Moving consumption

• Ultimately, the papers published in this special issue have at least three general implications. First, they show that market moves, be they the moves of consumers or the moves of goods, are part of larger political issues: economic asymmetries at the world level (Birtchnell and Urry), environmental costs of globalization (D'Antone and Spencer), sustainability and liveability issues associated with local consumer logistics (Hansson) or nomad elites (Figueiredo). Second, moving consumption underlines the importance of container technologies, be they large supply side (Birtchnell and Urry) or small demand side containers (Hansson). They also highlight the transformative role of more sophisticated devices that are aimed at assisting consumers in their moves, such as music players (Dholakia et al.), syncing tools (Figuereido) and heart rate monitors (Pantzar and Ruckenstein), along with many more consumer choice equipment, such as smartphone consumer apps, big data, geolocalization devices and so on, which all shift e-shopping from desktop to mobile consumption. Third, these transformations have theoretical and methodological implications. Theoretically, the more people move, the more they are equipped, and the more the entities we study shift from isolated fixed consumers to webs of mutable moving networks and practices. In order to account for such hybrid entities, there is a need for hybridizing the views of consumer research (Dholakia et al., Figuereido) with approaches such as the new mobility paradigm (Birtchnell and Urry), the theory of practice (Pantzar and Ruckenstein) and actor-network theory (D'Antone and Spencer; Hansson). These approaches give additional means to address such mobile, composite and malleable objects; they also develop related methodological approaches, such as go-alongs, video-assisted observation (Hansson) or the secondary analysis of recorded consumer traces (Pantzar and Ruckenstein).

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Annan humaniora -- Etnologi (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Other Humanities -- Ethnology (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Sociologi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Sociology (hsv//eng)

Keyword

consumer logistics

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)