Consumer Deceleration Husemann, Katharina C; Eckhardt, Giana M
The Journal of consumer research,
04/2019, Letnik:
45, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Abstract
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 slowed-down 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.
Purpose
This study aims to explore the strategies that service providers use to facilitate marketplace accessibility, and identify the key challenges in that process. The authors do so to develop a ...roadmap towards improved accessibility and disability inclusion in the marketplace.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors conducted eight semi-structured interviews with service providers (curators, visitor service coordinators and access managers) at museums who run access programmes for customers with visual impairment (VI), along with an embodied duo-ethnography of those programmes.
Findings
Service providers foster autonomous, embodied and social access. Resource constraints, safety concerns and exposed differences between customers compromise access. To overcome these challenges, service providers engage in three inclusionary strategies – informing, extending and sensitizing.
Research limitations/implications
This service provider- and VI-focus present limitations. Future research should consider a poly-vocal approach that includes the experiences of numerous stakeholders to holistically advance marketplace accessibility; and apply the marketplace accessibility findings upon different disabilities in other marketplace contexts.
Practical implications
This study offers a roadmap for policymakers and service providers on: which types of access should and can be created; what challenges may be encountered; how to manage these challenges; and, thus, how to advance accessibility beyond regulations.
Originality/value
This study contributes a service provider perspective on marketplace accessibility that goes beyond removing “disabling” barriers towards creating opportunities for co-creation; an approach towards marketplace accessibility that fosters inclusiveness while considering the inherent challenges of that process; and an illustration of posthumanism’s empirical value in addressing issues of accessibility in the marketplace.
Liquid Consumer Security Atanasova, Aleksandrina; Eckhardt, Giana M; Husemann, Katharina C
The Journal of consumer research,
04/2024, Letnik:
50, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Abstract
Systemic risks––pandemics, economic recessions, professional precarity, political volatility, and climate emergencies––increasingly erode previously taken-for-granted stabilities and ...consumers’ confidence in the future. How do consumers manage risk and uncertainty when economic and ontological security are on the decline? Traditionally, consumers have built a sense of security through solid consumption (e.g., home ownership, accumulating possessions). A four-year ethnography of digital nomadism, however, demonstrates that looming uncertainty can render solid consumption a source of vulnerability and an unwanted anchor in turbulent times that call for agility and adaptability. We outline the emergence of liquid consumer security, defined as a form of felt security that stems from avoidance of solid consumption and its risks and responsibilities. Liquid consumer security inheres in the absence of ownership, attachments, or rootedness, and is derived from circumventing the temporal demands, financial liabilities, and commitments that solid consumption requires, which emerge as sources of risk. It is achieved through a recursive process of engaging in three strategies: (1) solid risk minimization; (2) security reconstruction through the liquid marketplace; and (3) ideological legitimation. Contributions to consumer risk and security, liquid consumption, social theories of risk, and digital nomadism are discussed.
Abstract Care is increasingly marketized. Previous marketing and consumer research has focused on specific tensions underlying marketized care provision and the ways in which consumers navigate them. ...In contrast, this conceptual article draws on interdisciplinary research on care to develop a cumulative understanding of marketized care, that is, based on those effects that build up over time when a critical mass of consumers routinely addresses care needs via markets. Defining marketized care as attending to the welfare needs of human and nonhuman others through the market, we identify four negative cumulative effects: individuating effects on consumer subjectivities, alienating effects on care relationships, responsibilizing effects on consumers as opposed to other institutional actors of care provision, and exploitative effects generated in global care and supply chains. We also outline four principles that can mitigate these effects: interdependent consumer autonomy, affective reconnections, proportionate responsibilization, and market reconfiguration. Our conceptualization moves the literature on marketized care forward by outlining its cumulative nature as well as offering potential solutions that are neither demonizing nor celebratory of markets. In doing so, we offer a series of generative insights for research on marketized care that contribute to addressing collective human and nonhuman flourishing.
Consumer spirituality Husemann, Katharina C.; Eckhardt, Giana M.
Journal of marketing management,
03/2019, Letnik:
35, Številka:
5-6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Consumers increasingly turn to the marketplace in search of spiritual well-being. In this introduction to the special issue, we unpack the concept of consumer spirituality. We define consumer ...spirituality as the interrelated practices and processes engaged in when consuming market offerings (products, services, places) that yield 'spiritual utility'. The market offerings are purposely designed to quench consumers' thirst for meaningful encounters with one's inner self or a higher external power. We identify three vehicles - materiality, embodiment, and technology - that consumers engage with to access consumer spirituality. By unpacking the concept of consumer spirituality along three themes - (1) shaping markets for consumer spirituality, (2) the means for accessing consumer spirituality, and (3) making sense of and researching consumer spirituality - we provide a future research agenda to advance scholarly explorations of consumer spirituality and to facilitate a systematic development of this nascent body of literature in marketing and consumer research.
Through an interpretive investigation of a religious pilgrimage, we explore the dynamic processes at play when consumers navigate the continuum between structure and antistructure in extraordinary ...experiences. We do so by identifying anastructure, which is a conflict-laden transient category that lies between the poles of antistructure and structure. Within anastructure, consumers can experience four types of tensions, which we unpack, and we also introduce four resolution strategies that consumers deploy to resolve those tensions. We additionally show that structure can lead to, and foster, benefits that are traditionally associated with an antistructural experience. This allows us to develop implications for our overall understanding of consumption within extraordinary experiences in general and pilgrimages specifically.
•We present a dynamic circulation model that extends current theorizations of extraordinary experience.•We introduce anastructure as a conflict-laden transient category that lies between the poles of antistructure and structure in extraordinary consumption experiences.•Within anastructure, we demonstrate that consumers experience four types of tensions and use four resolution strategies to achieve a rewarding pilgrimage experience.•We show that structure can lead to, and foster, benefits that are traditionally associated with an antistructural experience.
ABSTRACT
This study explores conflict culture as a distinct and influential element of a consumption community's broader culture, and explores how communities initiate, perform, manage, and resolve ...intracommunity conflicts. A four‐year interpretive study of the Premium Cola consumption community reveals two sets of formal and informal elements of conflict culture; explains how community members perform routine, and manage transgressive conflicts; shows how members garner positive and negative practical, identity, and relationship value from these two types of conflict; and documents how a community's conflict culture develops through inventing new conflict behaviors to resolve transgressive conflicts. The study thus contributes new theoretical insights to the literature on social conflict in online consumption communities, discusses managerial implications, and initiates a discussion about conflict culture.
During a roundtable discussion at the 2022 GENMAC Conference, a group of researchers specializing in religiosity and spiritual consumption, using examples from their own fieldwork, reflected on how ...(i) researchers’ subject positioning—including their gender and sexuality—shape fieldwork in multifaceted manners; (ii) investigations of religious/spiritual fields would benefit from a heightened sensitivity to issues of gender and sexuality; and (iii) greater sensitivity to aspects of religion and/or spirituality can help gender and sexuality scholars better understand consumers and markets. Based on the above, in this commentary paper, we call for intersectional reflexivity, attention to vulnerability and discomfort during fieldwork, and critical sensitivity to the religious “context of context” during theorization. Furthermore, we argue that specific spiritual/religious imaginaries can foster new research approaches that can contribute to more nuanced fieldwork and theorization in marketing and consumer research.
Social conflicts are ubiquitous to the human condition and occur throughout markets, marketing processes, and marketing systems. When unchecked or unmitigated, social conflict can have devastating ...consequences for consumers, marketers, and societies, especially when conflict escalates to war. In this article, the authors offer a systemic analysis of the Colombian war economy, with its conflicted shadow and coping markets, to show how a growing network of fair-trade coffee actors has played a key role in transitioning the country's war economy into a peace economy. They particularly draw attention to the sources of conflict in this market and highlight four transition mechanisms—empowerment, communication, community building, and regulation—through which marketers can contribute to peacemaking and thus produce mutually beneficial outcomes for consumers and society. The article concludes with a discussion of implications for marketing theory, practice, and public policy.
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