High-fidelity consumption and the claustropolitan structure of feeling

This paper invokes Redhead’s concept of claustropolitanism to critically explore the affective reality for consumers in today’s digital age. In the context of surveillance capitalism, we argue that consumer subjectivity revolves around the experience of fidelity rather than agency. Instead of experiencing genuine autonomy in their digital lives, consumers are confronted with a sense of confinement that reflects their tacit conformity to the behavioural predictions of surveillant market actors. By exploring how that confinement is lived and felt, we theorise the collective affects that constitute a claustropolitan structure of feeling: incompletion, saturation and alienation. These affective contours trace an oppressive atmosphere that infuses consumers’ lives as they attempt to seek fulfilment through digital market-located behaviours that are largely anticipated and coordinated by surveillant actors. Rather than motivate resistance, these affects ironically work to perpetuate consumers’ commitment to the digital world and their ongoing participation in the surveillant marketplace. Our theorisation continues the critical project of re-assessing the consumer subject by showing how subjectivity is produced at the point of intersection between ideological imperatives and affective consequences.

‘Which part of the day is (wo)man o’clock?’: Desires, urges and possibilities of (un)becoming

Drawing on Butler’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s theorising of (un)becoming, we study how male to female crossdressers enact the many fantasies of the crossdresser persona through gendered market objects and rituals to undo gender norms in a body that is at times considered ‘lawful’ and at others ‘unlawful’. We highlight how fantasies participate in the processes of unbecoming and becoming to disrupt the existing gendered boundaries/subjectivities and create new possibilities of being. The market objects, including the mundane and the excess, are operating in the becoming/unbecoming, facilitating temporal gender transformations, while at the same time creating identity residues that persist between the many gendered bodily experiences (male, female or hybrid) permeating time and space. In particular, we highlight how these identity residues can be experienced as pleasurable or risky if not managed carefully, contributing to an enhanced understanding of the affective state of in-between gender and how it intersects with gendered market objects and rituals.

Market legitimation in countercultural market change

Drawing on concepts of institutional work, legitimacy, and institutional logics, we investigate why countercultural markets experience institutional change and the actions institutional work market actors perform to inform institutional logics and ensure the legitimacy of countercultural markets. Although previous research suggests market changes and disruption, little attention has been paid to markets that originate from different institutional backgrounds, changes in the market experience in relation to its legitimization, and institutional work to attain legitimacy. The case of indie music in South Korea illustrates the evolution of a cultural market from the introduction of its ethos, the crisis caused by legitimacy pressures, and the transformation of the market. Using data gathered through in-depth interviews with indie labels and music consumers in South Korea, and archival sources, our research illuminates the source of market struggle and theorizes approaches that market actors perform to overcome the struggle.

Interesting numbers: An ethnographic account of quantification, marketing analytics and facial coding data

This article asks why facial coding, a method for understanding emotions that was rejected by mainstream psychology for over century, has emerged as a popular method in contemporary marketing. Reading ethnographic, historic and technical data sets, the article argues that facial coding works because it shifts the task of quantification from humans to computers. This grants facial coding an appearance of objectivity that allows marketing practitioners to open up new ways of understanding, talking about and acting in markets that go beyond the data itself. Informed by science and technology studies, the article offers the concept of interesting numbers to illuminate these contradictory tendencies in the quantification of consumer behaviours. It alerts us to the importance of the agents and forms of quantification in selling a measure to marketers. In short, the article shows that, when it comes to marketing measures, the numbers count.

‘He’s got the touch’: Tracing the masculine regulation of the body schema in reciprocal relations between ‘self-others-things’

The purpose of this article is to examine the interconnections between embodiment and masculinity. Departing from the predominant discursive view of masculinity, I explain how a phenomenological, post-dualistic approach, inspired by Merleau-Ponty and Butler, can be mobilized to conceptualize masculinity as an embodied, performative accomplishment that reverberates around socio-material relations. Towards this end, this article traces the masculine regulation of the body schema as it develops in reciprocal relations between ‘self-others-things’. Drawing from reflexive field notes and participant interviews, gathered over a 5-year period of observant participation with male motorcycle repairers, the article shows machinic masculinity as an embodied emplacement that is constituted by socio-material entanglements and performative enactments. In so doing, the article conceptually reframes how masculinity and embodiment are understood in Consumer Culture Theory (CCT).

Why do crowds cause trouble? Exploring affective instability in collectivity

Through our ethnographic study of urban activism collectives in São 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.

How advertising got ‘woke’: The institutional role of advertising in the emergence of gender progressive market logics and practices

The use of gender stereotypes has long been a common creative strategy used by practitioners in advertising portrayals, leading to concern over the individual and societal effects of such representations of women. However, a recent decline in this institutionalized practice has provided the stimulus for our research. As such, we explore the influences that have led to meso-level market actors working in advertising and marketing actively avoiding the use of gender stereotypes of women in advertising depictions. We consider the role of advertising in a dynamic market system and the influences upon advertising practitioners leading to the emergence of gender progressive market logics. Linking the experiences of an expert sample of advertising professionals with the extant literature, our study broadens understanding of the central role of advertising in shaping markets. While previous research has examined the impact of advertising on society and cultural meaning, we highlight the recursive nature of this interaction. We find that emergent gender progressive logics have been dependent upon support in public discourses, shifts in professionals’ moral conscience, voiced consumer opinion and the market success of trailblazing, gender progressive advertising campaigns. We advance empirical analysis of market system influences that have led to more socially responsible advertising practices. This study has important implications for understanding advertising’s potential to address institutional problems in society.

Machines driving machines: Deleuze and Guattari’s asignifying unconscious

The psychoanalytic tradition is split. Most marketing theorists work with a linguistic model, treating the unconscious as an extension of conscious language. This article promotes the machinic model of Deleuze and Guattari, which treats the unconscious as asubjective but also asignifying. This means that the unconscious is comprised of colliding forces and their contingent connections, rather than a chain of signification in a wider symbolic structure. There are a small number of machinic or proto-machinic articles in marketing theory, but this article explores how explicating the Deleuzoguattarian model could reconceptualise: (1) the unconscious, (2) its relation to sociomaterial systems, (3) its relation to marketing practice, and (4) the role of critical marketing theory. This article also argues that there is a strategic benefit in searching for complementarities between Deleuze and Guattari, on the one hand, and other psychoanalytic thinkers, on the other. A united front of unconscious understandings would be advantageous in a discipline that lionises conscious choice. As such, this article presents the machinic model as another perspective in the already pluralistic tradition of psychoanalytic marketing theory.

Something old, something new: Enabled theory building in qualitative marketing research

“Enabled theorizing” is a common practice in marketing scholarship. Nevertheless, this practice has recently been criticized for constraining the creation of novel theory. To advance this conversation, we conduct a grounded analysis of papers that feature enabled theorizing with the aim of describing and analyzing how enabled theorizing is practiced. Our analysis suggests that enabled theorizing marries data with analytical tools and ontological perspectives in ways that advance ongoing conversations in marketing theory and practice, as well as informing policy and methods. Based on interviews with marketing and consumer research scholars who practice enabled theorizing, we explain how researchers use enabling theories to shape research projects, how researchers select enabling lenses, and how they negotiate the review process. We discuss the implications of our analyses for theory-building in our field, and we question the notion of originality in relation to theory more generally.

Happiness and co-creation of value: Playing the blues

Little has been written about co-creational aspects of happiness. Happiness is generally treated in the marketing literature as an individual outcome of exchange. However, the notion of value in exchange has been challenged by service-dominant (S-D) logic. To stimulate the research discovery process, an account of co-creation of happiness is offered, based on the experience of the lead author, in playing blues music. We propose value is co-created in a context when it is perceived by an individual to be adding to their happiness/subjective well-being (SWB). Thus, the concepts of value and happiness/SWB are closely linked and interconnected. The contribution to S-D logic is in recognising the interconnectedness between value co-creation and happiness/SWB. In particular, this article draws attention to the co-creative role of the artist, in cultural ecosystems. This is relevant to the development of the field and has potentially significant implications for policy in allocating society’s resources.