Research in Consumer Behavior: Volume 14

In this volume, you will find a selection of consumer culture theory based research in consumer behavior. All were presented at the seventh conference on consumer culture theory held at Saïd Business School, Oxford University in August 2012. The papers in this volume were selected by the editors based on reviewer feedback on the qualities of these papers as well as editors’ readings of the various manuscripts.

This “paper” is a rough transcription of the Presidential Address delivered at the Oxford CCT conference on August 18, 2012. I have attempted to retain the conversational style and informal structure of the original speech, but have added some connective transitions to render the talk more legible. I examine some key strengths and prospects for the field of CCT, and some challenges to be faced by its professional organization. The address is my effort to congratulate the membership, and exhort it to ever greater achievement in the coming years.

Purpose – Child sponsorship programs have been accused of representing children from the developing world in a manner described as “development porn” in their marketing communications, and of operating in such a way as to reinforce beliefs that people in the global South are powerless, dependent on help from the developed North. This research takes a critical, historical approach to investigating the marketing practices of Plan Canada, a subsidiary of one of the oldest and largest child sponsorship-based development agencies, in order to evaluate outcomes of charitable giving at the social and ideological level.

Methodology – We adopted a consumer storytelling theoretical lens to conduct narrative analysis of letters written by donors upon their return from visiting their sponsor children.

Findings – We reveal how even if aid recipients are treated with respect in marketing communications, ideological outcomes which reinforce Northern hegemony may still result.

Social implications – Although charitable acts by individuals are commonly encouraged and lauded, marketers may play a role in perpetuating negative outcomes that result from this consumer action, such as reinforcing notions of cultural difference and superiority.

Originality/value of paper – Only a few researchers have investigated the social and ideological outcomes of charitable giving. We investigate the outcome of charitable giving on the donor and recipient communities and relationship between these communities. Models of charitable giving need to be revised to include these outcomes.

Purpose – We study weight loss communities to contribute to the understanding of how gifting, sharing, and the relationship between them allow individuals to pursue status transitions for a social identity.

Methodology – We employed archival netnography to capture emic experiences for a stigmatized circumstance in American society. We analyze data from four communities to obtain a broad range of consumer experiences within fee versus free communities.

Findings – We explain how individuals differentially employ sharing and gifting to create and sustain communities in support of status transitions within a social identity. Further, we describe roles of gifting, sharing, and prosumption, and their contributions to the transformative process of weight loss.

Research limitations/implications – The data comes from communities that may be viewed as stigmatized within the United States, one cultural milieu. Future research should examine these concepts across additional contexts and cultures.

Practical implications – Our analysis reveals the basis for virtual community development in support of status transitions. These results underscore the necessity to examine how consumers co-opt market resources to enact private, albeit life altering, goals.

Originality/value of paper – Most extant literature focuses either on gifting or sharing with little attention to how consumers employ community and membership to achieve personal goals. Our research articulates how individuals employ market resources to enact customized rituals and achieve individual goals within communities.

Purpose – The present article explores a relatively new way for consumers to dispose of items they no longer use, namely free recycling websites. Online recycling is based on an encounter with an unknown recipient to give something away ‘in person’.

Methodology – A phenomenological approach was used to understand the meaning of giving through free recycling websites. Placing the focus on the donor's perspective, we analysed Internet postings and conducted 27 in-depth interviews.

Findings – Our research shows that (1) when the object is given, the online giver is less concerned about the risk of refusal, since the recipient has deliberately made the choice to take the item; (2) when the item is received, the encounter with the recipient removes the anonymity of charities and (3) in return, the encounter with the recipient offers the giver acknowledgement for the gesture without committing them to a relationship with the recipient in the way a gift to kith or kin might do.

Research implications – While former literature has highlighted certain tensions in the gift economy, this study shows how free recycling websites can help to alleviate such tensions.

Social implications – The research highlights how this system of object disposition enhances social interactions between two strangers that share an interest in the same object.

Originality – The article shows how this new form of gift-giving relationship is both rewarding and liberating: it is rewarding thanks to the interaction with the recipient (unlike donations to charities) without necessarily creating a bond of dependence (unlike giving to someone you know).

Purpose – To explore how young men negotiate the matriarchal domain of fashion consumption and self-presentation, observing techniques adopted by these men to navigate this feminized space and construct their identity project.

Methodology/approach – Engaging Foucauldian theory, a constructionist approach is followed to analyze qualitative interview data with the understanding that a consumer's narrated experience is embedded in a social web of possible interpretation. Rather than seeking to discover a respondents “essential self” within interview data, this research takes a narrative analysis approach, considering individuals storytelling within the context of circulating discourses and power relations.

Findings – As young, fashion-forward men navigate new configurations of power relationships and adopt new modes of performing masculinity, they come to legitimate themselves by forging new categories of existence. They engage various techniques to include the arts and the art of irony in an effort to constitute their masculine subjectivity within discourses of fashionable self-presentation practices.

Social implications – By exploring the social context wherein consumer choices are made, we see consumer identity projects are in fact constricted and influenced by a myriad of sociocultural forces.

Originality/value of paper – Within consumer culture theory, there is much focus on the agency of consumers and their identity projects. However, there is a dearth of work that considers the social and cultural context wherein these identity constructions take place. This study makes a contribution toward addressing this gap.

Purpose – Whilst everyday consumption, such as of cosmetics, creates meanings for our being-in-the-world, these meanings appear to be easily over-looked and conceal untapped significance from the experiencing individuals. This study addresses this opportunity for exploring selves in daily transformation, studying cosmetics consumption across key developmental phases of everyday life.

Design/methodology/approach – Phenomenological interviews were employed to investigate individuals' feelings, perceptions and experiences of cosmetics consumption. An iterative process of hermeneutical interpretation was adopted to identify the constellation of past-present-future relations that have underscored the individuals' intentions, motives and purposes.

Findings – This chapter highlights the intricacies of how the self changes on a daily basis. We illustrate how consumers use cosmetic consumption, at a transformational level, to create, redefine and defend aspects of the self and, strategically, to manipulate and even attack others.

Research limitations/implications – Beyond cosmetics consumption, we provide ‘food for thought’ on this very complicated subject-how does mundane consumption potentially address issues of sense of self, and vice versa?

Originality/value – The study highlights an individual's challenges in defining the self and how cosmetics function as a coping mechanism, responding to changes occurring at varying stages of life.

Purpose – In this chapter, we seek to explore the collective responsibilities undertaken by the family as a whole in maintaining familial bonds through meal consumption. We draw on work which examines the role of gift giving (Ruskola, 2005), sharing (Belk, 2010) and sacrifice (Miller, 1998) in consumption. We take an original approach which does not look at the family meal in isolation but rather focuses on the patterning of meals and the relationships between them.

Methodology – The ethnographic study draws on interviews with 18 families and follows up mealtime observations with 15 families.

Findings – The analysis reveals a mealtime patterning involving collective participation in saving (in the form of consuming ordinary and thrifty meals during the week) and spending (in consuming extraordinary meals at weekends). Even if in the women and mothers in the household tend to sacrifice themselves more than other family members, the consumption of thrifty or ordinary meals implies a process of sacrifice involving the entire family. In viewing the meal as gift, we also observe a process of reciprocity in operation with family members obliged to both share in, and contribute to, the meals that have been cooked for them.

Social implication – Our analysis reveals discordances between the aspirations of family members (which are arguably largely based on cultural ideals), and their everyday experiences of family mealtimes.

Originality/Value – The chapter show how these micro experiences of family mealtimes have implications for a macro understanding of the idealised and culturally loaded construct of the family meal.

Purpose – By analysing the experience of homelessness, this chapter aims to understand how individuals experience involuntary life changes in uncertain contexts and analyses the role of consumption, in terms of possessions and practices, along the process.

Methodology/approach – This study adopts a phenomenological approach, focusing on the homelessness experience. It involves an 18 month quasi-ethnography study in a charity that supports the homeless individuals, where interviews about their retrospective biographical accounts were performed. The data was analysed using existential phenomenological procedures.

Findings – Informants’ pathways to homelessness reveal a four-stage process of forced self-transformation (initial self, forced negotiation, transition, transformed self) which takes place across two stressful situational contexts: the triggering events for transformation (i.e. that led informants to lose their home) and the persisting state of uncertainty (i.e. further survival living in the streets).

Social implications – In the current postmodern times there is greater uncertainty surrounding individuals’ life changes. The consequences of the current economic crisis have threatened individuals to lose their homes. By having a better understanding of the way individuals experience this type of loss, the study brings new information about how to support them.

Originality/value of chapter – This study highlights contexts where Van Gennep's transformational routine may not be suitable in the current postmodern times, and provides an alternative transformational routine that takes into account the uncertainty that accompanies involuntary transformations.

Purpose – To extend our understanding of consumers’ relationships with their growing collections of digital virtual goods by exploring adult videogamers’ attachments to their digital virtual possessions within videogames.

Methodology – Phenomenological interviews with 35 adult videogamers, primarily conducted in participants’ homes and lasting on average two hours.

Findings – Our participants were able to possess and form emotional attachments to ‘irreplaceable’ digital virtual goods within videogames despite the goods’ immaterial nature and their own lack of legal ownership. The processes via which these attachments developed mirror our existing understanding of material possession attachment; however, technical and legal restrictions were found to hinder attachment formation. Our participants also expressed concerns, rooted not in the immateriality of the goods, but in their lack of control over the safety of their digital virtual possessions and societal perceptions surrounding such emotional involvement in ‘childish’ videogame play.

Originality/value – This study illustrates that consumers desire to, and find ways to, form meaningful attachments to possessions, regardless of their materiality, whilst highlighting the tension between the desire to possess and make meaning from digital virtual goods and recognition of their lack of legal ownership and control, and the goods’ status as frivolous.

Research implications – We see potential for future research to look beyond the immaterial nature of digital virtual goods to study the complex networks of forces influencing digital virtual consumption, whilst the ambiguous ownership of in-game possessions presents possibilities for further research into the problematic nature of possessing, but not owning, such goods.

Purpose – The objectives of this study are to explore how consumers achieve, maintain, and/or regain privacy and to more fully understand the meaning consumers ascribe to privacy.

Methodology/approach – Image-elicited depth interviews were conducted on a theoretical sample of 23 informants.

Findings – Consumers are active participants who assert their dominance in the marketplace and resist organizational practices that impinge upon their privacy. Seven categories of privacy management practices were identified: withdraw, defend, feint, neutralize, attack, perception management, and reconcile. The findings also reveal that when informants desire privacy and engage in these practices, they are ultimately in a quest for the meta-goal of sovereignty over their respective personal domains.

Research limitations/implications – This study provides support for and expands upon knowledge of the privacy management practices identified in extant literature, and offers an encompassing conceptualization of privacy as it applies in the context of contemporary consumption.

Social implications – This study may assist policy makers and managers in their efforts to develop appropriate solutions to manage consumers’ privacy concerns and support them in their pursuit of privacy.

Originality/value of the paper – This study injects the voice of the consumer into the privacy debate. A broad theoretical framework for understanding what consumers mean when they talk about privacy and the practices they engage in to “do privacy” is presented. It is hoped that this study provides a basis for managing consumer privacy concerns and future research on the issue so that improved outcomes can be attained for all.

The notion of “boundary” is central in both consumer acculturation research and migrants’ daily experience within and beyond the market. Yet, scholars have rarely questioned this concept and thus made it a taken for granted that conceals more than it reveals. Our study aims at moving from the etic notion of boundary we use as consumer acculturation scholars to an emic notion of boundaries, here grounded on an ethnographic inquiry of Moroccan mothers and daughters in France. This chapter shows that (1) the notion of boundary is much more articulated than expected, since migrants may use up to five different typologies of boundaries (national, ethnic, religious, biographical, and generational) in order to organize their experience; (2) first and second generations tend to attribute different meanings to these boundaries; and (3) boundaries represent problematic conceptual references in migrants’ life, which ask for specific coping strategies (crossing the borders, melting the borders, and pushing the borders). Overall, this chapter provides a more sensitive, blurred, and critical representation of boundaries, which – we hope – will stimulate sounder acculturation research. With reference to the limitations of our work, while we identify the variety and interpretive heterogeneity of boundaries migrants use to frame their experience, we limitedly address how such boundaries are performed.

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to investigate consumption discourses in contexts characterized by multiple cultures and intercultural contacts, as multicultural contacts and multiple migrations challenge existing consumer acculturation models based on a dualistic process of acculturation. This chapter explores empirically the character of cultural reflexivity and its expression in consumers’ discourses. Given that nostalgia is one prominent dimension of the migration conceptualization, we seek to understand how the role of nostalgia changes in contexts where consumers are decreasingly territorially embedded agents.

Methodology – The study rests on in-depth analysis of migrant narratives from two research phases. While the first phase encompasses in-depth interviews, the second one combines interviews and observations to provide a depiction of intercultural contact within the micro cosmos of a multicultural apartment.

Findings – The findings of this chapter illustrate how migrants develop different nostalgic discourses, to either (re-)appropriate the Expatriate as defined by James (1999), or to appropriate global consumptionscapes through nostalgia for the routine.

Research implications – On the basis of these findings, the article discusses cultural reflexivity in terms of naturalization and cultivation narratives (Wilk, 1999), proposing shifts between reflexive and routinized consumption practices as basis for consumers’ cultural reflexivity.

Originality/value of chapter – The contribution of this chapter is firstly a contextualized and empirically grounded definition of cultural reflexivity. Secondly, it demonstrates that migrants’ consumption discourses revolve more around disruptions of routines than around acculturation processes. Thirdly, the chapter illustrates the use of nostalgia for emotional valorization of cultures beyond classical home cultural authenticity discourses.

Purpose – In the context of international human mobility and common personal life transformations, this article focuses on the impact of such transformations on emotional attachment to places of origin.

Design/methodology/approach – A combination of phenomenological interviews with 13 Latin American migrants living in Belgium, and poetry composition by the author.

Findings – Drawing on this empirical work, the article illustrates (i) how, after many years of successful international mobility, some migrants still experience, occasionally and with different intensities, a desire to return home – homecoming tendencies; and (ii) how consumption-related activities support consumers in nourishing these personal returning tendencies, therefore enabling them to avoid disappearing from view in the territories from which they departed.

Originality/value – The notion of homecoming tendencies contrasts with that of home maintenance, by demonstrating how preserving one's home in departure lands is also a matter of caring, commitment, and contributing back home. Such gestures are inextricably linked with consumption-related activities such as housing decisions, the adoption and export of cultural ideas, traveling, working, celebrating, all in departure contexts. These activities often involve current inhabitants of those territories, such as local designers, constructors, tourism services providers, colleagues, students, and family members.

Purpose – In this chapter, we intend to discuss and analyse possibilities and policies for sustainable cities and mobility by linking these issues to ordinary consumption or shopping practices. We argue that sustainability discourses directed towards urban dwellers or citizens tend to express totalizing and exclusionary tendencies that obscure the situated dimensions of mobility practices generated through consumption.

Design/methodology – Through an ethnographically informed exploration of everyday consumption practices we discuss discrepancies between examples of sustainability policies and campaigns on the one hand and mundane consumption practices on the other.

Findings – The chapter concludes that there are some major discrepancies between official sustainability discourses and mundane consumption practices and introduces the concept of the ‘consumover citizen’ as a productive way of discussing sustainability.

Originality/value – Introducing the concept of ‘consumover citizen’ is a novel way of conceptualizing sustainability in terms of who and what moves in the city regarding mobility generated by consumption practices.

Purpose – Little attention has been directed to investigating abandonment which refers to the deliberate choice of giving up something previously consumed. In this chapter, we look into meanings that motivate the abandonment of a product category and also the meanings abandonment gives rise to.

Design/methodology/approach – The research used a qualitative methodology to collect and analyze data obtained from in-depth interviews with 16 Brazilian consumers who gave up automobile ownership. This category was chosen due to its intense symbolic dimension.

Findings – The interviews suggest that, rather than being a discrete event, an action, or decision that is circumscribed by a given moment, abandonment is in fact a process. The analysis also outlines three types of abandonment: contingent, positional, and ideological. Contingent abandonment occurs when the individual, despite sharing the meanings with other consumers of the category, is forced to abandon consumption. Positional abandonment is driven mainly by the rejection of symbolic associations that consumption provides. Finally, ideological abandonment presents a collective perspective where the individual believes that society as a whole should abandon or reassess that consumption.

Practical implications (if applicable) – Results offer potential insights, for both governments and nongovernmental organizations involved in de-marketing efforts aimed at inappropriate consumption and companies interested in reversing the shrinking of their markets.

Originality/value – The present research broadens our knowledge of abandonment and allows us to situate it among other kinds of anticonsumption behaviors.

Purpose – This paper explores a pervasive yet little explored myth that underlies much marketing theory and practice: living in harmony with nature. While previous research typically presents “harmony with nature” as something consumers can easily find by returning to a benevolent “Mother Nature,” the current research problematizes how “harmony with nature” is discursively constructed in contemporary advertisements.

Methodology/approach – This paper traces the visual genealogy of contemporary advertising imagery to explore different discursive constructions of the harmony myth. Over 600 advertisements published in Backpacker magazine between 2007 and 2009 form the database for this research.

Findings – Drawing on a more nuanced understanding of the organic framework of nature, and representations of nature in the artistic genre of Romantic landscape painting, the current research finds that divergent images of an “Arcadian” and “Dynamic” nature give rise to different constructions of harmony that are fraught with tension. Harmony might be as easily lost as it is found, or it might never be achieved at all.

Originality/value of paper – This research shows that living in harmony with nature is less harmonic than it seems. It extends previous research that adopted an implicitly unproblematic understanding of finding harmony in nature by uncovering nuances and contradictions within contemporary manifestations of the harmony myth. Implications for marketers and for our understanding of the human/nature relationship more generally are offered.

Purpose – We examine the meanings of objects that have indexical (or direct first-hand) connections to celebrities. In so doing, we distinguish between the meanings of proximal indexicality versus contagious indexicality. We reveal how these disparate meanings are linked to how consumers use a celebrity object, either by displaying the object or by using the object as the celebrity had originally used the object.

Methodology – Our informants were consumers participating in sales of celebrity-owned items. Data include videotaped depth interviews, photographs of auction participants and celebrity objects, field notes, and auction catalogue descriptions.

Findings – Some consumers were fans who desired to be close to the celebrity, while others participating in celebrity-object auctions desired to become a celebrity themselves. Those that desired to be close to the celebrity (fans) were attracted to the proximal indexical meaning of the object, in which an indexical link conveyed a perceived closeness between the perceiver and the signified (e.g., consumer and celebrity) through the indexically linked object. Those that desired to become a celebrity themselves were attracted to the contagious indexical meaning of the object which facilitates a perceived contamination of the perceiver (e.g., consumer) by the essence of the signified (e.g., celebrity) through the indexically linked object.

Contributions – We contribute to the Peircian semiotic framework as used in consumer research by differentiating between the meanings of proximal indexicality and contagious indexicality. We show these meanings are linked to consumers’ display use versus the original use of the celebrity-owned object.

Purpose – To extend understanding of the rituals and practices of alcohol consumption through a focus on the consumption object (the Dirty Pint) as a central actant in the practices of extreme alcohol consumption.

Design/methodology/approach – Seventeen paired and group interviews were conducted with young consumers (aged 16–18). An Actor-Network Theory (ANT)-inspired approach to data analysis was used in conjunction with Bourdieu's key concepts of habitus, field and capital to present a detailed understanding of the practices and rituals of extreme alcohol consumption.

Findings – The same consumption object takes on a very different role and has different forms of agency, depending on the social space (field) in which it is embedded. The Dirty Pint acts differently within different social spaces or sub-fields of the field of adolescence, particularly when combined with individual subjects of differing habitus to produce an object+subject hybrid.

Social implications – Paying attention to all the relevant actants (both human and non-human) involved in the practice of alcohol consumption could lead to more novel and relevant alcohol-harm reduction strategies or campaigns that young people can both relate to and take more seriously.

Originality/value of paper – We stress the need to grant greater agency to objects in studying consumption practices and identity enactment and contribute to the literature on identity by extending Gergen's (2009) ‘relational being’, conceiving of the self as embedded in both inter-subjective and inter-objective interactions and relationships (Latour, 1996).

Purpose – To explore the nature of metaphorical thinking in marketing and consumer research, with particular emphasis on consumers’ metaphor-manufacturing proclivities.

Methods/approach – The chapter concentrates on one of the most compelling and powerful metaphors of the 20th century, the sinking of the RMS Titanic in April 1912. It uses introspective methods to interrogate consumers’ figurative interpretations of the iconic catastrophe.

Findings – Four categories of consumer metaphor-making are identified: negative, positive, reflexive and visual.

Research implications – The profusion of Titanic tropes suggests that researchers should resist unearthing ‘deep’ metaphors and focus instead on ‘wide’ metaphors, those that spread across the surface of society and culture.

Practical implications – ZMET, the widely used metaphorical elicitation procedure, warrants a complement called TMET. This Titanic Metaphor Elaboration Tendency is better attuned to contemporary branding thinking than its more familiar predecessor.