Marketing TheoryPub Date : 2023-09-11DOI: 10.1177/14705931231202435
Lucia Bainotti
{"title":"How conspicuousness becomes productive on social media","authors":"Lucia Bainotti","doi":"10.1177/14705931231202435","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14705931231202435","url":null,"abstract":"Increasing attention has been paid to social media influencers and their self-branding strategies; yet, a perspective that specifically focuses on such practices in terms of social status has still to be fully developed. This paper analyses how Instagram micro-influencers use self-branding practices as ways to construct and display social status and, secondly, contributes to shed light on the contemporary changes in status gaining and signalling. Moving from Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption, I contend that conspicuousness represents the main cultural logic underpinning micro-influencers’ practises, and it's characterised by a productive display of consumption. Departing from Veblen’s theorisation, the display is not an expression of wastefulness, but a productive element in the construction of social status. Employing a methodological approach comprising digital methods and qualitative interviews, the research shows how the logic of conspicuousness unfolds and becomes productive through consumption practices characterised by accumulation, access, and circularity. Furthermore, the results highlight how micro-influencers follow the logic of conspicuousness to construct social status by seeking exclusivity or negotiating belongingness.","PeriodicalId":48020,"journal":{"name":"Marketing Theory","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135981909","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 : 2023-09-11DOI: 10.1177/14705931231202359
Domen Bajde, Maja Golf-Papez, Tomaž Kolar, Barbara Culiberg
{"title":"The multiple logics of market-based governance: How the sharing economy platform Airbnb governs user conduct","authors":"Domen Bajde, Maja Golf-Papez, Tomaž Kolar, Barbara Culiberg","doi":"10.1177/14705931231202359","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14705931231202359","url":null,"abstract":"Building upon the rich tradition of research on governmentality, this paper introduces the notion of market-based governance (i.e. the coordinated efforts of companies to align the conduct of its constituents with the institutional norms, values and interests of the company), and presents an empirical investigation of market-based governance in the context of a sharing economy platform, Airbnb. Whereas existing governmentality research has focused on specific discourses or aspects of governance in the marketplace, our aim is to develop broader-spectrum conceptual tools for ‘ordering’ the increasingly multifaceted forms of marked-based governance. We show that Airbnb mobilizes three distinct logics of governance (i.e. the regulatory, competitive and communitarian) which subsume diverse modes of power (i.e. the sovereign, disciplinary and pastoral) that contribute to the cultivation of governable subjects (i.e. the compliant subject, entrepreneurial subject and community member). The theoretical framework developed in this work is applied to critically reflect on emergent forms of market-based governance, the dilemmas of multi-logic governance and the uneven geographies of market-based governance.","PeriodicalId":48020,"journal":{"name":"Marketing Theory","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136024244","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 : 2023-09-08DOI: 10.1177/14705931231201780
Lydia Ottlewski, Joonas Rokka, John W. Schouten
{"title":"How consumer-initiated platforms shape family and consumption","authors":"Lydia Ottlewski, Joonas Rokka, John W. Schouten","doi":"10.1177/14705931231201780","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14705931231201780","url":null,"abstract":"Research has recently highlighted processes of platformization through which consumer activities are shaped by socio-technical features of digital environments. Prior theorizations have focused on corporate-initiated platform dynamics and affordances, emphasizing either the managerial facets of platformization or how consumers use and interact with these platforms. Our interpretive research on Familyship.org offers a contrasting case and theorizes how ordinary consumers, thwarted by social and legal constraints in their desires to create families, leverage platformization for family creation and consumption. Our findings conceptualize consumer-initiated platforms and show how their key affordances— embeddedness, privacy, modularization, and scaling—shape one of the most sacred spheres of life, the institution of family. Our study contributes by theorizing how consumer-initiated platform affordances differ from dominant corporate-initiated ones and why the differences matter. We discuss how they can help consumers to find solutions to acute consumption problems and to reimagine dominant cultural institutions.","PeriodicalId":48020,"journal":{"name":"Marketing Theory","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136298205","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 : 2023-09-08DOI: 10.1177/14705931231201017
Hilary Downey, John F Sherry
{"title":"Art and emplacement in Northern Ireland","authors":"Hilary Downey, John F Sherry","doi":"10.1177/14705931231201017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14705931231201017","url":null,"abstract":"We explore the relationship between placeways and public art in the case of ephemeral architecture entitled “Temple,” installed in Northern Ireland in 2015. Synthesizing our own published ethnographies of the event, we employ a method we call auto-meta-ethnography to discover a grounded theory of emplacement that synergizes prior work undertaken on the concept of -scapes. We emphasize conjuncture over disjuncture and probe the isomorphism of cultural flows. We examine the imbrication of the installation in a cluster of -scapes we label landscape, mythscape, brandscape, giftscape, griefscape, artscape, and Templescape, together which comprise a chorography of the Temple’s emplacement. These micrometaphors provide more precision and nuance to existing macrometaphors, illuminate the intimate intermingling of -scapes, and illustrate the synergy their propinquity occasions.","PeriodicalId":48020,"journal":{"name":"Marketing Theory","volume":"70 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136362323","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 : 2023-09-08DOI: 10.1177/14705931231202434
Samuelson Appau, Ye (Nicole) Yang
{"title":"Church advertising and the marketization of religious hegemony","authors":"Samuelson Appau, Ye (Nicole) Yang","doi":"10.1177/14705931231202434","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14705931231202434","url":null,"abstract":"This paper contributes to the research on the symbiotic relationship between religion and the market by examining the nature and implications of the marketization of religion in a contemporary Christendom in which religion and the market are hegemonic. Based on our analysis of 3741 church advertisements in Ghana over a 6-year period, we conceptualize three symbiotic relationships that coexist between the market and religion—commensalism, mutualism, and competition. We argue that these symbiotic relationships mirror how religion hegemonizes popular imagination and members’ consumption through marketization in contemporary Christendom. This study extends our understanding of the dialectical relationship between religion and the market by showing that religion can use marketization to perpetuate its hegemony within and beyond the market.","PeriodicalId":48020,"journal":{"name":"Marketing Theory","volume":"122 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136298473","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 : 2023-09-07DOI: 10.1177/14705931231202360
Ross Gordon, Theresa Harada, Gordon Waitt, L. Gurrieri
{"title":"Reconceptualising risky and harmful consumption through molar and molecular lines: Mobile smartphone sports betting arrangements","authors":"Ross Gordon, Theresa Harada, Gordon Waitt, L. Gurrieri","doi":"10.1177/14705931231202360","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14705931231202360","url":null,"abstract":"This paper seeks to extend existing conceptualisations of risky and harmful consumption. Our work draws on a qualitative, rhizomatic study of Australian consumers’ sports betting practices. We utilise Deleuze and Guattari’s related concepts of molar and molecular lines and lines of flight to draw attention to sports betting’s mutually affecting discursive, socio-material and emotional intensities. We examine the ongoing tensions between how people understand themselves as gamblers, the social normalisation of gambling and the parameters of risky betting behaviour. We argue that conceiving gambling consumption through molar and molecular lines challenges the binaries inherent in current framings of risky and harmful consumption. We also consider the possibilities for lines of flight and implications for gambling harm.","PeriodicalId":48020,"journal":{"name":"Marketing Theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47153085","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 : 2023-09-06DOI: 10.1177/14705931231201779
J. Schöps, Sarah Schwarz, Veronika Rojkowski
{"title":"Memetic logics of participation: Fitness body culture on Instagram","authors":"J. Schöps, Sarah Schwarz, Veronika Rojkowski","doi":"10.1177/14705931231201779","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14705931231201779","url":null,"abstract":"This study examines participatory logics as a process of the platformization of culture in the context of fitness body culture on Instagram. Building upon meme theory and applying a networked content analysis of #fitness, we highlight the memetic logics of participation that manifest in and derive from an interplay between consumers and affordances. Our findings, first, detail how content exhibiting common characteristics forms contextual memes that make up the platform's meme complex of fitness body culture. We, second, outline how the memetic logics of participation interconnect, cross-reference, and reinforce a standardized and platformized consumer culture. This study ultimately points to a networked public in which consumers follow both context-specific and platform-afforded—memetic—logics of participation in cultural production.","PeriodicalId":48020,"journal":{"name":"Marketing Theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46126315","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 : 2023-08-30DOI: 10.1177/14705931231199962
Handan Vicdan, Emre Ulusoy, Jack S. Tillotson, Soonkwan Hong, A. Ekici, Laetitia Mimoun
{"title":"Food prosumption technologies: A symbiotic lens for a degrowth transition","authors":"Handan Vicdan, Emre Ulusoy, Jack S. Tillotson, Soonkwan Hong, A. Ekici, Laetitia Mimoun","doi":"10.1177/14705931231199962","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14705931231199962","url":null,"abstract":"Prosumption is gaining momentum among the critical accounts of sustainable consumption that have thus far enriched the marketing discourse. Attention to prosumption is increasing whilst the degrowth movement is emerging to tackle the contradictions inherent in growth-driven, technology-fueled, and capitalist modes of sustainable production and consumption. In response to dominant critical voices that portray technology as counter to degrowth living, we propose an alternative symbiotic lens with which to reconsider the relations between technology, prosumption, and degrowth living, and assess how a degrowth transition in the context of food can be carried out at the intersection of human–nature–technology. We contribute to the critical debates on prosumption in marketing by analyzing the potentials and limits of technology-enabled food prosumption for a degrowth transition through the degrowth principles of conviviality and appropriateness. Finally, we consider the sociopolitical challenges involved in mobilizing such technologies to achieve symbiosis and propose a future research agenda.","PeriodicalId":48020,"journal":{"name":"Marketing Theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48712044","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 : 2023-08-29DOI: 10.1177/14705931231199386
Chih-Chieh Liu
{"title":"The even darker side of gift-giving: Understanding sustained exploitation in family consumption system","authors":"Chih-Chieh Liu","doi":"10.1177/14705931231199386","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14705931231199386","url":null,"abstract":"Extant literature on the dark side of gift-giving has predominantly focused on the dark side of generalised or balanced reciprocity, and not on negative reciprocity or unequal exchange of goods and services for personal gains. However, by emphasising the negativities around generalised or balanced reciprocity, understandings of an exploitative relationship are limited. Drawing on textual data from various online sources on the topic of ‘son preference’, this article explores the dark side of gift-giving in terms of unequal exchange and how it can generate a vicious cycle of affective and social destructions in the lived experience of the exploited giver. Crucially, I illuminate how certain aspects of pre-exchange socialisation, gift-receipt disqualification, and gift-giving indebtedness unfold in the service of perpetuating a range of subject positions that foster sustained exploitation within the family consumption system.","PeriodicalId":48020,"journal":{"name":"Marketing Theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46702271","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}