Marketing TheoryPub Date : 2024-04-26DOI: 10.1177/14705931241249020
Jonatan Södergren, Oscar Ahlberg, Mattias Hjelm
{"title":"Marketing and the theatre of the absurd","authors":"Jonatan Södergren, Oscar Ahlberg, Mattias Hjelm","doi":"10.1177/14705931241249020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14705931241249020","url":null,"abstract":"The scientific tradition in marketing research has alienated marketing practitioners from academics. As a counterpoint, we argue that theory from the humanities, especially theatre and drama studies, can provide meaningful insights into consumer culture. Inspired by the Theatre of the Absurd, we develop four absurd prompts present in consumer culture: menace, aphasia, parody, and frustration. Taken together, these prompts amount to an absurd condition, a hall of mirrors, in which consumers inevitably find themselves. While the market promises different ways out of this condition, through manners, speech, sincerity, and attainment, we argue that these promises remain empty, amounting only to absurd inversions leading to new halls of mirrors. Through the lens of the Theatre of the Absurd, we map such promises of inversions and their implications for marketing theory.","PeriodicalId":48020,"journal":{"name":"Marketing Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140803079","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Marketing TheoryPub Date : 2024-04-16DOI: 10.1177/14705931241245589
Craig J Thompson
{"title":"Transcending paradigmatic schisms and building ontological bridges: How Russ Belk’s “extended self” became canonical consumer research","authors":"Craig J Thompson","doi":"10.1177/14705931241245589","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14705931241245589","url":null,"abstract":"This essay gives closer historical consideration to the unprecedented disciplinary impact of Belk’s (1988) conceptualization of the extended self. This canonical article initially appeared to be another flashpoint in the paradigmatic conflict between positivist and interpretivist consumer researchers. However, Belk’s portrayal of consumers as agentic actors who produce their own identities through a network of possessions and symbolic artefacts proved to be highly compatible with interdisciplinary trends toward a more holistic and socio-culturally situated understanding of consumer behavior. Accordingly, Belk’s “extended self” created an ontological bridge between interpretivist studies of consumers’ co-constituting relations to the socio-material world and consumer psychologists’ quest to expand their research interests beyond the study of rational decision making processes. While some marketing historians have suggested that the extended self’s seminal influence derives from its generative “vagueness,” I propose that its transformational effects on the broader field of consumer research trace to a genius of mythopoesis and a genius of timing. I then discuss how the logic of ontological reconfiguration, manifest in Belk’s conceptualization, can foster more synergistic and innovative inter-paradigmatic dialogues between consumer culture theory (CCT) and consumer psychology.","PeriodicalId":48020,"journal":{"name":"Marketing Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140616452","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Institutional complexity and consumer wellbeing: Navigating the conflicting logics of religion, state, and market during the COVID-19 pandemic","authors":"Ozlem Sandikci, Berna Tarı Kasnakoğlu, Şahver Omeraki Çekirdekci","doi":"10.1177/14705931241245593","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14705931241245593","url":null,"abstract":"Institutional complexity arises when multiple institutional logics prescribe divergent and incompatible behaviors. Studies show that exposure to contradictory prescriptions of multiple logics may trigger identity tensions, strategic challenges, and legitimacy problems. We add to this research stream by exploring the implications of the incompatibility between religion and other logics on consumer wellbeing. Extant research reports a generally positive effect of religion on wellbeing but limits the analytical attention to the individual effects of religiosity. Viewing religion as part of an inter-institutional system, we seek to understand why religion and other institutional logics might come into a conflictual relationship with each other and destabilize wellbeing. We find that critical events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, change the relative centrality of logics and prompt individuals to engage in incompatible behaviors. We also discuss how consumers manage the sudden and unexpected institutional complexity they face and seek to restore their wellbeing.","PeriodicalId":48020,"journal":{"name":"Marketing Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140581485","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Marketing TheoryPub Date : 2024-03-15DOI: 10.1177/14705931241240199
Bernard Cova, Franck Barès
{"title":"Extricating the concept of linking value from its tribal gangue","authors":"Bernard Cova, Franck Barès","doi":"10.1177/14705931241240199","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14705931241240199","url":null,"abstract":"The concept of linking value appeared in the marketing literature 30 years ago, at the height of the postmodern wave. In this text, we show that to reinvigorate this concept, it is necessary to break with its tribal roots. The tribal anchoring, which was the strength of its initial theorization because it attracted researchers, is now a drawback because it limits the potential applications of the concept of linking value at a time when the social world is undergoing fundamental change. Our aim is to reopen the black box of linking value that marketing researchers have kept closed during the last few decades.","PeriodicalId":48020,"journal":{"name":"Marketing Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140148685","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Marketing TheoryPub Date : 2024-02-06DOI: 10.1177/14705931241230047
M. Molesworth, G. Grigore, Georgios Patsiaouras, Mona Moufahim
{"title":"Bullshit consumption: What lockdowns tell us about work-and-spend lives and care-full alternatives","authors":"M. Molesworth, G. Grigore, Georgios Patsiaouras, Mona Moufahim","doi":"10.1177/14705931241230047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14705931241230047","url":null,"abstract":"COVID-19 disrupted ‘non-essential’ work and consumption, providing an unparalleled opportunity to examine work-and-spend culture, which we do via 44 in-depth interviews that capture experiences and reflections during UK lockdowns. Deploying Graeber’s conceptualisation of ‘bullshit jobs’ and related critiques of consumption, we first consider the possibility that contemporary work-and-spend lifestyles may deny the normative separation of work as worthy toil and consumption as its pleasurable opposite. Within such experience, and in addition to Graeber’s bullshit jobs, we find a parallel in bullshit consumption at work, in order to work, and because of work. Yet our findings also highlight that when freed from bullshit, participants engage in more caring practices for the self, others, and their possessions. We propose that much of our work-and-spend lives might be bullshit: routines that promise status, virtue, freedom, and pleasure, but feel meaningless, while displacing satisfying experiences of care. We conclude that a focus on subtractive logics – cutting the bullshit! – can activate both new critiques and optimism about societal arrangements.","PeriodicalId":48020,"journal":{"name":"Marketing Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139858436","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Marketing TheoryPub Date : 2024-02-06DOI: 10.1177/14705931241230047
M. Molesworth, G. Grigore, Georgios Patsiaouras, Mona Moufahim
{"title":"Bullshit consumption: What lockdowns tell us about work-and-spend lives and care-full alternatives","authors":"M. Molesworth, G. Grigore, Georgios Patsiaouras, Mona Moufahim","doi":"10.1177/14705931241230047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14705931241230047","url":null,"abstract":"COVID-19 disrupted ‘non-essential’ work and consumption, providing an unparalleled opportunity to examine work-and-spend culture, which we do via 44 in-depth interviews that capture experiences and reflections during UK lockdowns. Deploying Graeber’s conceptualisation of ‘bullshit jobs’ and related critiques of consumption, we first consider the possibility that contemporary work-and-spend lifestyles may deny the normative separation of work as worthy toil and consumption as its pleasurable opposite. Within such experience, and in addition to Graeber’s bullshit jobs, we find a parallel in bullshit consumption at work, in order to work, and because of work. Yet our findings also highlight that when freed from bullshit, participants engage in more caring practices for the self, others, and their possessions. We propose that much of our work-and-spend lives might be bullshit: routines that promise status, virtue, freedom, and pleasure, but feel meaningless, while displacing satisfying experiences of care. We conclude that a focus on subtractive logics – cutting the bullshit! – can activate both new critiques and optimism about societal arrangements.","PeriodicalId":48020,"journal":{"name":"Marketing Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139798711","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Marketing TheoryPub Date : 2024-01-29DOI: 10.1177/14705931241230041
Chinedu James Obiegbu, Gretchen Larsen
{"title":"Algorithmic personalization and brand loyalty: An experiential perspective","authors":"Chinedu James Obiegbu, Gretchen Larsen","doi":"10.1177/14705931241230041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14705931241230041","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the relationship between algorithmic personalization and brand loyalty by examining how personalization experiences are articulated within the context of music streaming consumption. Despite previous acknowledgement of the link between personalization and brand loyalty, an experientially grounded understanding of how this works has yet to be articulated. Building upon the concept of ‘experiential brand loyalty’, the Algorithmic Personalization/Depersonalization Loop highlights the development of brand loyalty through consumers’ interactions with algorithm-backed brands. Being seen and understood by the algorithm sets off an iterative, two-way learning relationship that ultimately heightens the consumers’ experience, activates positive emotions, and deepens the relational bond with the brand, leading to brand loyalty. If, however, the algorithm is unsuccessful in personalizing the service experience, a ‘depersonalization’ process can occur that erodes brand loyalty and can lead to brand switching or even consumer activism.","PeriodicalId":48020,"journal":{"name":"Marketing Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139952335","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Marketing TheoryPub Date : 2024-01-23DOI: 10.1177/14705931241230046
Konstantinos Poulis, Ioannis Christodoulou
{"title":"Justificative conformity in ontologically ring-fenced fields: Problematizing the scholarly nomenclature in qualitative studies","authors":"Konstantinos Poulis, Ioannis Christodoulou","doi":"10.1177/14705931241230046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14705931241230046","url":null,"abstract":"Ontology is implicitly or explicitly the impetus of any study. However, what are the implications of a scholarly field whose prevailing ontological assumptions and resultant epistemological commitments impede more nuanced theorizing? In this paper, we caution against theorizing norms in fields characterized by a non-diverse and non-inclusive set of ontological assumptions. We contend that editorial practices therein create a certain kind of methodological conformity and conduct, that is, an undue justification and explanatory overtones related to methods that are set against the predominant grain. Through a thematic review of qualitative papers in international marketing as a case in point, we argue against narrow onto-epistemological arsenals, we discuss the value of critical theorizing and put forward two modest proposals to address this kind of scholarly conformity in the future.","PeriodicalId":48020,"journal":{"name":"Marketing Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139603802","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Marketing TheoryPub Date : 2024-01-17DOI: 10.1177/14705931231226121
Zeeshan Rafiq, Susan Dunnett
{"title":"The inter-generational construction of religious in/authenticity in the rituals of British Pakistani Muslims","authors":"Zeeshan Rafiq, Susan Dunnett","doi":"10.1177/14705931231226121","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14705931231226121","url":null,"abstract":"This paper explores the phenomenon of rituals as a contested intersection of religion and ethnicity and demonstrates how changes in religio-ethnic inclinations of various generations of immigrant communities influence the religious authenticity/inauthenticity of rituals. Its focus is the British Pakistani Muslim community in the UK where the emerging second and subsequent generations of British Muslims have started to redefine and contest their religious and ethnic identities. The findings, derived through interview and observation, reveal that religion has become the preeminent marker of identity, eclipsing that of ethnic identity. Through reciprocal socialization, the first generation are relearning an Islam from younger generations that is unfettered by cultural bonds. We illustrate how and why rituals are deemed inauthentic and abandoned. Findings demonstrate that authenticity/inauthenticity provides a potential outlet for reflexive consumers to assert agency against ethnic norms and ideological hailings that are at odds with their emergent religious identities. Accordingly, the study conceptualizes emergent inauthenticity to explain this phenomenon and delineates the role of boundary work and contamination in the authentication and rejection of rituals.","PeriodicalId":48020,"journal":{"name":"Marketing Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139616106","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The platformization of consumer culture: A theoretical framework","authors":"Alessandro Caliandro, Alessandro Gandini, Lucia Bainotti, Guido Anselmi","doi":"10.1177/14705931231225537","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14705931231225537","url":null,"abstract":"This special issue, together with this position paper that accompanies it, aims at providing a comprehensive framework to address this issue, introducing and theorizing the concept of platformization of consumer culture. The overarching scope of this essay is to discuss what is distinctive of the process of platformization in relation to consumer culture (and research); what are its most important aspects, its critical controversies, its innovative dimensions and main risks. Accompanying this positional essay are the seven exceptional contributions that compose the special issue, which we believe will come to represent a pivotal reference in the quest to address this phenomenon. These showcase the manifold empirical, semantic and methodological dimensions of this emergent phenomenon, concurring to define the key dimensions that identify, describe, and explore the ways in which consumer culture has been “platformized,” from the perspective of consumer culture theory. Specifically, we identify four key “tensions” characterizing the platformization of consumer culture: datafication vs liquification; standardization vs ephemerality; interaction vs mediation; immateriality vs materiality.","PeriodicalId":48020,"journal":{"name":"Marketing Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139442352","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}