Amber M Epp
Biographic Data
| ID | 143367 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Amber M Epp |
| GIVEN NAMES | Amber M |
| FAMILY NAME | Epp |
| SIGNATURE | EPP A M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Wisconsin–Madison |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2039-4804 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 8 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 191 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 7 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
What Makes Consumption Experiences Feel Special? A Multimethod Integrative Analysis
This article addresses a simple theoretical question of high substantive relevance: What makes a consumption experience special in a consumer’s mind? To answer this question, the authors report an extensive multimethod investigation involving a grounded theory analysis of numerous consumer narratives and in-depth interviews, a field survey, a scale development study, a natural language processing (NLP) analysis of more than 3 million Yelp reviews…
Collaborating with Generative AI in Consumer Culture Research
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has introduced new possibilities for both the creation and analysis of language, which is one key input for consumer culture researchers who analyze qualitative and textual data. How can consumer culture researchers use GenAI to produce insights and work with qualitative data? What are the possibilities and challenges of using these tools? And what are some valuable practices and principles for integrati…
When Fields Are Destabilized: Mobilizing Gendered Capital to Resolve Hysteresis
In the fight for legitimacy, understanding the rules of status games is critical. This idea holds true in the wedding marketplace. However, when legalization of marriage for same-sex couples disrupted the binary wedding script, the rules of the game became less clear to consumers. Couples sometimes found their gendered bodies, roles, and expressions were out of sync with the evolving script of a destabilized wedding field, thus raising legitimacy…
The Best Laid Plans: Why New Parents Fail to Habituate Practices
Consumers regularly fail to habituate newly adopted practices. In contrast to established practices, this often occurs because understanding a practice is different from actually doing it. Our work explores this "messiness of doing" and explains why consumers successfully habituate some newly adopted practices after experiencing obstacles (i.e., misaligned practice elements) but not others. Utilizing a longitudinal approach that follows first-tim…
Outsourcing Parenthood? How Families Manage Care Assemblages Using Paid Commercial Services
An expanding array of available services allow parents to outsource almost any caregiving activity (e.g., nannies, potty training, birthday party planning). Sociologists document a care deficit—resulting from dual-earner households and distance from extended family—coupled with rising consumerism to account for outsourcing. These studies, as well as those in consumer research, clarify outsourcing motivations, but stop short of explaining the diff…
The Storied Life of Singularized Objects: Forces of Agency and Network Transformation
Our study contributes to understanding the role of material culture in families. Findings from a longitudinal case study extend Kopytoff's theory of singularization by explaining what occurs between the singularization of a focal object and its recommodification. We uncover processes that move an already singularized object in and out of a network of practices, objects, and spaces; identify forces that constrain and empower a singularized object'…
Family legacies: Constructing individual and family identity through intergenerational storytelling
The current study focused on discovering the ways in which the intergenerational transmission of family legacy stories both enables and constrains individual family members’ sense of their own identities. Using semi-structured interviews, 17 third generation family members identified a multitude of both positive and negative family legacies. Both positive and negative legacies were influenced by the storytelling context. Positive legacies portray…
Family Identity: A Framework of Identity Interplay in Consumption Practices
“Being a family” is a vitally important collective enterprise central to many consumption experiences and replete with new challenges in contemporary society. We advance a framework to learn how families draw on communication forms and use marketplace resources to manage interplays among individual, relational (e.g., couple, sibling, parent-child), and collective identities. Our framework also outlines potential moderators of this identity-manage…
Family Identity: A Framework of Identity Interplay in Consumption Practices
“Being a family” is a vitally important collective enterprise central to many consumption experiences and replete with new challenges in contemporary society. We advance a framework to learn how families draw on communication forms and use marketplace resources to manage interplays among individual, relational (e.g., couple, sibling, parent-child), and collective identities. Our framework also outlines potential moderators of this identity-manage…
The Storied Life of Singularized Objects: Forces of Agency and Network Transformation
Our study contributes to understanding the role of material culture in families. Findings from a longitudinal case study extend Kopytoff's theory of singularization by explaining what occurs between the singularization of a focal object and its recommodification. We uncover processes that move an already singularized object in and out of a network of practices, objects, and spaces; identify forces that constrain and empower a singularized object'…
Outsourcing Parenthood? How Families Manage Care Assemblages Using Paid Commercial Services
An expanding array of available services allow parents to outsource almost any caregiving activity (e.g., nannies, potty training, birthday party planning). Sociologists document a care deficit—resulting from dual-earner households and distance from extended family—coupled with rising consumerism to account for outsourcing. These studies, as well as those in consumer research, clarify outsourcing motivations, but stop short of explaining the diff…
The Best Laid Plans: Why New Parents Fail to Habituate Practices
Consumers regularly fail to habituate newly adopted practices. In contrast to established practices, this often occurs because understanding a practice is different from actually doing it. Our work explores this "messiness of doing" and explains why consumers successfully habituate some newly adopted practices after experiencing obstacles (i.e., misaligned practice elements) but not others. Utilizing a longitudinal approach that follows first-tim…
Family legacies: Constructing individual and family identity through intergenerational storytelling
The current study focused on discovering the ways in which the intergenerational transmission of family legacy stories both enables and constrains individual family members’ sense of their own identities. Using semi-structured interviews, 17 third generation family members identified a multitude of both positive and negative family legacies. Both positive and negative legacies were influenced by the storytelling context. Positive legacies portray…
Collaborating with Generative AI in Consumer Culture Research
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has introduced new possibilities for both the creation and analysis of language, which is one key input for consumer culture researchers who analyze qualitative and textual data. How can consumer culture researchers use GenAI to produce insights and work with qualitative data? What are the possibilities and challenges of using these tools? And what are some valuable practices and principles for integrati…
When Fields Are Destabilized: Mobilizing Gendered Capital to Resolve Hysteresis
In the fight for legitimacy, understanding the rules of status games is critical. This idea holds true in the wedding marketplace. However, when legalization of marriage for same-sex couples disrupted the binary wedding script, the rules of the game became less clear to consumers. Couples sometimes found their gendered bodies, roles, and expressions were out of sync with the evolving script of a destabilized wedding field, thus raising legitimacy…
What Makes Consumption Experiences Feel Special? A Multimethod Integrative Analysis
This article addresses a simple theoretical question of high substantive relevance: What makes a consumption experience special in a consumer’s mind? To answer this question, the authors report an extensive multimethod investigation involving a grounded theory analysis of numerous consumer narratives and in-depth interviews, a field survey, a scale development study, a natural language processing (NLP) analysis of more than 3 million Yelp reviews…
Family Identity: A Framework of Identity Interplay in Consumption Practices
“Being a family” is a vitally important collective enterprise central to many consumption experiences and replete with new challenges in contemporary society. We advance a framework to learn how families draw on communication forms and use marketplace resources to manage interplays among individual, relational (e.g., couple, sibling, parent-child), and collective identities. Our framework also outlines potential moderators of this identity-manage…
Family legacies: Constructing individual and family identity through intergenerational storytelling
The current study focused on discovering the ways in which the intergenerational transmission of family legacy stories both enables and constrains individual family members’ sense of their own identities. Using semi-structured interviews, 17 third generation family members identified a multitude of both positive and negative family legacies. Both positive and negative legacies were influenced by the storytelling context. Positive legacies portray…
The Storied Life of Singularized Objects: Forces of Agency and Network Transformation
Our study contributes to understanding the role of material culture in families. Findings from a longitudinal case study extend Kopytoff's theory of singularization by explaining what occurs between the singularization of a focal object and its recommodification. We uncover processes that move an already singularized object in and out of a network of practices, objects, and spaces; identify forces that constrain and empower a singularized object'…
Outsourcing Parenthood? How Families Manage Care Assemblages Using Paid Commercial Services
An expanding array of available services allow parents to outsource almost any caregiving activity (e.g., nannies, potty training, birthday party planning). Sociologists document a care deficit—resulting from dual-earner households and distance from extended family—coupled with rising consumerism to account for outsourcing. These studies, as well as those in consumer research, clarify outsourcing motivations, but stop short of explaining the diff…
The Best Laid Plans: Why New Parents Fail to Habituate Practices
Consumers regularly fail to habituate newly adopted practices. In contrast to established practices, this often occurs because understanding a practice is different from actually doing it. Our work explores this "messiness of doing" and explains why consumers successfully habituate some newly adopted practices after experiencing obstacles (i.e., misaligned practice elements) but not others. Utilizing a longitudinal approach that follows first-tim…
When Fields Are Destabilized: Mobilizing Gendered Capital to Resolve Hysteresis
In the fight for legitimacy, understanding the rules of status games is critical. This idea holds true in the wedding marketplace. However, when legalization of marriage for same-sex couples disrupted the binary wedding script, the rules of the game became less clear to consumers. Couples sometimes found their gendered bodies, roles, and expressions were out of sync with the evolving script of a destabilized wedding field, thus raising legitimacy…
What Makes Consumption Experiences Feel Special? A Multimethod Integrative Analysis
This article addresses a simple theoretical question of high substantive relevance: What makes a consumption experience special in a consumer’s mind? To answer this question, the authors report an extensive multimethod investigation involving a grounded theory analysis of numerous consumer narratives and in-depth interviews, a field survey, a scale development study, a natural language processing (NLP) analysis of more than 3 million Yelp reviews…
Collaborating with Generative AI in Consumer Culture Research
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has introduced new possibilities for both the creation and analysis of language, which is one key input for consumer culture researchers who analyze qualitative and textual data. How can consumer culture researchers use GenAI to produce insights and work with qualitative data? What are the possibilities and challenges of using these tools? And what are some valuable practices and principles for integrati…
Psychology (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Social Psychology (5 works) · Social science (4 works) · Business (3 works) · Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification (3 works) · Consumption (sociology) (3 works) · Marketing (3 works)