Julien Cayla
Biographic Data
| ID | 117290 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Julien Cayla |
| GIVEN NAMES | Julien |
| FAMILY NAME | Cayla |
| SIGNATURE | CAYLA J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Nanyang Technological University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3447-6149 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 153 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 10 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 6 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Conceptualizing Consumer Body Awareness
Existing research typically treats body awareness as a subset of self-awareness, which emphasizes identity and appearance at the expense of embodied sensations. This article offers a corrective by reconceptualizing consumer body awareness as a distinct, cultivated capacity, defined as the ability to notice, make sense of, and respond to exteroceptive, proprioceptive, and interoceptive sensations with the help of marketplace resources. Prior studi…
Consumptive Work in Coworking: Using Consumption Strategically for Work
Consumption has always been part of the workplace, yet it has traditionally been seen as nonwork—an activity that depletes rather than creates value. In the knowledge and digital economy, however, consumption and work are becoming increasingly intertwined, calling for a relational perspective on consumption’s productive role. We develop this perspective through a four-year ethnography of coworking spaces across Paris and London, supplemented by p…
Digital Affective Encounters: The Relational Role of Content Circulation on Social Media
One of the most ubiquitous practices on social media is sharing content with others to show affection or affirm an interpersonal connection. Extant consumer research has examined the circulation of objects fueled by desire or as repositories and carriers of emotion and value. The article extends this work to understand how consumer relationships are shaped through the creation, consumption, and circulation of digital objects imbued with affect. D…
Consumer Sovereignty and the Ethics of Recognition
Stigma Resistance through Body-in-Practice: Embodying Pride through Creative Mastery
Stigma, as a process of shame, fosters social exclusion and diminishes bodily competences. Thus, stigmatized consumers often turn to the marketplace for respite. Based on an ethnographic study of drag artists, this study proposes a new understanding of the body that emerges from the mastery of creative consumption practices to combat shame. We theorize a novel 'body-in-practice' framework to examine how consumers transform from an imagined person…
Crowdfunding as a Market-Fostering Gift System
Reward-based crowdfunding has enabled an unprecedented number of consumers to provision capital for commercial and artistic ventures. Each year, consumers use digital platforms to transfer billions of dollars to entrepreneurs and artists to help them develop a wide range of market innovations. Notably, these consumers obtain no financial benefits, no formal guarantee that their money will be used aptly, and no reimbursement options. Under such ma…
Chronic Consumer Liminality: Being Flexible in Precarious Times
This study introduces the notion of chronic consumer liminality (CCL) defined as a recurrently activated state of transition experienced when engaging in frequent, multiple, and nonlinear consumer life transitions. CCL is characterized by (1) reoccurring transitions, (2) ongoing self-transformation, and (3) the embracing of precarity. We find evidence of CCL in a multimethod qualitative study of the flexible consumer lifestyle. CCL emerges as a r…
Recognition in India's new service professions: Gym Trainers and Coffee Baristas
How do employees in “new services”, such as coffee baristas and gym trainers in India, see their jobs? In this paper, we build on extensive fieldwork in gyms and coffee chains that cater to the emerging Indian middle classes. Our research highlights the importance of respect and recognition in making service interactions more meaningful for new service workers. Generally hailing from the lower middle classes, new service work offers important opp…
Fetish, Magic, Marketing
Fetish, magic, marketing
This article identifies specific forms of fetishistic enchantments produced by practices culturally specific to modern consumer culture. The authors show that magical practices are constitutive of two fetishistic marketing constructs: the consumer and the human luxury brand. Marketing magic enacts relations between man and the transcendent by bringing consumer personas 'to life' and manifesting ideals of the beautiful in luxury. Marketing magic i…
Selling Pain to the Saturated Self
How can we comprehend people who pay for an experience marketed as painful? On one hand, consumers spend billions of dollars every year to alleviate different kinds of pain. On the other hand, millions of individuals participate in extremely painful leisure pursuits. In trying to understand this conundrum, we ethnographically study a popular adventure challenge where participants subject themselves to electric shocks, fire, and freezing water. Th…
Ethnography Guiding Brand Strategy: Rum & Real Blokes
Consumer fetish
Commercial ethnography has become an important activity for accessing the lived experiences of consumers that are constructed as "others" that firms have to discover and manage. In organizational contexts where the necessity to accumulate organizational knowledge about markets have become paramount, the figure of the "consumer" has become a quasi-magical object bestowed with the aura of the real, a fetish that comes to stand for the market, and s…
Inside Marketing
Inside Marketing: Practices, Ideologies, Devices
In comparison to the impressive amount of resources, time, and energy going into researching the inner life of consumers, a rather minor effort has been made to study the growing army of economic actors whose work it is to define markets and give shape to the consumer culture as we know it. Furthermore, the results of the work that marketers do are, by definition, highly visible. Indeed, we would suggest that making things visible (in the sense o…
Asian Brands and the Shaping of a Transnational Imagined Community
Journal Article Asian Brands and the Shaping of a Transnational Imagined Community Get access Julien Cayla, Julien Cayla Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Giana M. Eckhardt Giana M. Eckhardt Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 35, Issue 2, August 2008, Pages 216-230, https://doi.org/10.1086/587629 Published: 14 April 2008
Asian Brands and the Shaping of a Transnational Imagined Community
Journal Article Asian Brands and the Shaping of a Transnational Imagined Community Get access Julien Cayla, Julien Cayla Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Giana M. Eckhardt Giana M. Eckhardt Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 35, Issue 2, August 2008, Pages 216-230, https://doi.org/10.1086/587629 Published: 14 April 2008
Selling Pain to the Saturated Self
How can we comprehend people who pay for an experience marketed as painful? On one hand, consumers spend billions of dollars every year to alleviate different kinds of pain. On the other hand, millions of individuals participate in extremely painful leisure pursuits. In trying to understand this conundrum, we ethnographically study a popular adventure challenge where participants subject themselves to electric shocks, fire, and freezing water. Th…
Chronic Consumer Liminality: Being Flexible in Precarious Times
This study introduces the notion of chronic consumer liminality (CCL) defined as a recurrently activated state of transition experienced when engaging in frequent, multiple, and nonlinear consumer life transitions. CCL is characterized by (1) reoccurring transitions, (2) ongoing self-transformation, and (3) the embracing of precarity. We find evidence of CCL in a multimethod qualitative study of the flexible consumer lifestyle. CCL emerges as a r…
Recognition in India's new service professions: Gym Trainers and Coffee Baristas
How do employees in “new services”, such as coffee baristas and gym trainers in India, see their jobs? In this paper, we build on extensive fieldwork in gyms and coffee chains that cater to the emerging Indian middle classes. Our research highlights the importance of respect and recognition in making service interactions more meaningful for new service workers. Generally hailing from the lower middle classes, new service work offers important opp…
Stigma Resistance through Body-in-Practice: Embodying Pride through Creative Mastery
Stigma, as a process of shame, fosters social exclusion and diminishes bodily competences. Thus, stigmatized consumers often turn to the marketplace for respite. Based on an ethnographic study of drag artists, this study proposes a new understanding of the body that emerges from the mastery of creative consumption practices to combat shame. We theorize a novel 'body-in-practice' framework to examine how consumers transform from an imagined person…
Crowdfunding as a Market-Fostering Gift System
Reward-based crowdfunding has enabled an unprecedented number of consumers to provision capital for commercial and artistic ventures. Each year, consumers use digital platforms to transfer billions of dollars to entrepreneurs and artists to help them develop a wide range of market innovations. Notably, these consumers obtain no financial benefits, no formal guarantee that their money will be used aptly, and no reimbursement options. Under such ma…
Consumer fetish
Commercial ethnography has become an important activity for accessing the lived experiences of consumers that are constructed as "others" that firms have to discover and manage. In organizational contexts where the necessity to accumulate organizational knowledge about markets have become paramount, the figure of the "consumer" has become a quasi-magical object bestowed with the aura of the real, a fetish that comes to stand for the market, and s…
Fetish, magic, marketing
This article identifies specific forms of fetishistic enchantments produced by practices culturally specific to modern consumer culture. The authors show that magical practices are constitutive of two fetishistic marketing constructs: the consumer and the human luxury brand. Marketing magic enacts relations between man and the transcendent by bringing consumer personas 'to life' and manifesting ideals of the beautiful in luxury. Marketing magic i…
Asian Brands and the Shaping of a Transnational Imagined Community
Journal Article Asian Brands and the Shaping of a Transnational Imagined Community Get access Julien Cayla, Julien Cayla Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Giana M. Eckhardt Giana M. Eckhardt Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 35, Issue 2, August 2008, Pages 216-230, https://doi.org/10.1086/587629 Published: 14 April 2008
Inside Marketing
Inside Marketing: Practices, Ideologies, Devices
In comparison to the impressive amount of resources, time, and energy going into researching the inner life of consumers, a rather minor effort has been made to study the growing army of economic actors whose work it is to define markets and give shape to the consumer culture as we know it. Furthermore, the results of the work that marketers do are, by definition, highly visible. Indeed, we would suggest that making things visible (in the sense o…
Consumer fetish
Commercial ethnography has become an important activity for accessing the lived experiences of consumers that are constructed as "others" that firms have to discover and manage. In organizational contexts where the necessity to accumulate organizational knowledge about markets have become paramount, the figure of the "consumer" has become a quasi-magical object bestowed with the aura of the real, a fetish that comes to stand for the market, and s…
Ethnography Guiding Brand Strategy: Rum & Real Blokes
Fetish, magic, marketing
This article identifies specific forms of fetishistic enchantments produced by practices culturally specific to modern consumer culture. The authors show that magical practices are constitutive of two fetishistic marketing constructs: the consumer and the human luxury brand. Marketing magic enacts relations between man and the transcendent by bringing consumer personas 'to life' and manifesting ideals of the beautiful in luxury. Marketing magic i…
Selling Pain to the Saturated Self
How can we comprehend people who pay for an experience marketed as painful? On one hand, consumers spend billions of dollars every year to alleviate different kinds of pain. On the other hand, millions of individuals participate in extremely painful leisure pursuits. In trying to understand this conundrum, we ethnographically study a popular adventure challenge where participants subject themselves to electric shocks, fire, and freezing water. Th…
Fetish, Magic, Marketing
Recognition in India's new service professions: Gym Trainers and Coffee Baristas
How do employees in “new services”, such as coffee baristas and gym trainers in India, see their jobs? In this paper, we build on extensive fieldwork in gyms and coffee chains that cater to the emerging Indian middle classes. Our research highlights the importance of respect and recognition in making service interactions more meaningful for new service workers. Generally hailing from the lower middle classes, new service work offers important opp…
Chronic Consumer Liminality: Being Flexible in Precarious Times
This study introduces the notion of chronic consumer liminality (CCL) defined as a recurrently activated state of transition experienced when engaging in frequent, multiple, and nonlinear consumer life transitions. CCL is characterized by (1) reoccurring transitions, (2) ongoing self-transformation, and (3) the embracing of precarity. We find evidence of CCL in a multimethod qualitative study of the flexible consumer lifestyle. CCL emerges as a r…
Consumer Sovereignty and the Ethics of Recognition
Stigma Resistance through Body-in-Practice: Embodying Pride through Creative Mastery
Stigma, as a process of shame, fosters social exclusion and diminishes bodily competences. Thus, stigmatized consumers often turn to the marketplace for respite. Based on an ethnographic study of drag artists, this study proposes a new understanding of the body that emerges from the mastery of creative consumption practices to combat shame. We theorize a novel 'body-in-practice' framework to examine how consumers transform from an imagined person…
Crowdfunding as a Market-Fostering Gift System
Reward-based crowdfunding has enabled an unprecedented number of consumers to provision capital for commercial and artistic ventures. Each year, consumers use digital platforms to transfer billions of dollars to entrepreneurs and artists to help them develop a wide range of market innovations. Notably, these consumers obtain no financial benefits, no formal guarantee that their money will be used aptly, and no reimbursement options. Under such ma…
Conceptualizing Consumer Body Awareness
Existing research typically treats body awareness as a subset of self-awareness, which emphasizes identity and appearance at the expense of embodied sensations. This article offers a corrective by reconceptualizing consumer body awareness as a distinct, cultivated capacity, defined as the ability to notice, make sense of, and respond to exteroceptive, proprioceptive, and interoceptive sensations with the help of marketplace resources. Prior studi…
Consumptive Work in Coworking: Using Consumption Strategically for Work
Consumption has always been part of the workplace, yet it has traditionally been seen as nonwork—an activity that depletes rather than creates value. In the knowledge and digital economy, however, consumption and work are becoming increasingly intertwined, calling for a relational perspective on consumption’s productive role. We develop this perspective through a four-year ethnography of coworking spaces across Paris and London, supplemented by p…
Digital Affective Encounters: The Relational Role of Content Circulation on Social Media
One of the most ubiquitous practices on social media is sharing content with others to show affection or affirm an interpersonal connection. Extant consumer research has examined the circulation of objects fueled by desire or as repositories and carriers of emotion and value. The article extends this work to understand how consumer relationships are shaped through the creation, consumption, and circulation of digital objects imbued with affect. D…
Sociology (11 works) · Business (8 works) · Psychology (5 works) · Social Psychology (5 works) · Aesthetics (4 works) · Ethnography (4 works) · Political science (4 works) · Art (3 works) · Computer Science (3 works) · Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification (3 works)