Understanding the flexible consumer lifestyle

A new generation of consumers is emerging, with individuals embracing precarity in nearly all aspects in their lives. These flexible consumers eschew ownership and daily routines in favour of nomadism and constantly renewed experiences. Laetitia Mimoun and Fleura Bardhi explore how these people manage the challenges associated with serial transitions, and what it means in terms of market opportunities

Consumption acquisition practices

This conceptual paper aims to advance a theory of acquisition practices by integrating concepts and theories about resource circulation practices, such as buying, sharing, gifting, access based consumption, into a common framework. While acquisition, the process of obtaining consumption resources, is an essential aspect of consumer behavior, it has mainly been conceptualized in terms of buying. Recent research has begun to identify and conceptualize alternative acquisition practices and theoretical approaches. We build on these works and develop an organizing theoretical framework that integrates these concepts towards the advancement of a theory of acquisition process and aims to provide conceptual clarity in the current literature. We develop a typology of research acquisition practices on the basis of a) the level of market mediation, and b) ownership transfer based on a literature review and theories of exchange. The typology distinguishes six consumption acquisition practices: buying, bartering, gifting, renting, sharing, and borrowing. We conceptualize each practice, discuss associated consumption consequences, and discuss hybrid cases. Our model helps advance the theoretical account of consumer behavior and widen the scope of such theorization to enclose recent phenomena that arise from the sharing economy

The value in de-emphasizing structure in liquidity

In the set of commentaries on liquidity entitled “The continuing significance of social structure in liquid modernity,” three sets of authors set out to examine the relationship between liquidity and structure, value, and distinction. In doing so, they attempt to marry theories which argue against sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s central thesis that societal structures are shifting with his seminal construct of liquidity, an exercise that has mixed results. All three sets of authors have engaged with Bauman’s conceptualization of liquid modernity as well as our conceptualization of liquid consumption and its consequences. In this response to the commentaries, we clarify how we understand Bauman and how we have used his ideas in our theorizing, engage with the three sets of author’s advocacy for emphasizing the continuing relevance of structure within liquidity, and, finally, sum up how de-emphasizing structure has and can continue to lead to important new insights in marketing theory

Towards a theory of identity anchoring: Transnational mobile professionals

This dissertation advances the theoretical framework of identity anchoring, by defining and distinguishing the concepts of anchoring points and anchoring mechanisms, and their interrelationship. This framework enables the study of two fundamental issues: (1) the role of place and social relations in identity anchoring of postmodern consumers; and (2) the role consumption of commercial products, services, and settings in anchoring identity to places and relations. The empirical context of this study is the global consumer segment of highly mobile professionals with cosmopolitan orientation. This study uses 35 semi-structured interviews mobile professionals and finds that place and social relations continue to provide salient identity anchoring points even in conditions of geographical mobility and cosmopolitanism. Salient relationships and home-places provide transnational mobile professionals with a sense of self-identity as well as a sense of being oriented in space and time; they also influence important life and consumption decisions. However, this study finds that the nature of identity anchoring in place and relationships has changed. These mobile professionals are more likely to anchor (1) relationships than places; (2) in portable, deterritorialized types of homes and relationships; (3) in permanent and temporary relationships and places; and (4) in multiple social and spatial anchoring points. This study identifies six different notions of home and three types of relationships that serve as anchoring points for transnational mobile professionals. Further, the study shows that the type of geographical mobility and cosmopolitanism influence the nature of identity anchoring. The key contribution of the dissertation is in providing an alternative to the consumer behavior identity conceptualization of “we are what we have or consume”, and arguing for a mediating role of consumption as a linking mechanism to sustain identity anchoring to social and spatial anchoring points. Transnational mobile professionals consume actively products, services and settings that generate co-presence with, remind them of, and imitate home-places and relationships. This enables to either sustain relationship to distant home-places and relationships or recreate a sense of home on the road. The framework of identity anchoring also identifies conditions under which different commercial anchoring mechanisms are important