| 1. |
- Çakanlar, Aylin, 1991-
(author)
-
Essays on Consumers’ Socially Responsible Decision Making
- 2021
-
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Identity has important implications for consumers’ choices in the marketplace. While prior research has mainly studied identity at the individual level, consumers’ social identities are growing more relevant in the marketplace. This dissertation examines how these social identities affect socially responsible decision-making. Using experiments as my primary method, I study how consumers’ political and couple identities can affect their decision-making in the context of sustainable consumption practices, COVID-19 behaviors, and the sharing economy. Across 16 online experiments, two Facebook split tests, and one field study, this dissertation demonstrates the critical implications of political and couple identity in the socially responsible decision-making process. First, this dissertation shows that consumers’ political identities influence their willingness to engage in sustainable consumption, COVID-19 prevention behaviors, and support for peer-to-peer providers in the sharing economy. Second, this dissertation examines sustainable consumption in a romantic relationship context and demonstrates that consumers’ sustainability-related decisions can influence their partners’ sustainable choices, highlighting the importance of couple identity. Overall, this dissertation contributes to the literature on identity and socially responsible decision-making and provides practical implications for marketers and policymakers who aim to improve consumers’ socially responsible behaviors in the marketplace.
|
|
| 2. |
- Lucarelli, Andrea, 1982-
(author)
-
The Political Dimension of Place Branding
- 2015
-
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Place branding is commonly understood as the application of marketing and commercial ideas, strategies, measurements and logic to the realm of places such as cities, regions and nations. Nevertheless, place branding is also understood as the locus where political activities – imbued with political impact and political effects – appear and affect the soft and hard infrastructures of urban agglomeration and other spatial environments. In this regard, by performing an analysis that helps unpack the multiple characters and impacts of political structures and processes in relation to place branding activities, the present dissertation aims to offer a conceptualization of the political dimension of place branding. By drawing on the critical assessment of the academic literature on place branding and on a series of studies about the branding processes in the region of Romagna and in the Greater Stockholm, the present dissertation further specifies an alternative conceptual framework (i.e. ecological politics) that suggests how place branding should be seen an empirical and theoretical political apparatus that acts, in praxis, based on an emerging, multifaceted and spatio-temporal enfolding of politics. More specifically, the ecological politics of place branding is characterized by four main aspects: the unfolding of a biopolitical ecology around place-branding practices; the ideological appropriation of place-branding processes; the positioning through politicized actions between the interest groups; and finally place-branding as a process of policy-intervention. Finally, on more general level, the present dissertation, by recognizing the political activities and efforts of place branding as crucial elements to be analyzed, makes the case for a more explicit, complex and manifold political analysis of the political dimension of place branding, which allows attention to be given to the impact that branding processes, practices and activities have on cities, regions and nations
|
|
| 3. |
- Ehnhage, Anna Felicia, 1986-
(author)
-
Paradoxical consumer enjoyment : A cultural perspective on cigarette consumption
- 2024
-
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- In a time when health is seen as an important personal achievement, it is difficult to understand why people consume cigarettes. The explanations for cigarette consumption tend to be one-sided and the most common explanation are addiction and compulsive personality. Consumer culture theory (CCT) has similarly ended up in a one-sided portrayal when studying consumption seen as destructive or marginalising. This thesis argues that this one-sided view is a result of how dominant discourses within CCT views pleasure. The strive to attain pleasurable experiences is often described as a motivation for consumption in CCT, however, pleasure lacks nuance and is mainly portrayed as constructive and socially accepted. That is, consumption of the seemingly irrational, destructive, or repulsive products in today's marketplace cannot be understood as motivated by pleasure as defined in CCT, as a result, much of the consumption that occurs in the marketplace is excluded from the literature.The thesis argues that the one-sided view on pleasure in CCT is the result of a lack of frameworks encompassing ambiguous experiences. To this end, the present thesis builds a framework based on psychoanalytically informed discourse theories’ view of jouissance, a form of paradoxical enjoyment, and apply it on the study of cigarette consumption. This thesis suggests to move away from pleasures when studying destructive and marginalising consumption and instead suggests paradoxical enjoyment as an alternative.This thesis concludes that paradoxical enjoyment, in the case of smoking, further breaks with the assumptions of rationality and constructiveness often present in CCT. Smokers, on the other hand, experience enjoyment because of the regulations and social stigma that surrounds smoking. The thesis moreover shows how enjoyment of smoking is expressed as a disruption of pain experienced in crisis caused by e.g., separation or death, because the pain from crisis is out screamed with the pain felt from smoking. In addition, enjoyment of smoking is felt through the moving back-and-forth between self-imposed limits and limitlessness. Lastly, the thesis found that smoking is an isolated enjoyment, preferred away from non-smokers as well as from other smokers, because of the repulsion smokers sense towards their own consumption.
|
|
| 4. |
- Servadio, Luigi, 1971-
(author)
-
Customer Rituals : Ethnographic explorations of wine rituals with families and friends
- 2018
-
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Marketers are increasingly adopting rituals as a powerful technique to spur product engagement and enhance customer value creation. From a customer perspective, rituals and value creation may entail broader purposes and meanings that go beyond the company’s intentions. Service research has extensively studied everyday value creation as emerging in the interaction between companies and customers. Increasingly, service scholars are nuancing understanding toward a more focussed perspective of value creation, which primarily is dominated by customers. By expanding on this bourgeoning literature, the present thesis provides an alternative view suggesting that customer value creation in certain instances can be better understood through the lens of rituals. Rituals are customer-centric processes of value creation orchestrated by customers within their realm, with little or no control from companies. Rituals are sacred moments in customers’ lives separated from the everyday, in which value creation appears to be not only a mundane action, but broadly these actions are loaded with extraordinary experiences. Rituals are cocreated by broader customer ecosystems, including not only customers and their contexts, but also other subjects and contexts, collectively determining value. The purpose of this thesis is to provide a framework to explore the relationship between rituals and value creation from a customer’s point of view by taking a customer-dominant stance on service as a starting point and leveraging insights from a theoretical ritual construct to provide a fuller understanding of how customers create and determine value. The field of wine is chosen as a fertile empirical context in which to research rituals due to its rich ritualistic connotations. The research adopts ethnography as method of investigation and exploits reflexivity as a strategic asset to elicit and interpret data. Data was collected during a period of 2 years in two sites (Sweden and Italy) to moderate research biases and to broaden the empirical setting. Various techniques, including participant observation and interviews, were chosen in order to obtain detailed descriptions of how families and friends ritualized their value creation through drinking wine. The thesis provides a customer rituals framework, its main contribution. In adopting this framework, the study illustrates in two ethnographic episodes how wines (i.e. distribution mechanism of service provision) become embedded in customers’ lives through rituals. Particularly, value creation in rituals emerges as an ongoing, multilayered process (script-based) exerted by customers meant to feed their needing for rituals. Furthermore, ritualizing customers gather in communitas,that is an extended, temporary customer ecosystem, wherein value is intersubjectively and dynamically determined by multiple subjects and contexts. Service providers may benefit from this study by using the framework to better facilitate customer value creation in rituals and to gain interesting insights on product and service innovation.
|
|
| 5. |
- Södergren, Jonatan, 1989-
(author)
-
“Woke” Authenticity in Brand Culture : A Patchwork Ethnography
- 2022
-
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Authenticity is often considered the holy grail in marketing. Prior research has focused on authenticity in consumption and marketing communications based on countercultural images of personal freedom, including mythologies based on resistant rebels and social outlaws. In turn, research has constructed an androcentric view of authenticity using only one-half (i.e., the masculine/agentic) of its inherently ambivalent dialectic of meaning. Little is known about the authentication of more feminine/communally gendered consumers such as stigmatized seekers and other marginalized consumer segments. In that respect the literature on authenticity in consumer research is highly problematic, because the dominant worldview tends to essentialize an exotic version of the Other recognized as authentic while knowing next to nothing about the Other beyond this stereotypical image.This thesis fills an important gap in knowledge regarding the circuit of cultural ideologies around authenticity, particularly in relation to brand culture and consumers’ authenticating acts. Through a patchwork ethnography consisting of data collected in different empirical contexts (e.g., the Viking myth, queer cinema, disability in ads, etc.), the aim is to deconstruct the androcentric gaze on authenticity. Findings help pave the way toward a more empathic marketing theory and practice in which the Other is less confined by the harmful depiction of stereotypes. These findings are important because we live in times when brands are increasingly purpose-driven and expected to engage in activism (e.g., by taking a stand on socio-political issues even if they are not directly related to their business), while our social institutions are becoming more and more like brands. Indeed, recent marketing tendencies indicate a shifting cultural economy in which myths of personal freedom have been replaced with commodity activism in the “woke” discourse of authenticity in contemporary brand culture.I contribute to consumer research and conversations concerning the politics of authenticity, emphasizing issues of ethical representation and responsibility toward the Other, which may alleviate androcentric failings in previous research. I do this through thinking rooted in a deconstructive ontology, a feminist epistemology, and a transformative consumer research axiology.
|
|
| 6. |
- Yngfalk, Carl, 1980-
(author)
-
The Constitution of Consumption : Food Labeling and the Politics of Consumerism
- 2012
-
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The power dynamics of consumerism is an important aspect of contemporary consumer culture. Within the field of marketing and consumption, consumer culture theory (CCT) tends to understand power in terms of agency, the ability of consumers to emancipate from a market infused by the culture of consumerism. As such, CCT assumes a repressive hypothesis of power, as if consumerism was an external reality from which agentic consumers can escape by acts of dialectical opposition. In contrast, through a Foucauldian approach, the present study emphasizes the productive side of power, arguing that consumerism operates beyond dialectical oppositions to constitute consumption at different levels of scale – at the macro, meso and micro levels. More specifically, through qualitative data generated from official documents and interviews with state agency officials, consumers, and food manufacturers and retailers, the study undertakes a discourse analysis of date labeling in the food market. In accounting for the regulative, organizational and performative dimensions of consumption, the case of date labeling makes it possible to study consumerism at the intersection of the state, business and consumers. The study argues that consumption is constituted through a multiplicity of mundane power struggles that arise in the wake of date labeling. As such, it extends previous approaches by suggesting an extra-dialectical theory of consumer culture. Further, it argues that date labeling reinforces the mind/body dualism of consumerism by privileging cognition and choice at the cost of the human embodiment and sensory perception. It concludes that empowered performativity does not represent a negation of power, but that it emerges as a product of power and the consumerist attempt to constitute effective, predictable, responsible and controlled consumption. However, future research should continue studying the dominant institutional conditions of particular consumption contexts.
|
|
| 7. |
- Lindblad, Emma, 1981-
(author)
-
Looking vanlig; neither too much nor too little : A study of consumption of clothing among mainstream youth in a Swedish small town
- 2017
-
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis studies consumption among young people who identify as mainstreamers in a Swedish small town. In order to map patterns of clothing consumption and to understand what was central in the young people’s self-identification, the research was conducted using a mix of ethnographic methods and wardrobe studies. This is an inverted study of the subcultural, that problematizes the assumption that the majority (the mainstream) and the minority (the countercultural) are opposites when it comes to identity creation. The central concepts used here are ordinary (vanlig), mainstream, and subculture. One of the main findings is that the youth studied self-identify as ordinary. This finding is used to problematize not only the traditional markers of masculinity and femininity as they present themselves in this context, but also what is characterized as new patterns of consumption. There are two main conclusions. First, being mainstream and ordinary was not a static identity position, as the literature would have it; instead, being an ordinary mainstreamer required constant work in order to stay within certain culturally negotiated boundaries. Second, the ethnographic findings contribute in the field of subcultural studies by questioning the convention of portraying the mainstream and the subcultural as polar opposites: contrary to the literature, it is argued that neither is so very different from the other, making it an unhelpful dichotomy in understanding young people today.
|
|
| 8. |
- Magalhães Lopes, Maíra, 1982-
(author)
-
The Making of Us : How affects shape collective bodies resisting gentrification
- 2018
-
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis explores how we can think of collective bodies as amalgamations of interplaying affects (i.e., multiplicities), rather than compositions of individuals. Using ethnography as my main method, I study urban activism collectives resisting gentrification in the city center of São Paulo, Brazil. Following affect-based theorizing, I focus on the collective body as a composition of affective intensities. I explore disgust, fear, (dis)comfort, and hope as affective intensities that travel with different orientations, directions, and potencies. I take the position that, through such travelings, bodily surfaces become felt and unfelt. That is, I explore the surfacing of the collective body as a continuous process through the circulation and accumulation of such affects. I also explore how collective bodies become organized as packs and crowds, whilst disputing spaces for consumption within a gentrification process. Whereas packs are seen as a condensed form of multiplicities, crowds are expanded forms of multiplicities. The findings of this thesis then contribute to the marketplace culture literature by exploring how the formation of the collective body is a continuous affective process that unfolds into different forms of multiplicities (i.e., packs and crowds). This study proposes viewing the collective body as a continuous process of affective amalgamation. This study also contributes to extant CCT studies regarding affect and emotions. The findings of this study interlink felt experiences with surfacing effects. That is, I focus the analysis on how affects work in delineating the relation between and of bodies and, thereby, marking what we understand as I, you, us, and them. Thirdly, this study also contributes to discussions regarding space and place in marketing. This study extends the discussion regarding spatial injustices and neoliberal cities, which are driven by wider consumption ideology.
|
|
| 9. |
- Molander, Susanna, 1965-
(author)
-
Mat, kärlek och metapraktik : En studie i vardagsmiddagskonsumtion bland ensamstående mödrar
- 2011
-
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The everyday dinner usually involves a number of different and sometimes conflicting ambitions that may include striving for self-fulfillment and striving to care for one’s family and society at large. To understand the consumption that occurs in connection with these ambitions, consumer researchers must understand the context surrounding the everyday dinner. In this dissertation theories of practice are utilized as a conceptual framework to emphasize the importance of context.Theories of practice have gained renewed interest within the field of consumption. Yet, Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) has neglected practice theories’ ability to operationalize the consumption context. The aim of this dissertation is to develop further CCT’s practice perspective to increase the understanding of the consumption context and thereby better understand consumption as a social and cultural phenomenon. An ethnographic approach is employed to identify what practices operate within a complex consumption situation such as the everyday dinner among single mothers; how these practices incorporate consumption in their strivings and how the different practices operating within the consumption situation interact with one another.This new approach comes to the conclusion that mothering, defined as a meta-practice, dominated the consumption situation and organized the other practices involved. A meta-practice is one with major influence over consumption and thus a type of practice consumption researchers should look for. Furthermore in Western society consumption situations, like the everyday dinner, seem to be especially important when it comes to anchoring meta-practices and thereby the social order. A preliminary characterization of the meta-practice is proposed as consisting of four different traits: I) its impact on the social order; II) its generalizability, density and superiority; III) its regulation and IV) its stability or slow change. However, more studies are necessary to explore these characteristics further.
|
|
| 10. |
- Östberg, Jacob
(author)
-
What's Eating the Eater? Perspectives on the Everyday Anxiety of Food Consumption in Late Modernity
- 2003
-
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Consumers today are constantly showered with a vast array of different messages about what and how they should and should not eat in order to lead a healthy life. This bombardment has escalated over the last decades as various actors, such as representatives from the medical community and public policy makers, have increasingly stressed the connections between individuals’ food consumption habits and the state of their health. On top of this, food producers are trying to capitalize on the increased focus on health by developing, or repositioning, products that cater to the health conscious market segments. These developments lead to a situation where consumers are faced with various different, and sometimes contrasting, groups of experts that tell them what they are supposed to do. This dissertation looks at how consumers navigate between and make use of the available cacophony of different voices of food and health. The emerging picture is one of consumers reflexively incorporating bits and pieces of this expert knowledge of food consumption and health into their day-to-day lives. However, the consumers are also plagued by an everyday anxiety, as they feel unable to determine whether they are really able to make sense of the incoming expert information or not. Furthermore, the picture includes consumers constantly having to deal with a nagging sense that they are not able to live according to the norms they have set up for themselves.
|
|
