For whom the consumer retorts: Consumer identity, cultural conditions, and the ramification and re-integration of the market through co-optation

Co-optation theory has evolved such that the cultural friction between consumer agency and the market provides an eternal source of marketing opportunities for marketers to culturally rejuvenate their businesses. The relevant literature studying consumer identity, however, precludes docile consumers from the analyses and theorization process. Given the theoretical incompleteness, this dissertation first expounds the nature of consumer agency by studying consumer cultural conditions cultivated and entrenched since modern epoch. Consumers‘ varied levels of ability to signify and their urge for distinctiveness are two cultural conditions that can capture the quintessence of consumer agency. Second, this study delves into the possibility that consumers overcome the given cultural quality, employ different (re)presentations of consumer culture for their identity projects, and consequently contribute to the market dynamics. Ethnographic data collected from the context of X Games help explicate the elements of consumer cultural quality based on emerging themes of ability to signify and urge for distinctiveness. The themes of the construct of ability to signify demonstrate that dialectical negotiation of identity contributes much less than postulated in the literature to the performance of consumer identity project in terms of true presentation of idiosyncratic self-identity. In addition, consumers in the context tend to be iconoclastic, narcissistic, and naturalistic distinction-makers with their new currency for distinction: cool. The consumer-market dynamics impeccably operates based upon interactions and mutual facilitations among four theoretically and empirically distinct groups of consumers: pragmatic, stigmatized, distinction-oriented, and self-normalizing consumers. The historic conflict between consumers and the market steeped in Hegelian dialectics is again contested in the dynamics due to the switch of modes(arts) of being(consumption) made by individual consumers who respectively participate in the system through presentation and representation. Accordingly, a new perspective of consumers as cyborgs, based on posthumanism, is discussed. Some theoretical considerations of gender and race issues in such dynamics are also proposed

‘Coronated’ Consumption in the Viral Market

The universal exposure to the virus has disrupted institutions, redefined values, and reshaped systems, including the market. Idling, uncertainty, and liquidity encapsulate the ever-precarious individual lives and the reflexive socio-politico-cultural changes. These conditions and consequences nonetheless create paradoxical opportunities in the viral market. The new meaning of connectivity that promotes high-viscosity relationships and high-visibility identities will transform the market to better acknowledge and support humans and the new sociality

Orientalism, Resistance or Global Harmony? Entangled Strands in the film Isle of Dogs

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Food prosumption technologies : A symbiotic lens for a degrowth transition

Prosumption is gaining momentum among the critical accounts of sustainable consumption that have thus far enriched the marketing discourse. Attention to prosumption is increasing whilst the degrowth movement is emerging to tackle the contradictions inherent in growth-driven, technology-fueled, and capitalist modes of sustainable production and consumption. In response to dominant critical voices that portray technology as counter to degrowth living, we propose an alternative symbiotic lens with which to reconsider the relations between technology, prosumption, and degrowth living, and assess how a degrowth transition in the context of food can be carried out at the intersection of human–nature–technology. We contribute to the critical debates on prosumption in marketing by analyzing the potentials and limits of technology-enabled food prosumption for a degrowth transition through the degrowth principles of conviviality and appropriateness. Finally, we consider the sociopolitical challenges involved in mobilizing such technologies to achieve symbiosis and propose a future research agenda.©2023 Sage Publications. The article is protected by copyright and reuse is restricted to non-commercial and no derivative uses. Users may also download and save a local copy of an article accessed in an institutional repository for the user's personal reference.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Skating dialectics and flipping genealogy

Purpose – This interpretive study aims to demonstrate how dialectics might hamper researchers\u27 imagination, inspiration, and insight that can otherwise enhance the understanding of a variety of phenomena in consumer-market dynamics and subsequently propose Foucauldian genealogy as an alternative to theorize such dynamics in the current consumer culture. Methodology/approach – An ethonographic field study is conducted in the context of X Games, followed by an empirical juxtaposition of semiotic square, as a dialectical analysis, and a genealogical analysis of the same textual data. Findings – Consumer-market dynamics operate based on interactions and mutual facilitations among four theoretically and empirically distinct groups of consumers in the context of X Games: pragmatic, stigmatized, distinction-oriented, and self-normalizing consumers. The historic conflict between consumers and the market steeped in Hegelian dialectics is contested in the dynamics due to the switch of modes(arts) of being(consumption) made by individual consumers who respectively participate in the system through presentation and representation. Implications – A multitude of reality/truth-making is present in the consumer-market dynamics; thus, the dialectical view of the systematic progression of the market is found to be less implicative than the genealogical view of the system as polyvalent power relations

Forget negotiation: The non-dialectical model of identity project by extreme sports participants

Identity negotiation has enabled contemporary consumers to ingeniously circumvent the calcified symbolic associations, norms, and power relations in the market while still conforming to socio-culturally created and marketized meanings. Ethnographic data collected from the X Games venues, however, demonstrate that dialectical negotiation of identity contributes much less than postulated to the performance of consumer identity