Locating the past in its silence: history and marketing theory in India

The paper aims to argue, while examining the history of marketing theory in India, that the discipline is a historical, serves large business interests and is shaped by hegemonic Western knowledge

Underdeveloped other in country-of-origin theory and practices

Consumers and marketers employ extant sociocultural discourses to give meaning to the products they consume or sell. In this paper, we present data and analyses that illustrate the manner by which American consumers and marketers draw upon one such sociocultural discourse, development, in the context of “craft” objects. Beyond the focus on discourse, however, our intent is to apply a post-development perspective to the Otherness inherent in country-of-origin (COO) theory and practices. We critique the COO framework and see it as a ramification of, and further creator of, economic difference and hierarchy

Accumulation through derealization: how corporate violence remains unchecked

This study examines the alleged organization of violence by Coca-Cola through a field study conducted in a village in India. It draws on the works of Judith Butler to show how subaltern groups are derealized and made into ungrievable lives through specific, yet recurrent, practices that keep violence unchecked. Many participants attempt to resist derealization through protest activities that showcase their vulnerability. However, the firm appropriates their claims to vulnerability through a paternalistic discourse that justifies intensified violence and derealization. This research offers insights into accumulation through derealization and on the effects of resistance to it

The making of negative being::Religion, humiliation, and consumer vulnerability

This study draws upon the lived experience of Sharankumar Limbale, a Dalit, as depicted in his autobiographical memoir, ‘The Outcaste’. Through Limbale’s narratives, we aim to understand how religion morphs consumption into a site of humiliation for Dalits. We examine Limbale’s caste-based market interactions and consumption to illuminate the reduction of Dalits to negative beings, subjected to interpellation as polluted individuals and to degrading consumption of waste. These negative beings endure ontological wounds and exist as degraded appendages to dominant social groups. This study calls attention to the recognition of the category of negative being within consumer research, as without it, the extreme vulnerability faced by certain consumer groups remains incomprehensible. Ultimately, this research advances the theoretical understanding of how religion plays a role in perpetuating and reinforcing conditions of extreme consumer vulnerability.<br/

Privileging Localism and Visualizing Nationhood in Anti-Consumption

The main aim of this research is to understand the genesis and nature of an anti-consumption movement in India and its emphasis on nationalism through localism. This research adopted a case study design, including in-depth interviews and discursive analysis. Through a historical analysis this research shows the influence of anarchist political philosophy in a contemporary anti-consumption movement. It demonstrates that anti-consumption is inflected with discourses of freedom, anti-authoritarianism, and anti-statism, which are central to the anarchist conception of localism. This research shows that anti-consumption movements in India use consumption objects to privilege local over both national and international. This helps to expand the framework of product-place-images and country-of-origin effects by showing how nationalism can become anti-nationalist in an anti-consumption discourse. It further helps to differentiate anti-consumption from consumer resistance as a deeper systemic challenge to consumerist lifestyle and consumer culture

The Regeneration of Consumer Movement Solidarity

Consumer research has focused on the various resources and tactics that help movements achieve a range of institutional and marketplace changes. Yet, little attention has been paid to the persistence of movement solidarity, in particular its regeneration, despite a range of threats to it. Our research unpacks mechanisms that help consumer movement solidarity to overcome threats. Drawing on a 6-year ethnographic study of consumer movements in Exarcheia, a neighborhood in central Athens, Greece, we find that consumer movement solidarity persists despite a cataclysmic economic crisis that undermines their prevalent ideology and the emotional fatigue, that is, common in such movements. Three key mechanisms serve to overcome these threats: performative staging of collectivism, temporal tactics, and the emplacement of counter-sites. Overall, our study contributes to consumer research by illuminating how threats to solidarity are overcome by specific internal mechanisms that enable the regeneration of consumer movement solidarity

Post-Colonial Consumer Respect and the Framing of Neocolonial Consumption in Advertising

This study of the production, representation, and reception of post-colonial advertising in India reveals a politics of consumer respectability. The post-colonial politics of consumer respectability is located at the intersection of center–periphery relations, class divisions, and colorism in a way that it frames neocolonial consumption. Advertisers depict middle-class consumer respectability by asserting Indian nationalism and by degrading the West as a symbol of colonialism. Such depictions are class- and color-based and show under-class and dark-skinned consumers in subordinate positions. Furthering such neocolonial frames of consumption, Indian advertising advances the middle-class desire for Eurocentric modernity by reinforcing the colonial trope of India as temporally lagging behind the West. Finally, middle-class consumer respectability involves a neocolonial whitening of self with epidermalized shaping of inter-corporeality and agency. In uncovering the theoretical implications of advertising as a site of avenging degradation, desiring modernity, and whitening of self, this study contributes by offering insights into how the politics of post-colonial consumer respectability furthers neocolonial frames of consumption

Consuming postcolonial shopping malls

Through a naturalistic inquiry, we interpret shopping malls in India as post-colonial sites in which young consumers deploy the West in an attempt to transform their Third World identities. Shopping malls in former colonies represent a post-colonial hybridity that offers consumers the illusion of being Western, modern, and developed. Moreover, consumption of post-colonial retail arenas is characterised as a masquerade through which young consumers attempt to disguise or temporarily transcend their Third World realities. This interpretation helps us to offer insights into transitioning retail servicescapes of the Third World, which in turn helps to improve extant understanding of consumer identity and global consumer culture

Normative violence in domestic service:a study of exploitation, status, and grievability

This paper contributes to business ethics by focusing on consumption that is characterized by normative violence. By drawing on the work of Judith Butler this study of kajer lok—a female subaltern group of Indian domestic service providers—and their higher status clients shows how codes of status-based consumption shaped by markets, class, caste, and patriarchy create a social order that reduces kajer lok to “ungreivable” lives. Our study contributes to business ethics by focusing on exploitation and coercion in consumption rather than in production and of woman rather than of men. It adds to consumer research by revealing how social distinctions not only manifest in status contests in which symbolic power is at stake but also may produce violent exploitation and ungrievable lives