| 1. |
- Hietanen, Joel, et al.
(författare)
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Catering to Otherness : Levinasian Consumer Ethics at Restaurant Day
- 2021
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Ingår i: Journal of Business Ethics. - : Springer. - 0167-4544 .- 1573-0697. ; 168:2, s. 261-276
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- There is a rich tradition of inquiry in consumer research into how collective consumption manifests in various forms and contexts. While this literature has shown how group cohesion prescribes ethical and moral positions, our study explores how ethicality can arise from consumers and their relations in a more emergent fashion. To do so, we present a Levinasian perspective on consumer ethics through a focus on Restaurant Day, a global food carnival that is organized by consumers themselves. Our ethnographic findings highlight a non-individualistic way of approaching ethical subjectivity that translates into acts of catering to the needs of other people and the subversion of extant legislation by foregrounding personal responsibility. These findings show that while consumer gatherings provide participants a license to temporarily subvert existing roles, they also allow the possibility of ethical autonomy when the mundane rules of city life are renegotiated. These sensibilities also create ‘ethical surplus’, which is an affective excess of togetherness. In the Levinasian register, Restaurant Day thus acts as an inarticulable ‘remainder’—a trace of the possibility of being able to live otherwise alongside one another in city contexts.
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| 2. |
- Magalhães Lopes, Maíra, et al.
(författare)
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Why do crowds cause trouble? Exploring affective instability in collectivity
- 2021
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Ingår i: Marketing Theory. - : SAGE Publications. - 1470-5931 .- 1741-301X. ; 21:4, s. 539-560
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Through our ethnographic study of urban activism collectives in Sao Paulo, we propose another approach for exploring the process of collective formations and their longevity. Rather than seeking out the representational meanings of individualized communities, we approach collectivity from the perspective of crowds. Crowds are affective. Crowds are contagious. By adopting affect-based theorizing, we discuss affective intensities that bring about collectivity before the individuals awaken to narrate their meaning-makings. In our ethnographic context, collectives resist manifestations of gentrification (i.e., consumer culture in itself) and offer us a multifaceted site of being and becoming with the crowds. We explore how connections and disconnections affectively rekindle the social expression of collective bodies in consumer culture. This way, we add new dimensions to extant theorizing of consumer collectivity that tends to focus on individualized meaning, stability, and harmony.
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| 3. |
- Wickstrom, Alice, et al.
(författare)
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“Something is missing” : Melancholia and belonging in collective consumption
- 2021
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Ingår i: Marketing Theory. - : SAGE Publications. - 1470-5931 .- 1741-301X. ; 21:1, s. 75-91
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In this essay, we explore the limits of marketized belonging through Kristeva's theorization of melancholia and desire. This allows us to problematize "joyful" accounts of societal re-enchantment and how "belonging" through collectives of consumption (such as neo-tribes, subcultures of consumption, and brand communities) is generally seen as a natural response to modernist rationalization and increased individualization. Instead, we argue that the scholarly understanding of collective forms of consumption has been premised upon paradoxical ground due to the notion of the subject-as-consumer as lacking often being implicitly reproduced, albeit theoretically neglected, allowing for the reproduction of romanticized ideals of marketized "communality." We foreground how tensions between individuality and communality are negotiated within markets and argue that collective forms of consumption feed upon separation, fragmentation, and the suspension of "joy" rather than relationality and belonging. We propose that this allows for a better understanding of the desire tobecomethrough collective consumption and direct further attention toward questions related to liminality, detachment, loss, and exclusion.
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