Psycho-emotional Disability in the Marketplace

Purpose: This study, through adoption of the psycho-emotional model of disability, aims to offer consumer research insight into how the marketplace internally oppresses and psycho-emotionally disables consumers living with impairment. Design/methodology/approach: This paper draws insight from the interview data of a wider two-year interpretive research study investigating access barriers to marketplaces for consumers living with impairment. Findings: The overarching contribution offers to consumer research insight into how the marketplace internally oppresses and psycho-emotionally disables consumers living with impairment. Further contributions offered by this paper: i) unearth the emotion of fear to be central to manifestations of psycho-emotional disability, ii) reveal a broader understanding of the marketplace practices, and core perpetrators, that psycho-emotionally disable consumers living with impairment, and iii) uncover psycho-emotional disability to extend beyond the context of impairment. Originality/value: Extending current consumer research and consumer vulnerability research on disability, the empirical adoption of the psycho-emotional model of disability is a fruitful framework for extrapolating insight into marketplace practices that internally oppress and psycho-emotionally disable consumers living with impairment. Practical implications: The insight offered into the precise marketplace practices that disable consumers living with impairment leads this paper to call for a revising of disability training within marketplace and service contexts. Research limitations/implications: This study adopts a UK-only perspective. However, findings uncovered that the model of psycho-emotional disability has wider theoretical value to marketing and consumer research beyond the context of impairment

Mini-miracles:transformations of self from consumption of the Lourdes pilgrimage

This paper explores transformations of self through pilgrimage consumption. A three year ethnographic study of Lourdes, one of the largest Catholic pilgrimage destinations, reveals the concept of “mini-miracles” to refer to those miracles that occur in and are important to an individual’s life, but are unlikely ever to be officially deemed as miracles in the eyes of the church. Mini-miracles transform selves and in turn draw pilgrims annually and recurrently to consume the Lourdes pilgrimage experience. The findings reveal the existence of three forms of subjectively experienced mini-miracles: physical, social and peaceful, each of which act as intangible word-of-mouth consumption drivers to the Lourdes pilgrimage. Lourdes, as a business institution, should capitalize on the word-of-mouth mini-miracles shared amongst consumers as a means of building and maintaining stronger networks and relationships within Catholic/ Christian communities at both the national and local level

Marketplace Accessibility:A Service-Provider Perspective

Purpose: This study explores the strategies that service providers use to facilitate marketplace accessibility, and identifies the key challenges in that process. We do so to develop a roadmap towards improved accessibility and disability inclusion in the marketplace.Methodology: We conducted eight semi-structured interviews with service providers (curators, visitor service coordinators, access managers) at museums who run access programmes for customers with visual impairment (VI), along 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.Original/ Value: This study contributes: i) A service provider perspective on marketplace accessibility that goes beyond removing ‘disabling’ barriers towards creating opportunities for co-creation. ii) An approach towards marketplace accessibility that fosters inclusiveness while considering the inherent challenges of that process. iii) An illustration of posthumanism’s empirical value in addressing issues of accessibility in the marketplace.Practical Implications: We offer a roadmap for policy makers and service providers on: i) which types of access should and can be created, ii) what challenges may be encountered, iii) how to manage these challenges, and, thus, iv) how to advance accessibility beyond regulations.Research Limitations: Our service provider- and VI-focus present limitations. Future research should: i) consider a poly-vocal approach that includes the experiences of numerous stakeholders to holistically advance marketplace accessibility, ii) apply our marketplace accessibility findings upon different disabilities in other marketplace contexts

Therapeutic Servicescapes and Market-Mediated Performances of Emotional Suffering

We introduce the concept of therapeutic servicescapes, defined as consumption settings where emplaced, market-mediated performances compensate for socio-cultural dilemmas. Our focus is on the localization of emotions which are emplaced in specific socio-spatial features and collectively reproduced through ritualized consumer performances. This ethnographic study of religious pilgrimage consumption reveals that the therapeutic servicescape comprises three features: evocative spaces, ideological homogeneity and restorative emotion scripts. These servicescape features catalyze the consumer rituals of therapeutic relations, therapeutic release and therapeutic renewal. Our theorization of therapeutic servicescapes offers three contributions. First, we reveal how emotions are socially and geographically orchestrated and transformed in marketplace settings. Second, we demonstrate how therapeutic ritual performances reproduce emplaced, market-mediated emotion and compensate for embodied emotional restrictions. Third, we demonstrate how the negotiation of emotional ordering guides the therapeutic dialogue between religion and the marketplace. Keywords: servicescapes, consumer emotion, therapeutic consumption, pilgrimag