Showing papers in "Journal of Consumer Culture in 2023"
TL;DR: In this article , the authors analyze aspects of fan labor and value creation, self-organization and entrepreneurship, agency and exploitation in an online discussion forum about the American singer Britney Spears in Brazil.
Abstract: The key argument of this article is that fan communities create, in their own way, a kind of prosumer media activism. Through a netnographic approach, I analyze aspects of fan labor and value creation, self-organization and entrepreneurship, agency and exploitation in an online discussion forum about the American singer Britney Spears in Brazil. Based on this case study on social networking, I develop the argument that it is possible to see digital fandom as a stage for a commodified cyberactivism, in which some social actors in the role of prosumers, on the one hand, exercise their freedom and find, more than gratification, ways to project themselves individually in society. But, on the other hand, they are subject to exploitative relationships, such as unpaid work, to promote the personality whose concrete relationship with their lives often does not go beyond media practices.
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TL;DR: In this article , a two-dimensional system defined by tastes for the culturally exclusive and the economically exclusive in Germany is analyzed, which are strongly associated with indicators of cultural capital and economic capital and reveal differences by both capital volume and capital composition.
Abstract: This paper charts the space of lifestyles in Germany in order to assess whether its structure resembles that famously uncovered in France by Bourdieu. Mobilising multiple correspondence analysis and using data from a bespoke national survey of tastes and lifestyles fielded in 2017–18 ( n = 2244), it unveils a two-dimensional system defined by tastes for the culturally exclusive and the economically exclusive. These dimensions are strongly associated with indicators of cultural capital and economic capital, and reveal differences by both capital volume and capital composition, but they are also structured by age and ethnic origin. While age is indicative of Bourdieu’s concept of trajectory, the effects of ethnicity underscore the relative autonomy of the space of lifestyles and suggest its determination by more than one structural force.
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TL;DR: This article examined how the deviant leisure perspective plays a role in explaining encounters of violence across British University Campuses within which a university campus in the Midlands Region will be applied as case study.
Abstract: This paper examines how the deviant leisure perspective plays a role in explaining encounters of violence across British University Campuses within which a university campus in the Midlands Region will be applied as case study. The deviant leisure framework will be broken down into its ultra-realist, cultural criminological, and zemiological underpinnings, through which violence will be contextualised under the backdrop of neoliberal capitalism. Through primary-based qualitative semi-structured interviews and surveys, two key arguments are made. Firstly, British university campuses are brand-driven spaces whereby under neoliberal capitalism, success is predicated upon excessive acts of consumption, that are capable of transcending into expressive and acquisitive modes of violence to achieve ‘success’. Secondly, consumer holidays are precipitators of violence rather than dark nights. It is argued that whilst dark nights serve as a catalyst for violence, it is instead the surge of consumer holidays including the Black Friday Sales and Christmas that drives violence. This research offers a fresh approach to understanding the correlation between violence and consumer culture. Forward-thinking, it is urged that the harmful subjectivities that are cultivated under liberal capitalism are considered when contesting violence within education settings for future practice.
TL;DR: In this article , Magaudda's circuit of practice theory is extended to grasp the multifaceted circuits of music in the digital age, which requires that the occurrence of a single audio format such as the cassette is recurringly analysed within different cultural contexts in order to map and delineate the format's overall significance for contemporary music practices.
Abstract: Despite its status as an analogue sound carrier, the cassette has shown remarkable resilience in the digital era. Drawing on qualitative data gathered in three significant markets for cassettes, Japan, Australia and the USA, during 2018 and 2019, this article explores how the cassette tape’s material significance in the 21st century manifests itself in a complex network of interrelated local, translocal and virtual practices of music creation, distribution and consumption. The article draws on Magaudda’s ‘circuit of practice’ concept and Peterson and Bennett’s three tier model of scenes (local, trans-local and virtual). Taking the cassette’s hybrid occurrence and usage throughout a plethora of highly distinctive music scenes in Japan, Australia and the United States as a basis, we argue that Magaudda’s ‘circuit of practice’ theory needs to be structurally extended to grasp the multifaceted circuits of music in the digital age. This requires that the occurrence of a single audio format such as the cassette is recurringly analysed within different cultural contexts in order to map and delineate the format’s overall significance for contemporary music practices.
TL;DR: In this article , the authors investigate the logic underlying household food consumption in Portugal and how it relates to class positioning, like other expressions of culture, using an approach inspired by the analysis pioneered by Bourdieu on Distinction and recently taken up by several streams of research.
Abstract: In this article, I investigate the logic underlying household food consumption in Portugal and how it relates to class positioning, like other expressions of culture. Therefore, the paper examines the Bourdieusian hypothesis of homology between the field of food and the configuration of social positions in Portuguese society against the hypotheses that emphasise homogenisation and individualisation of consumption patterns. I start by remapping the Portuguese social space, using an approach inspired by the analysis pioneered by Bourdieu on Distinction and recently taken up by several streams of research. Drawing on the national Household Budget Survey, I then develop a Correspondence Analysis of expenditure on a wide range of foodstuffs. The analysis is supplemented by data from the Second Large Survey on Sustainability in Portugal, seeking to examine patterns in ethical dispositions concerning food and drink in contemporary Portugal and their homology with class. Concluding on a degree of similarity between the space of food consumption and the space of social positions engendered by differences in the overall volume and composition of capital, I close with reflections on the methodological challenges of this approach and on the broader significance of these results for our understanding of consumption in Portugal.
TL;DR: This article investigated the UKIP Breaking Point advertisement, which appeared prominently during the Brexit referendum campaign and used a documentary photograph of Syrian refugees, implying that they were migrating to Britain, and charted news of the journey of a group of refugees, but becoming appropriated as an advertising image and ultimately an expression of political notoriety.
Abstract: This paper investigates the UKIP Breaking Point advertisement, which appeared prominently during the Brexit referendum campaign and used a documentary photograph of Syrian refugees, implying that they were migrating to Britain. We chart the assemblage through which the transformation of the image occurred: starting as Jeffrey Mitchell’s documentary photograph, charting news of the journey of a group of refugees, but becoming appropriated as an advertising image and ultimately an expression of political notoriety. The controversy generated by the advertisement serves as an example of advertising's meaning becoming a source of unpredictable contestation as different interests clash to define the image’s ‘real’ meaning. Rather than take advertising as a managed process, with meaning directly encoded and carefully crafted by producers, a cultural politics of advertising perceives advertisements as comprised of raw material whose meanings are ambiguous, negotiable and politically charged. Through this lens, advertising images are contextualized by a process of production and consumption, partly shaped by the producers of the advertisement, but also largely mediated by responses of the wider public, creative fields from where the original image was produced, and by unforeseen factors, such as when texts become overtaken by events and appropriated by intermediaries. Breaking Point, in other words, presents a perfect example to illustrate that advertising is not merely a passive channel that represents but is instead an assemblage able to shape engagement and (coercively) infer meanings and draw distorted patterns from different social worlds.
TL;DR: The authors examines the representation of sustainability on the online lifestyle site Goop as a case study of how promotional media deal with environmental and social concerns, and presents how promotional intermediaries address or conceal a tension between the promotion of conspicuous consumption and the advocacy of sustainable living.
Abstract: This article examines the representation of sustainability on the online lifestyle site Goop as a case study of how promotional media deal with environmental and social concerns. Specifically, the paper presents how promotional intermediaries address or conceal a tension between (1) the promotion of conspicuous consumption and (2) the advocacy of sustainable living. The paper contributes to cultural intermediary scholarship by showing how promotional intermediaries attempt to reconcile this tension, advocating consumerism favorable to them while still enhancing critical cultural citizenship. By presenting sustainable brands and environmental advocates, and different—at times, incommensurable—narratives on the relationship between sustainability and consumption, promotional intermediaries signal that sustainability is important while promoting actions that can be considered to contradict the idea of sustainability, such as excessive consumption. In this way they produce a safe space for brands and consumers but arrive at a sustainability paradox.
TL;DR: This paper examined the cultural processes a group of middle-class parents engage in to manage tensions between their classed sense of proper consumer-parenting and their children's consumer interests and desires.
Abstract: This article examines the cultural processes a group of middle-class parents engage in to manage tensions between their classed sense of proper consumer-parenting and their children’s consumer interests and desires. Based on analysis of qualitative data from interviews with parents with young children living in a middle-class neighborhood in Austin, Texas, I highlight the cultural practices through which parents acquiesce to their children’s desires without compromising their own classed consumer norms. Specifically, in this article I highlight the cultural processes through which middle-class parents (1) draw distinctions between spending on objects and spending on experiences, and (2) engage in intra-group “circuits of commerce” through which class actors confer positive shared meanings and moral understandings to otherwise excessive or “bad” consumer spending. Examining the ways in which parents were able to provide many of the “cheap” consumer goods their children desire without compromising their classed consumer norms provides insights into class boundaries in contemporary U.S. society as well as the role of consumerism and consumer culture in the reproduction of class inequalities.
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors examine how men are socialized to the ideal of fighter masculinity in the context of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), a combat sport mixing ground fighting and striking.
Abstract: The current paper examines how men are socialized to the ideal of fighter masculinity in the context of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), a combat sport mixing ground fighting and striking. Such work is timely because the fighter masculinity ideal underlies consumer cultural fascination with MMA, evident in advertising and branding of numerous fight promotions, lifestyle clothing and accessory brands, news and media channels, and fitness gyms. The theoretical focus on fighter masculinity addresses the paucity of research on how consumer identities are socialized. Utilizing long interviews with male amateur practitioners of MMA, the current research elucidates identity socialization as a multi-influence process that unfolds over an extended period in men’s lives. The findings uncover four novel consumer identity socialization processes: awakening, sanctioning, glamorizing, and incorporating, each associated with distinct socialization contexts and influences that enhance the resonance of fighter masculinity. This research also highlights the need to broaden consumer socialization frameworks in line with the post-cognitive notion of cultural enculturation.
TL;DR: In this article , a 3-year ethnographic study at a range of live Professional Darts Corporation (PDC) events across the globe was conducted to explore the nature of prosumption at live sports events.
Abstract: The nature of prosumption is one of the most important areas of debate within the study of contemporary consumer culture. David L. Andrews and George Ritzer highlighted how the majority of literature in the 21st century has focused on the sociology of sport as a form of consumer culture, and that there is a distinct lack of research into the exploration of fan atmospheres in regard to physical prosumption at live sports events as opposed to virtual spaces. We seek to address this through utilising findings from a 3-year ethnographic study at a range of live Professional Darts Corporation (PDC) events across the globe. Our findings extend existing knowledge on prosumer fandom, providing valuable insights for researchers on how sports organisations, when promoting their sporting event, utilise the fans as both producers and consumers to help create fervent atmospheres and market their sport to associated media outlets.
TL;DR: In this article , the authors employ wardrobe study interviews to reconceptualise the clothing consumption, storage and disposal practices of male fashion consumers in Hong Kong and their trans-temporal self-memory-object relationships.
Abstract: Previous research on fashion, clothing and accessorising practices typically stressed either the symbolic and identity-creating or practical and habitual functions of fashion, often neglecting its affective, emotive and mnemonic aspects. Drawing on affective theory and the agency of things, we theorise how the affects, feelings and emotions attached to active and inactive fashion objects evoke and are evoked by the consumer’s ongoing reminiscence, reconciliation, and renewal of memories. Remapping the intricate relationship among consumers, memory, affect, and fashion objects, this article employs wardrobe study interviews to reconceptualise the clothing consumption, storage and disposal practices of male fashion consumers in Hong Kong and their trans-temporal self-memory-object relationships. Interviewing 21 gay male participants while physically going through their wardrobes together reveals the mnemonic abilities of clothes and accessories to bring up the past, their functioning as emotive devices, and the process of how affective, unpatterned feelings and sensations are reminisced, reconciled and renewed through fashion. These unique theoretical and methodological approaches make it possible to delve deeper into consumers’ intimate material and sensual relationships with clothing and accessory items, which are often used to make sense of incongruent memories and future fantasies, also enabling their ongoing mediation of unresolved affective experiences and curation of a linear cultural script of personal development.
TL;DR: In this article , the authors investigate omnivorous consumers' perceptions of artistic experiences characterized by different degrees of co-creation and find that there are differences between the way in which consumers perceive interactive and participatory art and that two distinct dimensions of cultural consumption emerge from different co-creative dynamics.
Abstract: How do omnivorous consumers perceive co-creation in cultural consumption? In this article, we combine observation data on co-created cultural productions, focus groups and field interviews to investigate omnivorous consumers’ perceptions of artistic experiences characterized by different degrees of co-creation. We explored this topic in the context of co-creative theatre, an emergent theatrical genre that provides for the active involvement of omnivorous consumers in the staging of a theatrical performance. Our findings reveal new dimensions of what it means for omnivorous consumers to be culturally open by showing their perceptions of interactive and participatory art, two distinct co-creative artistic experiences. While interactive art encourages consumers to intervene in the artistic experience by following the precise direction of the professional artists on stage, participatory art entails an even more active and autonomous role of consumers in the design of the experience. Our findings indicate that there are differences between the way in which consumers perceive interactive art and participatory art and that two distinct dimensions of cultural consumption – novelty and authenticity – emerge from different co-creative dynamics. The observed co-creation experiences portray the transformation of the omnivorous consumers from spectators or visitors to co-authors of the experience and mark the dissolution of the existing boundaries between production and consumption.
TL;DR: Wang et al. as discussed by the authors investigated how Chinese audiences have consumed and engaged in BBC's Sherlock as a transcultural fan with the help of digital media and found that Chinese fans have created a female-dominated fandom that updated the gendered fandom by enriching paratexts of Boys' Love (BL) whilst China's censorship has largely constrained fans' homosexual productivity.
Abstract: This study aims to understand how Chinese audiences have consumed and engaged in BBC’s Sherlock as a transcultural fan with the help of digital media. Drawing on the transcultural and gendered fan studies and 36 qualitative interviews, this article interrogates Chinese Sherlock fandom within the hybridised transcultural flow of texts and identity. The key argument is that Chinese Sherlock fans have created a female-dominated fandom that updates the gendered fandom by enriching paratexts of Boys’ Love (BL) whilst China’s censorship has largely constrained fans’ homosexual productivity. On the one hand, the wide application of digital media technologies largely helps Chinese fans to access Sherlock transnationally and contribute to the global Sherlock fandom; on the other, the censoring mediascape in China has restricted fan prosumption, as erotic/homosexual fan work is not regarded as a canonical culture. This study thereby concludes, although Chinese Sherlock fans have been cultivated to circumvent the media censoring mechanism and produce fantexts outside China that features resistance power and fan intelligence, the compromised fan culture is understood as incomplete rebellion because Chinese fans have made concessions and the alternative choices are tacit by the national power itself.
TL;DR: In this article, a content analysis of American egg donor profiles is performed based on Baudrillardian theory to analyze the marketing strategy and show how egg donors are perfectionized using cultural notions of hegemonic femininity, in order to attract egg consumers by tacitly encouraging them to create an imagined hyperreal ideal self.
Abstract: Donor eggs have become commercialized and egg agencies mediate between egg consumers and donors. Despite the rapid growth of this industry, there is a paucity of research focusing on the imaginary aspects of the marketing strategies employed in the egg donation commerce. This article is based on a content analysis of American egg donor profiles. Inspired by Baudrillardian theory, I analyze the marketing strategy and show how egg donors are perfectionized using cultural notions of hegemonic femininity, in order to attract egg consumers by tacitly encouraging them to create an imagined hyperreal ideal self. This marketing strategy aims to de-commodify genetic substance in order to facilitate the exploitation of consumers’ self-concept for business goals. The identity of the donor is imbued with greater meaning for consumers than merely her genetic material, hence offers possibilities for the imaginary actualization of consumers’ ideal selves. Consumers are invited to exercise their agency and form a simulacrum of their desired self and materialize their utmost psychological identity aspirations.
TL;DR: In this article , the symbolic image of organic consumption is configured in light of the significant and emotional relationships that it establishes with health in order to advance knowledge about the motivational process in this type of consumption.
Abstract: Social research on organic consumption has increased in recent decades, partly due to its growing demand in central economies. Different studies have agreed to point out that health is one of the most relevant factors that help explain organic consumption. However, a substantial part of these studies are quantitative and fail to clearly establish the role played by health as a motivational element for organic consumption. This paper proposes an analysis of how the symbolic image of organic consumption is configured in light of the significant and emotional relationships that it establishes with health in order to advance knowledge about the motivational process in this type of consumption. We propose an articulation between a sociological and psychoanalytic approach that allows us to interpret how certain non-conscious fantasies and certain emotional states mediate the relationships with which consumers orient their experiences in their daily socio-cultural reality. The empirical analyses of the work have consisted of conducting focus groups and interviews with organic consumers who meet the majority profile in the Catalan market. The results reveal a Manichaean discourse on health and food reality where the organic acquires a defensive and reactive sense linked to the protection and stimulation of personal health. However, it is a discourse that does not manage to get out of the paradox of food modernity: the greater the insistence on risk, the more the fantasy of total protection is fed.
TL;DR: In this article , the authors make the case for the ongoing resignification of credit and debt and the evolving moral assessments of indebtedness, focusing on moderate and low-income households, namely those who embrace credit during recent decades.
Abstract: Credit is ubiquitous in the life of Chilean households, the oldest neoliberal society. It is a key feature in the budgeting, shopping, and consuming practices of families. Consequently, to be indebted is a normal expectation in Chile. Families engage with the ‘necessary evil’ of credit in different ways, representing a massive, regular use of credit as short, medium and long-term leverage tools, with store cards being the main source of credit for lower and moderate income families in general. Moral obligations together with conventional and unconventional financial knowledge accompany the everyday situated economic practices of families. Addressing both the normalisation and the moralisation of credit, I attempt to make the case for the ongoing resignification of credit and debt and the evolving moral assessments of indebtedness, focusing on moderate and low-income households, namely those who embrace credit during recent decades. This article contributes to the discussion about the meaning of debt, to understand the financialisation of everyday life by looking at situated economic practices, and to recognise the social, moral and relational foundations of the economic practices. From the coming of the expansion of credit, households have learnt to deal with economic rationalities and internal and external moral judgements in order to justify their use of credit. Together with structural factors, this develops indebtedness assessments from detachment to naturalisation, placing credit and debt in the centre of ‘decent life’ expectations.
TL;DR: In the becoming of neoliberal cities, consumption can play an important role in the process of marking who is human, that is, fit for consumption, and who is not as discussed by the authors .
Abstract: In the becoming of neoliberal cities, consumption can play an important role in the process of marking who is human, that is, fit for consumption, and who is not. This paper explores such processes as affective becomings and focuses on the workings of comfort and discomfort to highlight how some bodies are delegitimized in order for others to become legitimatized. Using an ethnographic approach with affective methodologies, I trace the process of erasing activism collectives that were resisting gentrification in São Paulo and advocating the ‘right to the city’. The contribution of this paper is threefold. Firstly, it highlights how the becoming of the neoliberal city follows a neoliberal normativity in tandem with a colonial one. By exploring how spaces, bodies, and norms are always related to one another in this process, I highlight how ‘the consumer’ has become the body who counts (i.e. the human). Secondly, this paper shows how activism work refracts the dynamics of the neoliberal-colonial normativity, as it (re)acts to its mechanisms for sorting out bodies. Thirdly, this paper highlights the political dimensions of (dis)comfort that mark the splitting of legitimate and illegitimatebodies in a social reproduction for consumption. Consequently, it explores how discomfort has been used as a political-affective tool of delegitimization, subjugation, and oppression.
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors use fashion as a strategic case of a cultural field with strong material underpinnings, and demonstrate how transparency apps bring politics to cultural fields, upsetting usual logics in the process, carrying implications for any cultural field that faces demands for supply chain transparency.
Abstract: As the climate crisis accelerates, consumers, lawmakers, and activists demand transparent supply chains in industries that form the material backbone of cultural fields such as fashion. Consequently, new apps have emerged that promise to make supply chains transparent by translating opaque production data into easily comprehensible product ratings. Integrating the literature on transparency, cultural intermediaries, and digital consumption apps, this article asks: how do these apps, which I call transparency apps, afford politics in cultural fields and new political ways of consumption? Using fashion as a strategic case of a cultural field with strong material underpinnings, this paper combines a walkthrough analysis of Good On You, Retraced, and Renoon with interviews of employees of the first two. I found these apps to afford a politics of transparency consist of eco-progressive values embedded in ideologies of consumer rights and self-optimization, which elevates the technical-material logic of fashion at the cost of its aesthetic logic. This politics is usually offered in a personalized form resembling platformized cultural production. Transparency apps are thus politicizing cultural intermediaries that simultaneously enable and limit the political contestation of fashion. This article demonstrates how transparency apps bring politics to cultural fields, upsetting usual logics in the process, carrying implications for any cultural field that faces demands for supply chain transparency.