emerges, intensifies, and affects the behavior and modes of consumption, we ask ourselves: How does narrative/participant observation help us to develop interpretations about the way in which the affective bodies of consumers navigate and move around this experience? We seek, in the resource of biographical tradition, to collect a life story linked to the experiences of consumption enjoyed and meant in a commercial point over the years. Our corpus was based on narrative interviews, observation, and documents. From the nine critical incidents retrieved in the temporal experience of the narrative, the analysis revealed eight syntagms that, when encoded, pointed to six constituent meanings of this mode of experience-based consumption, which is driven by everyday situational factors but operate as signifying elements of the sales environment. The consumption experience was found to be a social and affective form of experience emerging in the respondent’s everyday life, whereas the actual consumption was solely a means for the social reaffirmation of the actor in question and the strengthening of her relationships.
... their interpretation of the data; but not before attempting an open approach capable of generating original theory. For a counterpoint arguing in favor of theory-aided research, see Dolbec et al.(2021). There is also a forthcoming Marketing Theory "Conversation" between these three authors and Belk. ...
While many consumer behavior studies have investigated consumer coping, few have considered it as a source of positive benefits in addition to being a matter of necessity. In this paper, we draw on Bourdieu’s notion of capital to introduce the concept of coping capital—the intentional or unintentional accumulation of resources, such as emotional and epistemic-competencies and skills resulting from coping with adversity, that may thereafter exist in an embodied state in the form of mental and physical dispositions—dispositions that later provide benefits in life. We suggest that the benefits of coping capital may be determined using either a prospective or a retrospective approach. These benefits may be anticipated or unanticipated when intentionally coping with adversity, while the benefits are predominantly unanticipated when unintentionally coping. By conceptualizing coping capital, our study makes a domain-level conceptual contribution to research on consumer coping. In addition the concept of coping capital may have broader implications outside of the domain of consumption.
... The central argument behind these three dimensions is that the representational practices in service affect how individuals interact with each other, in turn influencing individuals' activities and consequently changing actors' roles, and the process repeats itself whenever there is an occasion for change [35]. In this study, we applied the dimensions of cocreation as an enabling theory to explain the phenomenon of interest, i.e., the changes in a care delivery process [36,37]. Using these dimensions, we explore how the application of distance monitoring changes the activities and interactions and the roles of the actors in the care creation process. ...
Background
There is a consensus among healthcare providers, academics, and policy-makers that spiraling demand and diminishing resources are threatening the sustainability of the current healthcare system. Different telemedicine services are seen as potential solutions to the current challenges in healthcare. This paper aims to identify how distance monitoring services rendered for patients with chronic conditions can affect the escalating demand for healthcare. First, we identify how distance monitoring service changes the care delivery process using the lens of service cocreation. Next, we analyze how these changes can impact healthcare demand using the literature on demand and capacity management.
Method
In this qualitative study, we explore a distance monitoring service in a primary healthcare setting in Norway. We collected primary data from nurses and general physicians using the semi-structured interview technique. We used secondary patient data collected from a study conducted to evaluate the distance monitoring project. The deductive content analysis method was used to analyze the data.
Result
This study shows that the application of distance monitoring services changes the care delivery process by creating new activities, new channels for interaction, and new roles for patients, general physicians, and nurses. We define patients’ roles as proactive providers of health information, general physicians’ roles as patient selectors, and nurses’ roles as technical coordinators, data workers, and empathetic listeners. Thus, the co-creation aspect of the service becomes more prominent demonstrating potential for better management of healthcare demand. However, these changes also render the management of demand and resources more complex. To reduce the complexities, we propose three mechanisms: foreseeing and managing new roles, developing capabilities, and adopting a system-wide perspective.
Conclusion
The main contribution of the paper is that it demonstrates that, although distance monitoring services have the potential to have a positive impact on healthcare demand management, in the absence of adequate managerial mechanisms, they can also adversely affect healthcare demand management. This study provides a means for practitioners to reflect upon and refine the decisions that they make regarding telemedicine deployment and resource planning for delivering care.
... Finally, even though WPPP state that they aim to increase research plurality rather than to advocate for a particular approach, it is difficult not to see the WPPP typology (as depicted on p. 750) as a normative framework when one quadrant is labeled ''weak, weak'' and another quadrant is labeled ''strong, strong'' on qualities argued to be good. We find it particularly difficult to understand the denigration of induction, given that qualitative research is widely seen to be based on both inductive and abductive reasoning; see a discussion of this in two disciplines important to IB, management (Grodal, Anteby, & Holm, 2020;Harley & Cornelissen, 2020;Van Maanen, Sørensen, & Mitchell, 2007) and marketing (Dolbec, Fischer, & Canniford, 2021). ...
The Welch et al. (J Int Bus Stud 42(5):740–762, 2011) JIBS Decade Award-winning article highlights the importance of the contextualization of international business research that is based on qualitative research methods. In this commentary, we build on their foundation and develop further the role of contextualization, in terms of the international business phenomena under study, contemporaneous conversations about qualitative research methods, and the situatedness of individual papers within the broader research process. Our remarks are largely targeted to authors submitting international business papers based on qualitative research, and to the gatekeepers – editors and reviewers – assessing them, and we provide some guidance with respect to these three dimensions of context.
... Interpretation of data was informed by insights on attachment theory (Ainsworth, 1979;Bowlby, 1969) to refine codes, assist their categorisation and the final conceptualisation. The use of attachment as an enabling theory helps to better explain processes that lead to previously under-theorised outcomes and concepts, thus furthering an ongoing conversation with new insights (Dolbec et al., 2021). ...
This research sheds light on givers’ relationships with recipients by identifying the dimensions that characterise receivers as part of a dynamic gift-giving network. For this, we draw on attachment theory, which conceptualises humans’ propensity to form affectional bonds with particular others (Bowlby 1977). Understanding how givers characterise gift recipients is of great importance given the economic significance of gift giving in the UK, representing an expenditure of £40 billion p.a. (Mintel 2013). Marketers need to understand receivers as antecedents of gifting in order to apply strategic decisions to the marketing of gifts (Beatty et al. 1996). From a givers’ perspective, some receivers are more valued than others (Lowrey et al. 2004), and these relationship differences influence aspects such as gift expenditures (e.g. Saad and Gill 2003) and motives (e.g. Wolfinbarger and Yale 1993). Three main research limitations restrict the understanding of gift receivers. First, existing classifications assume that specific types of recipients, such as family, are close by definition (e.g. Caplow 1982) without explaining what makes them important to the giver. Second, the study of relationship closeness in gift giving is limited to the giver-receiver dyad, neglecting the influence of third parties who tie the giver and the receiver together, with the exception of Lowrey et al. (2004). Lastly, although gift relationships can change over time, prior research adopts a static approach by assuming that the factors that could cause relationship change affect all receivers in the same way. In order to address these gaps in the gift literature, we collected 28 online diaries and conducted 27 follow-up interviews from 28 informants, which provided data on 247 different gift events. After conducting a quantitative content analysis (Kassarjian 1977), we adopted an interpretive approach to enable new themes to emerge from the data as used by Ruth et al. (1999). Our findings suggest that givers characterise recipients in three ways. First, in agreement with gift research (e.g. Joy, 2001), givers distinguish receivers in terms of the nature of the relationship (e.g. family, partner, friends). Second, givers differentiate recipients based on the type of emotional ties connecting the two of them. These ties involve (1) direct bonds, indicating sources or targets of support to the giver (e.g. supportive mother); (2) mediated bonds, signalling receivers who are means of support (e.g. wife’s father as a means to be close to a wife); and (3) surrogate bonds, signalling substitutes for unavailable supportive receivers (e.g. friend replacing a deceased sister). This finding advances the traditional approach to studying relationships, restricted to the giver-receiver dyad. Finally, givers alluded to the stability of the receivers’ presence within their gift network and identified permanent gift receivers, characterised by strong attachment bonds, transient receivers characterised by weaker bonds and sporadic receivers with non-existent bonds. Permanent gift receivers with strong attachment bonds tend to be less affected by factors that could cause relationship change than transient or sporadic receivers, which challenges the assumption that all gift relationships have the same likelihood of change. This manuscript advances knowledge on gift giving by dimensionalising givers’ relationships with gift recipients in terms of the nature of the relationship, the type of bonds and stability of the receiver’s place on the giver’s gift list. In marketing, contributions based on differentiation add insight by categorising a construct under study, and they matter because lack of distinction creates errors in reasoning (MacInnis 2011). In gift giving, failure to differentiate these dimensions leads to inaccurate assumptions of closeness, which practitioners mistranslate into their marketing communications and targeting strategies. References Available Upon Request
Purpose
As brands progressively become instruments for consumers to advocate for social change, many feel pressure to engage in social purpose branding (SPB) through addressing social issues. In a rush to remain socially relevant, brands have approached SPB differently; some genuinely intend to advance the social issue, while some intend to capitalise on social movements to mobilise the brand. This paper aims to explain these differences by theoretically outlining various approaches to SPB.
Design/methodology/approach
This mixed method paper draws on theory, interviews with marketing practitioners, and practical exemplars to present a typology of SPB approaches.
Findings
Using institutional logics theory, SPB is categorised into four approaches: social purpose-driving, social purpose-driven, social purpose-aligning and social purpose-washing.
Research limitations/implications
The typological framework for SPB advances this domain to outline effective and ineffective ways for brands to engage with social issues. A detailed agenda for further research is provided to guide ongoing SPB research.
Practical implications
The typology presented reduces complexity and helps marketers understand the different approaches to engaging with a social issue. Given the growing intertwinement of brands and social issues, this research is essential for brands seeking to advance a social issue and remain relevant.
Originality/value
This paper offers a novel conceptualisation of SPB by defining it, identifying a framework of its characteristics, and detailing four SPB approaches.
Nature affords transformations to consumers’ social, embodied, and temporal experiences. Yet, consumer research has yet to consider how wild species contribute to and are affected by experiential consumption in nature. With data from an ethnography of fly fishing, we theorize human-fish interactions as interspecies encounters in contact zones. Our findings explain how these encounters are established, engendering processes of interspecies becoming that transform both species. We discuss how these transformations are ordered by power relationships that classify roles for entities enrolled in consumption assemblages. Often, humans exert power over other living entities by classifying them as resources for consumption. Yet we also discover more reciprocal expressions of power between humans and other species. With consumption as a major contributor to the decline of wild species populations, we discuss theoretical and practical implications of our work that are intended to stimulate further research.
This essay gives closer historical consideration to the unprecedented disciplinary impact of Belk’s (1988) conceptualization of the extended self. This canonical article initially appeared to be another flashpoint in the paradigmatic conflict between positivist and interpretivist consumer researchers. However, Belk’s portrayal of consumers as agentic actors who produce their own identities through a network of possessions and symbolic artefacts proved to be highly compatible with interdisciplinary trends toward a more holistic and socio-culturally situated understanding of consumer behavior. Accordingly, Belk’s “extended self” created an ontological bridge between interpretivist studies of consumers’ co-constituting relations to the socio-material world and consumer psychologists’ quest to expand their research interests beyond the study of rational decision making processes. While some marketing historians have suggested that the extended self’s seminal influence derives from its generative “vagueness,” I propose that its transformational effects on the broader field of consumer research trace to a genius of mythopoesis and a genius of timing. I then discuss how the logic of ontological reconfiguration, manifest in Belk’s conceptualization, can foster more synergistic and innovative inter-paradigmatic dialogues between consumer culture theory (CCT) and consumer psychology.
Globally, more than 1.2 billion people depend directly on nature for their basic needs. These nature-dependent subsistence communities (NDSCs) bear the brunt of environmental disruptions caused by climate change. Prevailing climate solutions crafted by external “experts” often pursue narrow technocratic objectives that erode the dignity of NDSCs. In this paper, we conduct ethnographic research in a subsistence fishing community to develop a dignity-centric framework for crafting climate solutions for subsistence communities. We center the voices of community members in deriving our framework, which is a departure from prior approaches rooted in normative ethical frameworks. A unique feature of our framework is the dual focus on deontological (process-based) and teleological (outcome-based) dignity considerations. Furthermore, taking a dialectical approach to dignity outcomes, our framework reveals that climate solutions must account for three important dialectical tensions playing out within communities: cultural continuity versus cultural adaptation, place rootedness versus spatial mobility, and consumption adequacy versus aspirational consumption.
Issues of fairness relate to distributive justice (DJ), which is concerned with how a society distributes benefits and burdens. Whilst marketing theory has considered fairness in the distribution of basic goods, we lack insight into stakeholder perspectives on fairness for goods such as alcohol, which can be problematic, due to their global health and social burden. This study examines stakeholder perspectives on fairness from the Kenyan alcohol marketplace. Using longitudinal ethnographic data, we draw on two DJ theories, (egalitarianism and prioritarianism), to examine fairness perspectives of different stakeholders, their problem diagnosis, and proposed solutions to fairness challenges in the alcohol marketplace. By so doing, we give voice to previously unheard stakeholders, and expose some of the potential theoretical foundations for competing notions of fairness. The study also exemplifies the linkages between different forms of fairness and proposes a fairness chain as a framework for evaluating fairness in the marketplace.
Calls for research contribution and demands for original theories have become visibly and audibly louder in review processes over the last two decades. In interpretivist marketing and consumer research, such calls have been accompanied by an emphasis on the importance of theory and on drawing on context when crafting impactful research contributions. By investigating the rhetorical claims made by authors in 45 highly cited articles, published between 2005 and 2019 in three representative marketing journals, this paper provides a kaleidoscopic, three-dimensional framework that maps out and explores the rhetorical devices employed in interpretivist scholarship. Based on the framework, the paper suggests different pathways that researchers can follow to navigate through the complex process of shaping and developing relevant and impactful research contributions.
This paper seeks to extend existing conceptualisations of risky and harmful consumption. Our work draws on a qualitative, rhizomatic study of Australian consumers’ sports betting practices. We utilise Deleuze and Guattari’s related concepts of molar and molecular lines and lines of flight to draw attention to sports betting’s mutually affecting discursive, socio-material and emotional intensities. We examine the ongoing tensions between how people understand themselves as gamblers, the social normalisation of gambling and the parameters of risky betting behaviour. We argue that conceiving gambling consumption through molar and molecular lines challenges the binaries inherent in current framings of risky and harmful consumption. We also consider the possibilities for lines of flight and implications for gambling harm.
Older consumers’ adoption and consumption of technologies continues to be an important research area. However, marketing scholarship on this topic risks unintentionally smuggling age stereotypes into its constructed theories. Such assumptions include older consumers’ adoption processes being complicated by health and social isolation issues and their low tech-skills. Although stereotypes hold a ‘kernel-of-truth’ and underpin meaningful research, they can transform from helpful heuristics to impediments to crafting reflexive scholarship. Therefore, this article reviews marketing literature on older consumers and technology. It develops a 2 × 3 typology to analyse 86 articles based on their portrayals of older consumers’ capabilities (incapable/capable) and technology orientations (resisting/discerning/seeking). The typology’s six emergent categories aim to turn age stereotypes into ‘productive tensions’ for researchers by encouraging critical reflexivity in ways that broaden future research possibilities. These possibilities include better accounting for older consumers who are skilled technology-seekers, and equally, non-adopters with non-technophobic reasons to resist adoption.
This paper draws on practice theory and a review of practice theoretical studies in marketing, management, consumer, and markets research to advance our knowledge of marketing as a value-creating activity within firms. Building on previous research, the paper contributes to the literature by advancing a Marketing-as-Practice (MAP) framework based on three key concepts: marketing practices, marketing practitioners, and marketing praxis. The structures and interrelationships between these key concepts are also outlined. The framework can be used to study value-creating marketing activities within firms as well as between firms and their stakeholders which is in line with the American Marketing Association’s definition of marketing. This paper also contributes by presenting a MAP research agenda to guide future research on value-creating marketing activity.
This article responds to calls for IB researchers to study a greater diversity of international business (IB) phenomena in order to generate theoretical insights about empirical settings that are under-represented in the scholarly IB literature. While this objective is consistent with the strengths of qualitative research methods, novel empirical settings are not always well aligned with methods that have been developed in better-researched and thus more familiar settings. In this article, we explore three methods-related challenges of studying under-researched empirical settings, in terms of gathering and analyzing qualitative data. The challenges are: managing researcher identities, navigating unfamiliar data gathering conditions, and theorizing the uniqueness of novel empirical settings. These challenges are integral to the process of contextualization, which involves linking observations from an empirical setting to the categories of the theoretical research context. We provide a toolkit of recommended practices to manage them, by drawing on published accounts of research by others, and on our own experiences in the field.
How markets evolve is a perennial and important question in business. Building on a large qualitative dataset on the coffee market comprising primary and secondary interviews, archival data, and fieldwork, the authors introduce a novel theoretical mechanism—practice expansion—to explain how ongoing institutional complexity fosters market evolution. To theorize practice expansion, the authors combine institutional logics with resource partitioning and introduce a two-by-two typology of firms evolving in markets: craft vs. commercial and generalist vs. specialist. The authors’ analysis, grounded in this typology, identifies three mechanisms that explain practice expansion (elaboration, translation, and transformation). The authors then show how practice expansion contributes to market evolution by increasing product diversity, broadening skills and knowledge, and enriching the market meaning system. The novel theory introduced in this article contributes to extant work by theorizing market evolution as resulting from practice expansion, and by broadening our understanding of the types of firms and their interactions important to that evolution. The novel theory also points to important strategy implications for how different types of firms can contribute to and benefit from the identified evolutionary patterns and ongoing institutional complexity.
This article explores mothers’ narratives of ‘prepping’ behaviours. Prepping involves the management of stockpiled household items in anticipation of marketplace disruption. In this article, we use anticipated food shortages following the UK’s exit from the EU (‘Brexit’) as our context. Drawing on interview data, we highlight how mothers embed prepping into their ongoing pursuit of intensive motherhood, bound in the highly gendered practice of feeding the family. While adhering to elements of intensive motherhood ideology (their actions are labour intensive/child centred), participants reveal a hidden element to their practice. We introduce the notion of ‘survivalist intensive motherhood’ to understand their actions. Survivalist intensive motherhood departs from earlier intensive motherhood studies due to the largely invisible nature of preparations and the trade-offs made to feed the family during resource scarcity.
Drawing on institutional theory and discursive psychology, this article elucidates how actors use emotion discourse to undermine the legitimacy of consumer practices. Based on an empirical investigation of the bullfighting controversy in Spain, our work shows how activists engage in the production and circulation of compelling emotional prototypes of their adversaries. Such emotional prototypes constitute the discursive foundations of a pathic stigma, which, once established, taints the identity of the social groups associated with the practice. Our work frames the centrality of pathic stigmatization as a cultural mechanism mediating the relationship between emotion discourse and the subsequent delegitimization of consumer practices. We make three key contributions to the literature: we advance a rhetorical perspective on emotions and their role in deinstitutionalization processes; we further develop the theory of marketplace sentiments by showing how sentiments operate downstream; and we provide evidence of the sociocultural mechanisms underpinning the emotional vilification, stereotyping and stigmatization of consumer collectives.
In this article, we integrate Nietzsche’s visions of self-overcoming with a Žižekian toolbox to explore how ‘market-based progress’ is upheld through a fabric of ideological fantasies. Through an analysis of Huel, a nutritionally complete British food brand aligned with progressive and techno-utopian discourses, we reveal a fantasmatic structure centred on pragmatism, the search for unassailable truth and continuance of a prehistoric legacy. These fantasies function as illusory support for acceptance that humanity’s great overcoming is singularly achieved through market logic and ethos. Here, a fetishistic inversion centres on subjects believing that the detached spectatorialism of consumption is closer to the act of the Nietzschean ‘Overhuman’ than it is to its inverse, the ‘last human’. This article provides the parameters for how ideological fantasy insulates the market from its material deadlocks and concludes with a conceptualization of the post-sovereign consumer’s subjectification along the fantastical contours of market-based progress.
Emerging research explores the role of self‐tracking in supporting healthy behaviour. Self‐tracking comprises a number of interrelated practices; some individual some communal. In this article, we focus on practices that enable interaction between self‐trackers through data sharing and communication around personal data. For public health, communal self‐tracking has been explored for the additional benefits it provides in addition to self‐knowledge. However, under‐explored is the emotional entanglement of self‐tracking and tracked activities, or the role of practitioners in the dynamic evolution of tracked practices. Qualitative, mixed methods data were collected from leisure‐time runners in the SW England who self‐track using social fitness app ‘Strava’, and were interpreted through the lens of practice theory. We find that communal self‐tracking affords the active shaping of the emotion and purpose of running. This ‘teleoaffective shaping’ allows practitioners to negotiate and reconstitute appealing meanings associated with running to protect their practice loyalty. We identify three mechanisms for teleoaffective shaping afforded by Strava: labelling, reward and materialising effort. Findings advance our understanding of how social fitness apps work to retain practitioners of physically active leisure practices. Future research should further explore the multiple ways that associations with tracked physical activity evolve through entanglement with self‐tracking practices.
Purpose
This paper aims to illuminate the characteristics of Analytic and Continental scholarship to generate a deeper appreciation for both writing styles in the consumer culture theory (CCT) community.
Design/methodology/approach
Two CCT researchers discuss the merits of Analytic and Continental scholarship in an accessible dialogical format.
Findings
Analytic ideals of scholarship, espoused by elite academic journals, include conceptual rigor, logical claims, theoretical coherence, researcher agnosticism and broad generalizability. Continental ideals of scholarship, more likely to be espoused by niche and/or critical journals, include creative writing, holistic interpretation, intellectual imagination, political provocation and deep contextualization.
Originality/value
This dialogue may build more understanding across variously oriented scholars, literatures, and journals in the CCT community.
There is increasing interest in the marketing discipline to adopt an institutional perspective when examining markets. This requires seeing markets as complex systems that evolve through time, rather than as preexisting, stable structures. Using a historical, longitudinal case study, we integrate the “institutional work” framework as a lens to understand the process of market change in the novel, historic case of circus in North America through the 20th century. We explore the decline of the market for traditional American circus, and the emergence, in the 1970s, of the adjacent market for new circus, with a specific focus on the world’s preeminent new circus company, Cirque du Soleil. Theoretical contributions of the article include a “market-shaping activities” framework that illustrates market shaping involves considerably more actors than the dyad of producer and consumer. Market-shaping occurs through an interdependent process involving institutionalized practices, beliefs and expectations, and the intentional activities of market actors at any institutional level. Market change is shared, iterative, and recursive, that is cocreated, and undertaken by market actors both formal and informal. Market shapers do not necessarily work in an orchestrated fashion; nevertheless, vibrant networks of complementary actors contribute positively to the construction of shared identities and normative networks. From a managerial perspective, we find implications for policy makers, funders, strategists, and marketers.
This article introduces a new dimension of consumption as liquid or solid. Liquid consumption is defined as ephemeral, access based, and dematerialized, while solid consumption is defined as enduring, ownership based, and material. Liquid and solid consumption are conceptualized as existing on a spectrum, with four conditions leading to consumption being liquid, solid, or a combination of the two: relevance to the self, the nature of social relationships, accessibility to mobility networks, and type of precarity experienced. Liquid consumption is needed to explain behavior within digital contexts, in access-based consumption, and in conditions of global mobility. It highlights a consumption orientation around values of flexibility, adaptability, fluidity, lightness, detachment, and speed. Implications of liquid consumption are discussed for the domains of attachment and appropriation; the importance of use value; materialism; brand relationships and communities; identity; prosumption and the prosumer; and big data, quantification of the self, and surveillance. Lastly, managing the challenges of liquid consumption and its effect on consumer welfare are explored. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Journal of Consumer Research, Inc. All rights reserved.
Nosenography is a theoretical and methodological commitment to uncover the presences and practices of smell, an often-ignored sensory feature of market and consumption spaces. Drawing on prior social science theorizations of smell as well as contemporary sensory marketing practices, we develop a framework to understand how smell features in spatial assemblages of bodies, locations and experiences. Extending theorizations of product smells and ambient smells, we show how this framework can guide knowledge of the sensing, practice and management of smell and space. We explain that smell is a dynamic and unruly force that (i) encodes spaces with meaning, (ii) identifies bodies with spaces, and (iii) punctuates the temporal experience of space as it changes. Nosenography reaffirms that spaces of consumption are multisensory and that this quality should be further acknowledged in figuring market spaces as dynamic and contested assemblages of heterogeneous constituents.
Building on work on social and macro-social marketing, we provide an empirical account of ways in which American gun violence prevention groups (GVPGs) act as macro-social marketers as they address the wicked problem of gun violence, which they define as deaths and injuries with firearms. We find that, as a collective, GVPGs attempt to change the culture related to guns by targeting up-, mid-, and downstream agents. We contribute to theory by (1) expanding the concept of macro-social marketing beyond government entities to include consumer interest groups and collectives; (2) introducing internal marketing as a macrosocial marketing tool critical for macro-social marketers dependent largely on volunteers; (3) elucidating ways that macro-social marketers can accomplish upstream changes indirectly, by encouraging consumers and citizens to influence policy makers; and (4) revealing marketing tactics that can be leveraged across up-, mid-, downstream, and internal efforts.
This article, together with a companion video, provides a synthesized summary of a Showcase Symposium held at the 2016 Academy of Management Annual Meeting in which prominent scholars—Denny Gioia, Kathy Eisenhardt, Ann Langley and Kevin Corley—discussed different approaches to theory building with qualitative research. Our goal for the symposium was to increase management scholars’ sensitivity to the importance of theory-method “fit” in qualitative research. We have integrated the panelists’ prepared remarks and interactive discussion into three sections: an introduction by each scholar, who articulates their own approach to qualitative research; their personal reflections on the similarities and differences between approaches to qualitative research, and answers to general questions posed by the audience during the symposium. We conclude by summarizing insights gleaned from the symposium about important distinctions among these three qualitative research approaches and their appropriate usages.
The companion video is available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/_JdOSCzSpMc
This article offers an historical account of the contestation surrounding MP3 and its legitimation as a consumer choice option. We juxtapose our narrative against the service-dominant logic (SDL) literature, which positions the consumer as the co-creator of value. In these debates issues of power and politics are downplayed. By contrast, we foreground the politicized processes that frame consumer choice options. Through a study of the legal disputes around MP3 and digital delivery services, we make a case that law courts provide the scaffolding for judgements of value in the market system. Contrary to proponents of SDL, value is not only a function of co-production between company and customer. Nor do all consumption practices acquire sufficient legitimacy to enter into legally sanctioned value co-creation interactions. This is a function of the ‘hyper-power’ practiced by the legal community and related actors, which constitute or deny value to product offerings. Value is not, therefore, necessarily phenomenologically determined by the ultimate consumer. Neither are they the sovereign individual of marketing lore. Their subjectivity is patterned by macro and meso actors and service provision is permitted when it is capable of enrolment within the circuits of capital accumulation.
Purpose
Digital technologies are changing the ways in which the meanings and identity of both consumers and brands are constructed. This research aims to extend knowledge of how consumer-made “selfie” images shared in social media might contribute to the destabilization of brands as assemblages.
Design/methodology/approach
Insights are drawn from a critical visual content analysis of three popular champagne brand accounts and consumer-made selfies featuring these brands in Instagram.
Findings
This study shows how brands and branded selves intersect through “heterotopian selfie practices”. Accentuated by the rise of attention economy and “consumer microcelebrity”, the authors argue that these proliferating selfie images can destabilize spatial, temporal, symbolic and material properties of brand assemblages.
Practical implications
The implications include a consideration of how selfie practices engender new challenges for brand design and brand management.
Originality/value
This study illustrates how a brand assemblage approach can guide investigations of brands at multiple scales of analysis. In particular, this paper extends knowledge of visual brand-related user-generated content in terms of how consumers express, visualize and share selfies and how the heterotopian quality of this sharing consequently shapes brand assemblages.
Consumer-cultural research has never been a more exciting and relevant area of study. As the contributors to this volume illustrate, the practices, materials and discourses of markets and consumption are proliferating in manners that blur conceptual boundaries commonly established between consumers and technology, objects and subjects; production and consumption, nature and culture, local and global. What specific aspects of consumption engender these fuzzy boundaries and how can we map markets as they extend over ever-new territories? To answer these questions, this book unites some leading authors who are tracing markets and consumer cultures through the lenses provided by the concept of assemblage. During the past three decades assemblage has influenced thinking in philosophy, the humanities and the social sciences. Moving beyond the preoccupation with meaning associated with linguistic and interpretive turns, and problems of rigidity versus change associated with post-structuralism, 1 assemblage offers a range of tools for thinking about the social world as messy and ongoing interrelations between diverse kinds of things at various scales of life. So extensive is the concept's impact that it would be impossible to describe the range of applications and innovations generated so far. As such, this introduction will provide an overview of some features that unite theoretical perspectives associated with the work of, amongst others, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Manuel DeLanda, Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, John Law and Donna Haraway. The perspectives these authors establish are diverse. Yet what unites ideas of assemblages, actor-networks and figurations are conceptions of the world as constituted from more or less temporary amalgamations of heterogeneous material and semiotic elements, amongst which capacities and actions emerge not as properties of individual elements, but through the relationships established between them. In what follows, we will unpack this definition, explain the new pathways that assemblage opens, and illustrate what the concept can change in terms of how we understand markets, consumption and consumers. In so doing, we also introduce our co-authors' explorations of consumption assemblages; the overlapping entanglements of heterogeneous components from which consumer cultures and markets are both localised and extended. These explorations are intended to renew and refresh theories of markets and consumption in a world where conventional scales, sites, expressions and borders are open to new paths of transformation. Indeed, our contributing authors wreak
This study analyzes the marketplace performances that are enacted in the field of women’s flat track roller derby using the theoretical lens of gender performativity. Rather than treating the roller derby field as an autonomous enclave of gender resistance, this study focuses on the interrelationships between derby grrrls’ resignifying performances of femininity and the gender constraints that have been naturalized in their everyday lives. The market-mediated nature of derby grrrls’ ideological edgework enables them to challenge orthodox gender boundaries, without losing socio-cultural legitimacy. This analysis casts new theoretical light on the gendered habitus and reveals key differences to the outcomes that would follow from Bourdieusian assumptions about the deployment of cultural capital in zero-sum status competitions. The concept of ideological edgework also presents a theoretical alternative to critical arguments, such as the commodity feminism thesis, that assume an inherently paradoxical and, ultimately co-opting, relationship exists between practices of countercultural resistance and marketplace performances. We further argue that ideological edgework redresses some of the conceptual ambiguities that can lead gender researchers to conflate gender performativity with social performances.
We investigate the participation of engaged consumers in the fashion market through the lens of institutional theory. We develop theoretical insights on the unintended market-level changes that ensue when consumers who are avidly interested in a field connect to share ideas with one another. We find that consumers take on some of the institutional work previously done primarily by paid actors and introduce new forms of institutional work supportive of the field. We show that engaged consumers can precipitate the formation of new categories of actors in the field and the contestation of boundaries between established and emergent actor categories. Further, we propose that new consumer-focused institutional logics gain momentum, even while consumers support and promote preexisting logics through their practices. We compare cases where discontented market actors have brought about market changes with our investigation of one where contented consumers unintentionally precipitated market-level dynamics, and we show that the accumulation of consumers’ micro-level practices can have pervasive and profound impacts.
While the importance of the temporal dimension for both positive and negative consumption experiences has been well understood, no general theory exists to explain how consumers’ temporal experiences come about. We theorize temporal experiences as an effect of performing consumption practices in order to move from assessing isolated contextual variables to a more holistic understanding. The timeflow of a practice is defined as its ability to evoke an experienced temporality that cannot be reduced to either subjective “inner” time or cosmic “outer” time. On the basis of a longitudinal ethnography of temporality in two lifestyle sports—freeskiing and paintball—we find that five practice elements shape temporal experience: material set-up, bodily routines and skills, teleoaffective structures, rules, and cultural understandings. Misalignments of practice elements induce experiences of temporal drag or rush associated with experiences such as boredom and stress. We contribute to prior research on consumption experiences, waiting, and servicescapes.
An expanding array of available services allow parents to outsource almost any caregiving activity (e.g., nannies, potty training, birthday party planning). Sociologists document a care deficit—resulting from dual-earner households and distance from extended family—coupled with rising consumerism to account for outsourcing. These studies, as well as those in consumer research, clarify outsourcing motivations, but stop short of explaining the differential impacts of outsourcing tensions parents regularly face when assembling care. As such, consumer researchers know little about how parents navigate such tensions when deciding what is acceptable to outsource. Based on depth interviews with 23 families, our analysis uncovers complex care assemblages that are shaped by parenting discourses and tensions of control, intimacy, and substitutability. The resulting framework explains parents’ strategies for minimizing outsourcing tensions, reveals processes for (re)assembling different types of care resources, and challenges what is known about the relationship between the market and family life.
Drawing from Eliasian figurational theory and data obtained in Ireland during a 3-year participant observation of both the live and online spaces of the scene, we argue that control, both individual and social, plays a vital part in shaping heavy metal figurations. We focus on the role of the subcultural code in integrating participants into the scene, enabling the enactment of cathartic rituals, and its importance in signifying hierarchy and the distribution of subcultural capital. In particular, we place emphasis on bodily forms of control and emotional self-steering and we consider how the management of aggression in heavy metal subculture is indicative of wider civilizing processes. Such findings are considered within the context of previous consumer culture theory research that has called for studies that incorporate broader socio-historical perspectives.
Drawing from institutional theory in sociology, this article theorizes the process of “megamarketing”—defined by Kotler (1986) as the use of strategic efforts by a firm or firms to gain the cooperation of multiple stakeholders—to understand how new industries are created and sustained in a complex social and political context. The author uses an analysis of the casino gambling industry to demonstrate the role of normative and regulatory structures in facilitating the adoption and eventual acceptance of an industry through the social process of legitimation. In a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of 7211 newspaper articles from 1980 to 2007, the author finds that frames such as crime, business, and regulation change over time and that these frames are used by multiple stakeholders to structure normative conceptions about the practice of casino gambling. These findings contribute to a theoretical understanding of market creation and development over time and provide marketing managers with the conceptual tools for megamarketing in any industry.
Consumers regularly fail to habituate newly adopted practices. In contrast to established practices, this often occurs because understanding a practice is different from actually doing it. Our work explores this “messiness of doing” and explains why consumers successfully habituate some newly adopted practices after experiencing obstacles (i.e., misaligned practice elements) but not others. Utilizing a longitudinal approach that follows first-time parents from pregnancy through the first eight months postpartum, we track how parents plan for practices and how those plans unfold. We document a process whereby parents first engage in extensive planning and preparation prior to the birth of their child, during which parents build two realignment capabilities (anticipation and integration). After the baby’s arrival, some practices invariably do not work. Parents respond to these misalignments by following one of five paths—differentiated by the capabilities parents build while planning—that result in practice abandonment, vulnerable habituation, or habituation. Our work highlights the challenges associated with translating a social practice into an enacted practice and the corresponding importance of accumulating realignment capabilities during planning. To facilitate habituation of newly adopted practices, how consumers make plans for these practices may ultimately matter more than what they actually plan to do.
Developing and evaluating scientific knowledge and its value requires a clear – or at least not too unclear – understanding of what ‘theory’ means. We argue that common definitions of theory are too restrictive, as they do not acknowledge the existence of multiple kinds of scientific knowledge, but largely recognize only one kind as ‘theory’, namely explanatory knowledge. We elaborate a typology that broadens and clarifies the meaning of ‘theory’. Consisting of five basic theory types – explaining, comprehending, ordering, enacting and provoking theories – the typology offers a framework that enables researchers to develop and assess knowledge in more varied ways and for a broader set of purposes than is typically recognized, as well as providing a more level playing field within the academic community.
This article complements the concept of embedded security by proposing disembedded security to capture consumers’ energy practices when travelling across multiple domains of energy accessibility. Consumer mobility outside the home produces misalignments between infrastructure and portable technology experienced as ‘hysteresis of the battery’. Hysteresis captures how respondents are subject to ‘unpleasant unpredictability’ about battery-based technology and infrastructure, which spurs hermeneutic reflection about energy, location and sociality. Multi-domain energy practices therefore bring energy consumers to ‘reembed’ or create a sense of psychological comfort on the move. Charge levels on battery icons not only structure daily patterns of consumer life through planning efforts but become interpretively entangled in issues of duration, distance and sociality as energy demands in portable technology push consumers to avoid disruption.
This article provides insight into the management of brands that are also people by unpacking the interdependencies that exist between people and brands and focusing on the qualities that make person-brands human rather than on the qualities that make them brands. Using the extended case method to examine 20 years of public data about the Martha Stewart brand, the authors highlight the interdependent relationship between the person and the brand—in particular, consistency and balance—and identify four aspects of the person that can upset these interdependencies: mortality, hubris, unpredictability, and social embeddedness. Mortality and hubris can cause imbalance, but with the right skills and structures, these factors can be proactively managed. Inconsistency in the meanings of the person versus the brand can derive from the person’s unpredictability and social embeddedness and compromise brand value, but it may also enhance brand value by adding needed intimacy and authenticity. This two-bodied conceptualization suggests renewed management principles and contributes to branding theory through identification of the doppelgänger within, new brand strength facets, and emphasis on risk versus returns.
People increasingly seek out opportunities to escape from a sped-up pace of life by engaging in slow forms of consumption. Drawing from the theory of social acceleration, we explore how consumers can experience and achieve a sloweddown experience of time through consumption. To do so, we ethnographically study the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in Spain and introduce the concept of consumer deceleration. Consumer deceleration is a perception of a slowed-down temporal experience achieved via a decrease in certain quantities (traveled distance, use of technology, experienced episodes) per unit of time through altering, adopting, or eschewing forms of consumption. Consumers decelerate in three ways: embodied, technological, and episodic. Each is enabled by consumer practices and market characteristics, rules, and norms, and results in time being experienced as passing more slowly and as being an abundant resource. Achieving deceleration is challenging, as it requires resynchronization to a different temporal logic and the ability to manage intrusions from acceleration. Conceptualizing consumer deceleration allows us to enhance our understanding of temporality and consumption, embodied consumption, extraordinary experiences, and the theory of social acceleration. Overall, this study contributes to consumer research by illuminating the role of speed and rhythm in consumer culture. © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Journal of Consumer Research, Inc. All rights reserved.
In this article, we re-examine the McDonaldization thesis in light of social changes that occurred since the 1990s and notably in light of the onset of digital forms of consumption. The argument is presented that while the theory of McDonaldization remains profoundly relevant to the consumption of bricks-and-mortar locales, it is even more applicable in the digital age, as well as “bricks-and-clicks” consumption sites. The ways in which McDonaldization is played out in three iconic companies, namely, McDonalds, Amazon, and Wal-Mart is critically interrogated. On this basis, the article seeks to understand what the intensification of McDonaldization means for our understanding of the contemporary consumption experience. Arguing that theories are routinely outpaced by the pace of social change, we contend that the digital speeds up processes of rationalization while intensifying levels of consumption. The article concludes by reflecting on what this might mean given that we now live in an age of networked individualism, for our understanding of the relationship between place and consumption: the degree to which digital platforms appear to consumers to be “natural” and thus ideologically powerful, being of particular concern. For this reason, we suggest that the McDonaldization thesis is, in fact, more relevant in the digital future than it was in the bricks-and-mortar past.
Consumer behavior depth interviews are grouped with other kinds of story telling—fairy tales, novels, psychological test responses, and myths—as imaginative statements that can be qualitatively interpreted for their functional and symbolic content. Drawing upon the Claude Lévi-Strauss approach to the analysis of myths, a structuralist interpretation illustrates application to the age, sex, and social status dimensions of food consumption.
Our title plays with the promise on certain consumer goods packages of “no assembly required,” but in fact we call upon the reader to assemble new theories rather than rely on existing ones like assemblage theory. We argue that consumer culture theory (CCT), also known as interpretive consumer research, has thus far not fulfilled its potential as a theory-generating discipline. Our reluctance to attempt creative theorizing is institutionalized by calls for theory-enabled research rather than truly emergent theory. This retreat has recently been strengthened by the rise of Big Data and correlational approaches that eschew theory altogether. In order to change this situation, we recommend a three-stage approach: (1) original phenomena-driven inquiry, (2) combining grounded theory and abductive reasoning, and (3) generating and comparatively analyzing alternative theoretical explanations. We briefly conceptualize the first two stages and illustrate the third using an example of consumer brand masking and bluffing in Africa. We demonstrate the use of two criteria for comparative theoretical analysis: (a) fit with the data and (b) potential usefulness in other contexts. We also argue that sometimes multiple theories are needed. CCT researchers are uniquely positioned to pursue original theory, and in this article, we offer some ideas as to how this can be done.
In seeking to orient consumer research towards the sonic, this article has three objectives. First, to chart the emergence of the ‘sonic turn’ in the social sciences and, relatedly, to register the echoes of such a turn in consumer research. Second, to draw together the implications of this turn for the ontological, epistemological and methodological foundations of consumer research as a culturally framed social science. Third, to tease out the potential impact of the turn to sound in an intellectual context that remains relatively silent, by addressing the question: what does it mean to listen to consumption? We conclude that the sonic turn does not simply present a set of new objects for enquiry but rather offers a fresh analytical lens that provides a non-linguistic means of appreciating consumption. Such a move opens up the space for new, alternative and disruptive ways of thinking about and doing consumer research.
Drawing on Brighenti’s (2010, 2014) theoretical exposition of territorology, we extend current conceptualizations of place within the marketing literature by demonstrating that place is relationally constructed through territorializing consumption practices which continuously produce and sustain multifarious versions of place. In our fieldwork, we embrace a non-representational sensitivity and employ a multi-sensory ethnography, thus helping to illuminate the performative aspects of everyday life relating to people who use urban green spaces. Our analysis articulates three key facets relating to the process of territorializing consumption practices: (1) tangible and intangible elements of boundary making, (2) synchronicity of activities, and (3) sensual experiences. Taken together, these facets advance a kaleidoscopic perspective in which spatial, temporal and affective dimensions of the micro-practices of consumption territories-in-the-making are brought into view. Moreover, our empirical research adds an affective dimension to Brighenti’s theoretical elucidation of the formation and dissolution of territories, thereby incorporating sensual imaginations and bodily experiences into the assemblages of heterogeneous materials that sustain territories.
While emotions are a central facet of consumer culture, relatively little is known about how they are tied to the embodied and tacit aspects of everyday living. This article explores how practices organize emotions and vice versa. Pairing Schatzki’s teleoaffective structure with emotions understood as intensities that are deeply inscribed in the structural blueprints of practices, we propose that the organization of emotions and practices is recursive and based on three teleoaffective episodes: anticipating, actualizing, and assessing. To illustrate this, we present an analysis of empirical material from an ethnographic study on mothering. The practice–emotion link we unfold contributes to understanding the operation of emotions in consumer culture by specifying how practices and emotions are co-constitutive. This offers novel insights into the embodied and routinized nature of emotions, illuminates the connection between practices and individuals, and highlights the role of emotions in practice change.
Routines are the taken-for-granted practices that form the rhythm of everyday life, making people feel secure. How do consumers manage when their routines are disrupted? Practice theorists assert that practices are important to understanding consumption and stress their shared, repetitive, and conventional nature. When practices are stable, they are performed effortlessly, producing feelings of ease and trust in a predictable world. People are often unaware of the embodied competencies, or practical understandings, involved in the performance of these practices. However, practical understandings become apparent when elements of practices are misaligned. Our findings advance Giddens's (1984) theorization of ontological security by showing how the interplay between practical and discursive understandings and material configurations works to produce different ontological states that we call embedded security, embedded insecurity, discursive insecurity, acclimating security, and new embedded security. We also show how households subtly rework the underlying constitutive rules that anchor important practices in place within practice alignment.
Contemporary marketers build online brand communities to communicate with the organization’s social surroundings, yet there is a lack of understanding of how brand legitimization unfolds in these platforms. To understand how legitimacy is constructed and contested every day, the current study adopts a practice-theoretical lens and discourse analysis to investigate two online communities. The contribution of the study is twofold: First, the insights from the discursive praxis, online community posts, comments and reactions illustrate the connections between multiple levels of legitimization discourse. Second, this study builds a theoretical framework for legitimization practice. Individual perceptions, judgements of the texts and actions on them in the online community intertwine with the organizational and societal context shaping the legitimacy of the brand in the community and beyond. This practice supports or challenges the brand as an institution and may legitimize or delegitimize the brand.
This paper outlines a new approach to the study of power, that of the sociology of translation. Starting from three principles, those of agnosticism, generalised symmetry and free association, the paper describes a scientigc and economic controversy about the causes for the decline in the population of scallops in St. Brieuc Bay and the attempts by three marine biologists to develop a conservation strategy for that population. Four "moments" of translation are discerned in the attempts by these researchers to impose themselves and their degnition of the situation on others: Z) problematization-the researchers sought to become indispensable to other actors in the drama by degning the nature and the problems of the latter and then suggesting that these would be resolved if the actors negotiated the "obligatory passage point" of the researchers' program of investigation; G) interessemen- A series of processes by which the researchers sought to lock the other actors into the roles that had been proposed for them in that program; 3) enrolment- A set of strategies in which the researchers sought to degne and interrelate the various roles they had allocated to others; 4) mobilization- A set of methods used by the researchers to ensure that supposed spokesmen for various relevant collectivities were properly able to represent those collectivities and not betrayed by the latter. In conclusion, it is noted that translation is a process, never a completed accomplishment, and it may (as in the empirical case considered) fail.
How is consumer desire transformed by contemporary technology? Most extant theory holds
that technology rationalizes and reduces passion. In our investigation of networks of desire—
complex open systems of machines, consumers, energy and objects—we find technology
increasing the passion to consume. Effects depend upon participation in the network, which
can be private, public, or professional. Private participation tends to discipline passion into
interests reflecting established cultural categories. Public and professional participation build
new connections between extant desires and a wider network, decentering ties and
deterritorializing flows that limit hungers to emplaced bodies. Public and professional
participation drive consumption passion to transgressive extremes. We use ethnography and
netnography to study online food image sharing, a broad field that includes everything from
friend networks to food bloggers. Using and extending Deleuze and Guattari’s desire theory,
we conceptualize desire as energetic, connective, systemic, and innovative. Critically
examining the role of technocapitalism in the realm of consumption passion, we question
the emancipatory possibilities of unfettered desire. Networks of desire create a passionate
new universe of technologically enhanced desire, one that challenges the way we think
about consumer collectives, capitalism, emancipation, and posthuman consumption.
This article examines how consumers may work strategically to alter market dynamics through formally organized activities. We address this issue in the context of the Danish beer market and its evolution over the last two decades, with a specific empirical focus on the role of a formally organized consumer association. We draw on key tenets of recent advances in sociological field theory, which views social order as comprising multiple and related strategic action fields. From this perspective, we describe the Danish beer market and its transformation, with an emphasis on how Danish beer enthusiasts played a significant role in altering the logics of competition in the market, but also played a significant institutionalized role within the field itself. We theorize this activity as consumers’ collective action.
The central argument in this paper is that actor-network theory (ANT) does not do ‘cultural economy’ symmetrically: it has had a lot to say about economy but much less to say about culture. This rejection of culture is ontological and epistemological: culture appears in ANT largely as an artefact of modernist thought rather than as an empirical aspect of agents' performances. And yet if ‘economy’ can be critiqued and reinstated as performative, so too can ‘culture’. To explore this, we focus on objects of concern that – unlike the financial markets that have formed the core of ANT-inspired thinking about the economy – are assembled by actors in and through what they themselves understand to be cultural materials, cultural calculations, cultural processes, cultural institutions. In such examples, ‘culture’ is continuously invoked and enacted by actors in constructing their actions, whatever critical sociologists might have to say about its ontological status. It seems paradoxical that a theoretical approach that makes sacrosanct the associations constructed by agents who assemble their own world, generally discusses ‘culture’ only from the point of view of critical epistemology. Bearing all this in mind, we argue that it is time for us to ‘reassemble’ the cultural.
In this article I elaborate and codify the extended case method, which deploys participant observation to locate everyday life in its extralocal and historical context. The extended case method emulates a reflexive model of science that takes as its premise the intersubjectivity of scientist and subject of study. Reflexive science valorizes intervention, process, structuration, and theory reconstruction. It is the Siamese twin of positive science that proscribes reactivity, but upholds reliability, replicability, and representativeness. Positive science, exemplified by survey research, works on the principle of the separation between scientists and the subjects they examine. Positive science is limited by “context effects” (interview, respondent, field, and situational effects) while reflexive science is limited by “power effects” (domination, silencing, objectification, and normalization). The article concludes by considering the implications of having two models of science rather than one, both of which are necessarily flawed. Throughout I use a study of postcolonialism to illustrate both the virtues and the shortcomings of the extended case method.
Methodology can only bring us reflective understanding of the means which have demonstrated their value in practice by raising them to the level of explicit consciousness; it is no more the precondition of fruitful intellectual work than the knowledge of anatomy is the precondition of“correct” walking.
Max Weber— The Methodology of the Social Sciences
My intentions in this essay are fivefold: (1) to show how the discourses of qualitative inquiry and cultural studies in the seventh moment can be put to critical advantage by consumer researchers; (2) to discuss the cultural studies assumptions that define a consumer research agenda; (3) to offer a set of interpretive, methodological, and ethical criteria that can be used by consumer researchers; (4) to apply these criteria to a concrete case, a reading of the Hollywood “hood” films of the last decade; and thereby (5) to establish the relevance of this approach for the practices of critical consumer research. Throughout I use examples from the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s.
Adopting an institutional theoretic framework, this article examines the evolution and competitive dynamics of markets composed of multiple practices, beliefs, and rule systems. The 30-year historical analysis of the U.S. yoga market illustrates the coexistence of spirituality, medical, fitness, and commercial logics. Using data gathered through archival sources, netnography, in-depth interviews, and participant observations, the authors link shifting emphases on institutional logics and their sustenance to institutional entrepreneurs' accumulation and transmission of cultural capital, strategies to legitimize plural logics, distinct branding practices, and contestations among the pervading logics. The study offers a managerial framework for managing conflicting demands of logics, conveying brand legitimacy, and creating a coherent brand identity in plural logic markets; in addition, it develops a theoretical account of links between institutional logics, competitive dynamics, and market evolution.