Ela Veresiu

This article unpacks time as a cultural consumption resource and introduces the concept of consumer timework. Consumer timework refers to marketplace stakeholders’ negotiation of competing interpretations of how the past and the future relate using a wide range of consumption objects and activities. Building on the theory of temporalization, we argue that social tensions, conflicts, and breaks drive the past and the future apart in multiple incompatible ways that individuals and societies must contend. We theorize four fundamental dynamics of consumer timework in which market stakeholders engage: integrative, disintegrative, subjugatory, and emancipatory. Integrative and disintegrative consumer timework respectively harmonize and rupture the multiple temporal orientations (past, present, and future) to create shared communities or counter-communities of time through consumption. Subjugatory and emancipatory consumer timework respectively enforce and disrupt temporal hierarchies of power through consumption. We delineate these temporal dynamics using examples from extant consumer research. We conclude by establishing a future research agenda on consumer timework.

Context harm crises concern the challenges of advertising morally sound products in a context that is failing, as during COVID-19. Following Koselleck, we argue that crises interrupt the trajectory of existing social processes, thereby preventing consumers’ expected future outcomes. We propose a three-step future framing advertising strategy in response: (1) mourning a future that was lost to facilitate emotional adaptation; (2) reconstructing a new future to facilitate rational action under conditions of ambivalence; and (3) establishing mythologies for future-oriented identity work to facilitate the existential demands of crises. We then discuss health messaging from the perspective of future framing.

A growing body of consumer research on intersectionality in the marketplace focuses on identifying overlapping oppressive consumer identity categories, such as gender and race. Yet this work tends to prioritize microlevel agency over power relations within structures and practices of domination. Drawing on the more transformative aspects of intersectionality theory, as well as a focused media and netnographic investigation of the Advanced Style movement in North America, we examine how advanced (aged 50+) female style influencers help transform the ageist and sexist fashion and beauty markets. Specifically, these women enact two forms of embodied resistance informed by the Western dominant discourse of successful aging (deconstructing gendered and ageist fashion and defying gendered and ageist beauty) using the social media platform Instagram. We conclude with future research directions on the transformative potential of embodied resistance for various doubly oppressive gendered and ageist marketplaces.

Although extant consumer acculturation research has investigated the acculturative effect of various ideological and institutional contexts, it has devoted minimal attention to how spatial structural conditions, in particular state-subsidized spaces, affect the consumer acculturation experiences of poor immigrants. This study builds on spatial governmentality theory to investigate the creation and consumption of a racialized gated community in Italy. Specifically, it reveals three state-sponsored spatial governmentality strategies (race-restrictive zoning, domestic space standardizing, and technological self-surveilling) used to transform perceived norm-breaking Roma immigrants (derogatorily referred to as “Gypsies”) into acculturating consumers to regional sedentary norms, as well as the accompanying Roma consumer resistance responses (community-protective insulating, domestic space rearranging, and behavioral boundary testing) used to partly contest the imposed consumer acculturation and preserve some of the minority’s nomadic culture. The article concludes with implications for research on consumer acculturation, consumer resistance, and spatial governmentality.

Prior consumer research has investigated the consumer behavior, identity work, and sources of ethnic group conflict among various immigrants and indigenes. However, by continuing to focus on consumers’ lived experiences, researchers lack theoretical clarity on the institutional shaping of these individuals as ethnic consumers, which has important implications for sustaining neocolonial power imbalances between colonized (immigrant-sending) and colonizing (immigrant-receiving) cultures. We bring sociological theories of neoliberal governmentality and multiculturalism to bear on an in-depth analysis of the contemporary Canadian marketplace to reveal our concept of market-mediated multiculturation, which we define as an institutional mechanism for attenuating ethnic group conflicts through which immigrant-receiving cultures fetishize strangers and their strangeness in their commodification of differences, and the existence of inequalities between ethnicities is occluded. Specifically, our findings unpack four interrelated consumer socialization strategies (envisioning, exemplifying, equipping, and embodying) through which institutional actors across different fields (politics, market research, retail, and consumption) shape an ethnic consumer subject. We conclude with a critical discussion of extant scholarship on consumer acculturation as being complicit in sustaining entrenched colonialist biases.

Grounded in work on geography and markets, this article offers a conceptual framework to study the dynamics of markets through a spatial lens. The characteristics of four key spatial dimensions (place, territory, scale, and network) are explained and leveraged to provide distinct analytical vantage points and to conceptualize how various types of spaces matter differently in market dynamics. Findings from a qualitative meta-analysis identify 12 unique mechanisms tied to the four proposed spatial dimensions, which offer alternative theoretical avenues for unpacking market phenomena. These four spatial dimensions are then combined with 12 space-based mechanisms to offer novel research avenues for marketing scholars interested in market system dynamics.

Responsible consumption conventionally stems from an increased awareness of the impact of consumption decisions on the environment, on consumer health, and on society in general. We theorize the influence of moralistic governance regimes on consumer subjectivity to make the opposite case: responsible consumption requires the active creation and management of consumers as moral subjects. Building on the sociology of governmentality, we introduce four processes of consumer responsibilization that, together, comprise the P.A.C.T. routine (personalization, authorization, capabilization, and transformation). After that, we draw on a longitudinal analysis of problem-solving initiatives at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to explore the role of P.A.C.T. in the creation of four, now commonplace, responsible consumer subjects: the bottom-of-the-pyramid consumer, the green consumer, the health-conscious consumer, and the financially literate consumer. Our analysis informs extant macro-level theorizations of market and consumption systems. We also contribute to prior accounts of responsibilization, marketplace mythologies, consumer subjectivity, and transformative consumer research.