The Marketization of Religion: Field, Capital, and Consumer Identity

Certain institutions traditionally have had broad socializing influence over their members, providing templates for identity that comprehend all aspects of life from the existential and moral to the mundanely material. Marketization and detraditionalization undermine that socializing role. This study examines the consequences when, for some members, such an institution loses its authority to structure identity. With a hermeneutical method and a perspective grounded in Bourdieu’s theories of fields and capital, this research investigates the experiences of disaffected members of a religious institution and consumption field. Consumers face severe crises of identity and the need to rebuild their self-understandings in an unfamiliar marketplace of identity resources. Unable to remain comfortably in the field of their primary socialization, they are nevertheless bound to it by investments in field-specific capital. In negotiating this dilemma, they demonstrate the inseparability and co-constitutive nature of ideology and consumption.This is the publisher’s final pdf. The published article is copyrighted by the Journal of Consumer Research, Inc. and published by the University of Chicago Press. It can be found at: http://www.jstor.org/page/journal/jconsrese/about.htm

And There Were Jazz Clubs...: Navigating Community Change with Consumption Lifelines

This dissertation combines an assemblage theory ontology of urban sociology with the concept of Bauman's 'liquid modernity' (2000, 2012). It subsequently incorporates the nascent "liquid" constructs of liquid retail, liquid legitimacy, and liquid community to analyze consumers, community, and retailscapes in a violent and impoverished inner city area that has experienced constant and dramatic change. Through this lens, ethnographic fieldwork reveals a construct called consumption lifelines, which explains how consumers and communities use market-facing resources to find and create relative stability in the midst of turbulence, whether they choose to enter, stay in or leave a highly territorialized community with contested boundaries. The study adds complexity to Bauman's concept of liquidity and the construct of urban assemblages, and it has implications for other inner city communities that are similarly affected by changing times and challenging circumstances.Release after 01-Jun-2022Originally set to release 03-Jun-2018; extended embargo through 01-Jun-2022 per author request via Graduate College, 11-May-2018, Kimberl

Social Enterprise as a Broker of Identity Resources

Social enterprises often transmit pro-social values to their staff, volunteers, stakeholders, and communities. Research also shows that social enterprises can improve aspects of beneficiaries’ identity and self-worth. However, knowledge about identity-construction dynamics among social enterprises, their founders and other stakeholders, and the communities and cultures in which they are situated is undertheorized and fragmented across fields. This is attributable, at least in part, to the lack of a theory that can explain identity construction across micro-individual, meso-organizational, and macro-cultural levels. This study makes two major contributions. First, we advance a novel, multi-level theoretical framework for understanding identity construction based on assemblage theory. Second, we use that framework to interpret data from our ethnographic study of a social enterprise based in a Canadian fishing village. Our study reveals that the social enterprise actively curates identity resources from local culture and heritage and brokers those resources to stakeholders for their personal identity projects. It suggests that the impacts are greater for people with transitional or problematic identities. It also shows that identity-resource brokerage can result in generativity whereby staff and volunteers “pay it forward” with the effect of scaling the social impact of the enterprise. The findings support the usefulness of the identity-as-assemblage construct for understanding complex identity dynamics across multiple levels of analysis. They also open the door to a number of provocative research questions, including the role of narrative transmission in the flow of identity resources and a potential identity-mirroring role for social enterprise in shaping or reinforcing elements of place identity