Linda L Price
Biographic Data
| ID | 3640253 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Linda L Price |
| GIVEN NAMES | Linda L |
| FAMILY NAME | Price |
| SIGNATURE | PRICE L L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Graduate School of Business University of Colorado at Boulder |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 76 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1026 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 57 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
“Fresh Start” Messaging, “Rebirth Associations,” and Consumers’ Environmentally Sustainable Actions
What do consumers do with their used clothing, books, and children’s toys? In this research, we introduce metaphoric “fresh start” messaging as an effective tactic to encourage consumers to engage in environmentally sustainable actions of donating used products for remanufacture or reuse. Drawing on conceptual metaphor theory and construal theory, we contrast metaphoric “fresh start” messaging with dominant “reduce waste” and “recycle” non-metaph…
Identities without Products: When the Preference for Self-Linked Products Weakens
Extant literature and common marketing practices converge around the idea that stronger self-links to a brand and its products lead to increased brand loyalty. In this article, we challenge this conventional notion by revealing situations where the preference for self-linked brands diminishes, despite the self-links remaining unchanged. We introduce a key distinction between two types of consumer identities based on whether identity expression re…
Using Cultural Repertoires during Unsettled Times
This research draws on the theory of culture in action, which explains how consumers selectively mobilize their cultural repertoires to understand and solve daily problems. Contemporary life, however, is increasingly unsettled, challenging the adequacy of consumers' repertoires and how they use existing institutional cultural resources. This qualitative study identifies four ways in which consumers use their cultural repertoires and institutional…
Learning to Live with an Unruly Consuming Body
Past research shows that successful consumer learning takes place in environments that support cooperative communities of practice, that enable access to refined didactic resources, and that provide a safe, sympathetic backstage for a controllable and able learning body to durably transition from one repertoire to another. This study complements existing research by investigating a group of lactose-intolerant consumers who must learn to transitio…
Transnational Market Navigation: Living and Consuming across Borders
Prior research has investigated global mobility through the lenses of consumer acculturation, identity, and possessions with a focus on consumers’ socialization and identity management in the host consumer culture. It has neglected, however, the ways that globally mobile consumers simultaneously navigate the multiple, cross-border markets in which they are embedded. We adopt the social network perspective to investigate the transnational consumer…
Why Online Consumption Communities Brutalize
Consumers who socialize in online consumption communities sometimes become alarmingly hostile, toxic, and otherwise verbally violent toward one another-a phenomenon known in sociology as brutalization. Research indicates that short-lived, situational outbursts of verbal violence-such as gross insults, harassment, or trolling-are common in online consumption contexts. However, it does not explain why such behaviors sometimes become endemic, turnin…
Consumer Work and Agency in the Analog Revival
Why do consumers choose difficult analog technologies over their labor-saving digital counterparts? Through ethnographic investigations of three once defunct analog technologies that have experienced a resurgence (vinyl music, film photography, and analog synthesizers), we explore how the act of consumer work enables consumers to experience shifting dimensions of agency. We utilize the theoretical lens of serious leisure to introduce a four-stage…
Gift Giving in Enduring Dyadic Relationships: The Micropolitics of Mother-Daughter Gift Exchange
This article investigates the dynamics of long-term gift exchange between British mothers and their adult daughters, delving into the processes behind dyadic gift giving. Through 54 comprehensive interviews, we elaborate the micropolitics that characterize these dynamics. Micropolitics refers to the subtle, everyday interactions, including gift exchange, that shape the ongoing negotiation of roles and the management of conflict or consensus withi…
Class Conflict and Spatial Domination in the Neoliberal City
This article analyzes spatial domination in middle-classed spaces-the spaces that cater to the dispositions, status, and lifestyle ideals of middle-class groups-of the neoliberal city. Grounded in interdisciplinary scholarship on the neoliberal city, the article introduces a typology of middle-classed spaces, which maps out different combinations of cross-class hostility and cordiality in dynamics of spatial domination. Through an extended case s…
Post-Colonial Consumer Respect and the Framing of Neocolonial Consumption in Advertising
This study of the production, representation, and reception of post-colonial advertising in India reveals a politics of consumer respectability. The post-colonial politics of consumer respectability is located at the intersection of center-periphery relations, class divisions, and colorism in a way that it frames neocolonial consumption. Advertisers depict middle-class consumer respectability by asserting Indian nationalism and by degrading the W…
Race in Consumer Research: Past, Present, and Future
Race has been a market force in society for centuries. Still, the question of what constitutes focused and sustainable consumer research engagement with race remains opaque. We propose a guide for scholars and scholarship that extends the current canon of race in consumer research toward understanding race, racism, and related racial dynamics as foundational to global markets and central to consumer research efforts. We discuss the nature, releva…
Dominated Cosmopolitanism: Consumer Habitus Dynamics among Low-Resource Migrants
Cosmopolitanism is often cast as an elite cultural orientation and as a privileged disposition to an increasingly globalized marketplace, instigated by, and lived through, mobility. But how does cosmopolitanism evolve among consumers at intersectional subordinate positions of power? This article analyzes the emergence of cosmopolitanism through a 9 year longitudinal extended case study of female migrants with low levels of resources. Through the …
Morality Appraisals in Consumer Responsibilization
In recent decades, U.S. gun rights lobbying groups, politicians, courts, and market actors have sought to responsibilize U.S. consumers to use firearms to address the societal problem of crime. These efforts center an interpretation of the constitutional right to keep and bear arms guaranteed by the Second Amendment as an entitlement for individuals to practice armed self-defense. Using interview and online discussion data, this research investig…
The One-Away Effect: The Pursuit of Mere Completion
A series of controlled studies found that consumers counter-normatively prefer something nearly complete over something complete. We call this phenomenon the 'one-away effect' because we find that when consumers are, for example, one stamp away from completing a punch card loyalty program, they value the card more than a completed card. This is because their valuation of the one-away card is influenced by their anticipation of merely completing t…
Consumer-Driven Memorialization
Consumer research has focused on market-mediated efforts to memorialize the past, but this overshadows the issues that arise when consumers, as nonprofessionals, make the past consumable. Consumer-driven memorialization is defined as consumer engagement with traces of the past in memoryscapes of low market-mediation that creates a complex interplay of remembering and forgetting. Based on an ethnographic study of urban exploration, we theorize tha…
Between Cultural Appreciation and Cultural Appropriation: Self-Authorizing the Consumption of Cultural Difference
Countervailing discourses of cultural appreciation versus cultural appropriation are fueling a tension between the ethnic consumer subject, who views the consumption of cultural difference as a valorized identity project, and the responsibilized consumer subject, who is tasked with considering the societal impacts of such consumption. Drawing on an extended qualitative investigation of international K-pop consumers, this study illustrates that th…
Automation Assemblages in the Internet of Things: Discovering Qualitative Practices at the Boundaries of Quantitative Change
We examine consumers’ interactions with smart objects using a novel mixed-method approach, guided by assemblage theory, to discover the emergence of automation practices. We use a unique text data set from the web service IFTTT, (“If This Then That”), representing hundreds of thousands of applets that represent “if–then” connections between pairs of Internet services. Consumers use these applets to automate events in their daily lives. We quantit…
Consumer Desires and the Fluctuating Balance between Liquid and Solid Consumption: The Case of Finnish Clothing Libraries
The ongoing rise of liquid consumption manifests in the growing popularity of ephemeral, access-based, and dematerialized forms of consumption that contrast with traditional solid forms of consumption characterized by possession and strong object relationships. The literature already presents a robust understanding of what makes liquid and solid consumption appealing to consumers. What has received less attention is the co-existence of liquid and…
How Social Media Influencers Impact Consumer Collectives: An Embeddedness Perspective
Research has documented the emergence of embedded entrepreneurs within consumer collectives. This phenomenon is increasingly prevalent as social media enables ordinary consumers to become social media influencers (SMIs), a distinct form of embedded entrepreneur. Whilst research has considered the implications of embeddedness for embedded entrepreneurs themselves, we lack insight into embedded entrepreneurship's impact on consumer collectives. To …
Doing Family over Time: The Multilayered and Multitemporal Nature of Intergenerational Caring through Consumption
Care is a central dimension of family consumption. Previous studies have explored it as interpersonal, emotional work performed through everyday consumption practices. Most of these studies have investigated care as articulated in the present time and within nuclear families. This study sets out to explore the relations between grandparents and grandchildren, arguing that it provides an intriguing case for enriching the current understanding of c…
More Gamer, Less Girl: Gendered Boundaries, Tokenism, and the Cultural Persistence of Masculine Dominance
How do exclusionary boundaries persist in consumption subcultures amid increased progress, representation, and inclusion? In video gaming, women have come to represent nearly half of the market; yet, this is a limited indicator of gender-based progress. A culture of masculine dominance persists. Extending previous research on boundary work, the authors employ a cultural perspective of tokenism to examine how gendered boundaries in consumption sub…
Tensions in the Enactment of Neoliberal Consumer Responsibilization for Waste
Research has explored consumer responsibilization processes, yet there is a lack of understanding about the tensions that consumers might experience when enacting their responsibility. Using a large data set collected in France around waste responsibilization, we demonstrate how waste pathways can generate spatiotemporal, guidance, and destructiveness tensions in households. Consumers respond to such tensions by keeping waste at home, which allow…
Market Work and the Formation of the Omnivorous Consumer Subject
Omnivorousness is the tendency of culturally and economically privileged individuals to consume both highbrow and lowbrow products. Prior research explores omnivorousness as a manifestation of status distinction in which consumers deploy the aesthetic disposition-a generic and transposable ability to appreciate cultural products through a formal gaze-to lowbrow options. Existing work emphasizes the acquisition of the aesthetic disposition, but it…
When Products Come Alive: Interpersonal Communication Norms Induce Positive Word of Mouth for Anthropomorphized Products
Across five experiments, this research finds that product anthropomorphism enhances consumers' intention to share positive thoughts in their word-of-mouth (WOM) communication about such products, in the hope of creating a favorable interpersonal impression about themselves. Our theorizing suggests that the effect occurs because consumers apply a norm that originates in human-related communication-namely, that speaking positively of other people c…
The Value-Translation Model of Consumer Activism: How Consumer Watchdog Organizations Change Markets
How do consumer watchdog organizations (CWOs) change markets? Research on consumer activism has prioritized studying grassroots movements of ordinary consumers over more formalized activist actors, resulting in a paucity of theoretical resources for understanding the activism of powerful consumer organizations such as CWOs. This article draws on the sociology of valuation and evaluation to develop a new theoretical model of consumer activism, the…
River Magic: Extraordinary Experience and the Extended Service Encounter
This article explores the provision of extraordinary hedonic experiences on commercial, multiday river rafting trips in the Colorado River basin. White water river rafting provides a dramatic illustration of some of the complex features of delivering an extraordinary experience. Multiple methods were employed over two years of data collection to articulate the lived meaning of this experience from both the guides' and the consumers' perspectives.…
The Role of Imagery in Information Processing: Review and Extensions
Mental imagery is receiving increased attention in consumer behavior theory and research. This article describes imagery, characterizing it as a processing mode in which multisensory information is represented in a gestalt form in working memory, and discusses research on the unique effects of imagery at low levels of cognitive elaboration. It specifies researchable propositions for the relationship between high elaboration imagery processing and…
How Individuals' Cherished Possessions Become Families' Inalienable Wealth
This article examines a special category of objects, things that people should not give or sell, but keep from generation to generation within the close confines of a group-inalienable wealth. Previous findings about inalienable wealth are restricted to studies of indigenous cultures by anthropologists. We explore whether and how objects pass from alienable to inalienable status across generations of middle-class North American families. Our rese…
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…
Older Consumers' Disposition of Special Possessions
This article explores precipitating events, emotions, and decisions associated with older consumers' disposition of special possessions. Findings are based on analyses of semistructured interviews with 80 older consumers, complemented by depth interviews with seven informants. Cherished possessions and their disposition play a significant role in older consumers' reminiscence and life review. Concerns about disposition of special possessions invo…
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'…
When Differences Unite: Resource Dependence in Heterogeneous Consumption Communities
Although heterogeneity in consumption communities is pervasive, there is little understanding of its impact on communities. This study shows how heterogeneous communities operate and interact with the marketplace. Specifically, the authors draw on actor-network theory, conceptualizing community as a network of heterogeneous actors (i.e., individuals, institutions, and resources), and examine the interplay of these actors in a mainstream activity-…
Making Magic Consumption: A Study of White-Water River Rafting
Recourse to magic is a universal strategy for trying to resolve intractable social problems. Within the context of white-water river rafting, the authors illustrate the conjunction of elements (condition of the performer, rite, and formula) that make magical experience possible in a constructed consumption setting. They show how "river magic," like all magic, concerns itself with the relationship between humans and the world, how it activates cer…
Space as a Resource in the Politics of Consumer Identity
Consumers can pursue a wide range of market-mediated identities in contemporary culture. However, some consumer identities are more valued than others, creating a form of cultural inequality. The present research considers consumers' deliberate efforts to assert greater cultural value for their identities, a phenomenon termed a 'politicized consumer identity project.' Specifically, this research focuses on consumers' intentional use of space, a r…
In Times of Trouble: A Framework for Understanding Consumers’ Responses to Threats
The COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying economic downturn have dramatically impacted the lives of consumers around the world. From a conceptual perspective, such health and economic threats can severely disrupt consumers’ sense of ontological security and elicit adaptive responses by both consumers and marketers. Given the opportune timing, this issue of the Journal of Consumer Research is focused on articles that address questions of consumer…
The Fresh Start Mindset: Transforming Consumers' Lives
This article introduces the fresh start mindset, defined as a belief that people can make a new start, get a new beginning, and chart a new course in life, regardless of their past or present circumstances. With historical roots in American culture and neoliberalism, and with contemporary links to liquid modernity and global consumer culture, this mindset structures reasoning, experience, and everyday language, and guides behavior across self- an…
How Do Platforms Empower Consumers? Insights from the Affordances and Constraints of Reclame Aqui
Consumer feedback platforms offer consumers tools to provide feedback on their market and consumption experiences. Beyond broad prior characterizations, little is known about the specific means by which platforms affect empowerment. Elements of empowerment identified in extant studies include voice, choice, justice, inclusion, catalysis, and consciousness-raising. We research a popular Brazilian platform to learn how platforms facilitate and cons…
Understanding Difficult Consumer Transitions: The In/Dividual Consumer in Permanent Liminality
Some life transitions are difficult and prolonged, such as becoming an independent adult, forming a family, or adopting healthy consumption habits. Permanent liminality describes transitions that can span years and even a lifetime with no anticipated end. To understand how consumers are caught in permanent liminality, we examine how Pentecostal converts consume religious services in their difficult transition from the secular "world" to Pentecost…
Creating Responsible Subjects: The Role of Mediated Affective Encounters
Why do people willingly bestow upon themselves the responsibility to tackle social problems such as poverty? Consumer research has provided valuable insight into how individuals are created as responsible subjects but has yet to account for the crucial role of affective dynamics in subject formation. We draw upon affect theorizing and nascent research on 'affective governmentality' in organization and policy studies to theorize the formation of r…
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…
Racial Oppression and Racial Projects in Consumer Markets: A Racial Formation Theory Approach
The dominant theoretical approach to exploring ethnic and racial inequality in marketing and consumer research focuses on discrete acts of discrimination that stem from social psychological causes (e.g., prejudice, stereotypes, and negative racial attitudes). It holds limited explanatory power for meso- and macro-structural phenomena that also generate racialized outcomes. An implication is that ethnic and racial inequality can be portrayed as so…
Our Vision for the Journal of Consumer Research: It's All about the Consumer
Founded in 1974, the Journal of Consumer Research is a leading journal in the field of social science, with a rich history of publishing multidisciplinary research focused on the study of consumers. JCR has been fortunate to have had strong editorial leadership over the years, and has forged a prestigious reputation. We are honored and humbled by the Journal of Consumer Research Policy Board’s decision to select us to shepherd JCR for the next th…
Almost Equal: Consumption under Fragmented Stigma
How do historically stigmatized social groups consume strategically when they have achieved greater recognition, status, and respectability in society? Based on a seven-year interpretive social representations analysis of gay men in Germany, the authors first show that dominant, stigmatizing representations of such groups do not ameliorate uniformly and for all. Instead, they fragment into oppressive, enabling, and normalized societal representat…
International Pleasure Travel Motivations and Post-Vacation Cultural Attitude Change
Tourism, as a significant form of interaction between nations and cultures, has the potential to improve intercultural relations. This paper develops and tests a model of the relationship between international tourism and visitors' post-vacation attitudes toward the host or destination culture. Path analysis is used to examine the linkages between pleasure travel motivations, level of intercultural interaction, vacation satisfaction, and visitors…
Tensions in the Enactment of Neoliberal Consumer Responsibilization for Waste
Research has explored consumer responsibilization processes, yet there is a lack of understanding about the tensions that consumers might experience when enacting their responsibility. Using a large data set collected in France around waste responsibilization, we demonstrate how waste pathways can generate spatiotemporal, guidance, and destructiveness tensions in households. Consumers respond to such tensions by keeping waste at home, which allow…
Consumer Timework
This article unpacks time as a cultural consumption resource and introduces the concept of consumer timework. Consumer timework refers to marketplace stakeholders' negotiation of competing interpretations of how the past and the future relate using a wide range of consumption objects and activities. Building on the theory of temporalization, we argue that social tensions, conflicts, and breaks drive the past and the future apart in multiple incom…
Consumption Ideology
Ideology plays a central role in consumer decisions, actions, and practices. While there have been numerous studies of ideological formations in specific consumption contexts, an integrative theoretical framework on consumption ideology has been missing. The theoretical framework presented in this article integrates systemic, social group, and social reality perspectives from social theory with prior consumer research to conceptualize consumption…
Rethinking the Origins of Involvement and Brand Commitment: Insights from Postsocialist Central Europe
Drawing on our work in two postsocialist countries, Hungary and Romania, we contribute to understanding product involvement and brand commitment. We demonstrate that prominent political-cultural discourses, cultural intermediaries, social influences, and life themes and projects collectively prompt product involvement. We introduce the concept of involvement with branded products and examine its origins within a sociohistorical context. We consid…
The Regeneration of Consumer Movement Solidarity
Consumer research has focused on the various resources and tactics that help movements achieve a range of institutional and marketplace changes. Yet, little attention has been paid to the persistence of movement solidarity, in particular its regeneration, despite a range of threats to it. Our research unpacks mechanisms that help consumer movement solidarity to overcome threats. Drawing on a 6-year ethnographic study of consumer movements in Exar…
The Role of Emotion Discourse and Pathic Stigma in the Delegitimization of Consumer Practices
Drawing on institutional theory and discursive psychology, this article elucidates how actors use emotion discourse to undermine the legitimacy of consumer practices. Based on an empirical investigation of the bullfighting controversy in Spain, our work shows how activists engage in the production and circulation of compelling emotional prototypes of their adversaries. Such emotional prototypes constitute the discursive foundations of a pathic st…
The Role of Imagery in Information Processing: Review and Extensions
Mental imagery is receiving increased attention in consumer behavior theory and research. This article describes imagery, characterizing it as a processing mode in which multisensory information is represented in a gestalt form in working memory, and discusses research on the unique effects of imagery at low levels of cognitive elaboration. It specifies researchable propositions for the relationship between high elaboration imagery processing and…
International Pleasure Travel Motivations and Post-Vacation Cultural Attitude Change
Tourism, as a significant form of interaction between nations and cultures, has the potential to improve intercultural relations. This paper develops and tests a model of the relationship between international tourism and visitors' post-vacation attitudes toward the host or destination culture. Path analysis is used to examine the linkages between pleasure travel motivations, level of intercultural interaction, vacation satisfaction, and visitors…
An Investigation into the Social Context of Early Adoption Behavior
The social context of new product adoption behavior is a key aspect of the diffusion of innovations. Yet little is known about the process by which social contextual factors influence individual adoption decisions. This research develops and tests a model of the effects of perceived consumption visibility and superordinate group influence on new product intention formation. A structural equation model is used in an experimental design to provide …
River Magic: Extraordinary Experience and the Extended Service Encounter
This article explores the provision of extraordinary hedonic experiences on commercial, multiday river rafting trips in the Colorado River basin. White water river rafting provides a dramatic illustration of some of the complex features of delivering an extraordinary experience. Multiple methods were employed over two years of data collection to articulate the lived meaning of this experience from both the guides' and the consumers' perspectives.…
Commercial Friendships: Service Provider-Client Relationships in Context
The authors describe commercial friendships that develop between service providers and clients as one important type of marketing relationship. They report results of five studies that employ quant...
Cherished Possessions
Tell you what, I go to estate sales all the time. And when I go, every time I go, I realize that I have to do something. I must get rid of what I have. It is so sad [stresses the word sad] and there are these beautiful items that are being sold. And I think of these people; and of how they must have felt. They had all of this, and it meant so much to them. So, every time I go, I think that's not going to happen to me."-Iris (78, married
Making Magic Consumption: A Study of White-Water River Rafting
Recourse to magic is a universal strategy for trying to resolve intractable social problems. Within the context of white-water river rafting, the authors illustrate the conjunction of elements (condition of the performer, rite, and formula) that make magical experience possible in a constructed consumption setting. They show how "river magic," like all magic, concerns itself with the relationship between humans and the world, how it activates cer…
Older Consumers' Disposition of Special Possessions
This article explores precipitating events, emotions, and decisions associated with older consumers' disposition of special possessions. Findings are based on analyses of semistructured interviews with 80 older consumers, complemented by depth interviews with seven informants. Cherished possessions and their disposition play a significant role in older consumers' reminiscence and life review. Concerns about disposition of special possessions invo…
Rethinking the Origins of Involvement and Brand Commitment: Insights from Postsocialist Central Europe
Drawing on our work in two postsocialist countries, Hungary and Romania, we contribute to understanding product involvement and brand commitment. We demonstrate that prominent political-cultural discourses, cultural intermediaries, social influences, and life themes and projects collectively prompt product involvement. We introduce the concept of involvement with branded products and examine its origins within a sociohistorical context. We consid…
How Individuals' Cherished Possessions Become Families' Inalienable Wealth
This article examines a special category of objects, things that people should not give or sell, but keep from generation to generation within the close confines of a group-inalienable wealth. Previous findings about inalienable wealth are restricted to studies of indigenous cultures by anthropologists. We explore whether and how objects pass from alienable to inalienable status across generations of middle-class North American families. Our rese…
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'…
When Differences Unite: Resource Dependence in Heterogeneous Consumption Communities
Although heterogeneity in consumption communities is pervasive, there is little understanding of its impact on communities. This study shows how heterogeneous communities operate and interact with the marketplace. Specifically, the authors draw on actor-network theory, conceptualizing community as a network of heterogeneous actors (i.e., individuals, institutions, and resources), and examine the interplay of these actors in a mainstream activity-…
Our Vision for the Journal of Consumer Research: It's All about the Consumer
Founded in 1974, the Journal of Consumer Research is a leading journal in the field of social science, with a rich history of publishing multidisciplinary research focused on the study of consumers. JCR has been fortunate to have had strong editorial leadership over the years, and has forged a prestigious reputation. We are honored and humbled by the Journal of Consumer Research Policy Board’s decision to select us to shepherd JCR for the next th…
The Fresh Start Mindset: Transforming Consumers' Lives
This article introduces the fresh start mindset, defined as a belief that people can make a new start, get a new beginning, and chart a new course in life, regardless of their past or present circumstances. With historical roots in American culture and neoliberalism, and with contemporary links to liquid modernity and global consumer culture, this mindset structures reasoning, experience, and everyday language, and guides behavior across self- an…
In Times of Trouble: A Framework for Understanding Consumers’ Responses to Threats
The COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying economic downturn have dramatically impacted the lives of consumers around the world. From a conceptual perspective, such health and economic threats can severely disrupt consumers’ sense of ontological security and elicit adaptive responses by both consumers and marketers. Given the opportune timing, this issue of the Journal of Consumer Research is focused on articles that address questions of consumer…
Consumers Prefer 'Natural' More for Preventatives Than for Curatives
We demonstrate that natural products are more strongly preferred when used to prevent a problem than when used to cure a problem (the prevent/cure effect). This organizing principle explains variation in the preference for natural across distinct product categories (e.g., food vs. medicine), within product categories (e.g., between different types of medicines), and for the same product depending on how it is used (to prevent or to cure ailments)…
Preference Refinement after a Budget Contraction
How does coping with a resource loss of time, space, or money change a consumer? In the current work, we argue that resource losses that give rise to budget contractions require a coping strategy that not only influences choice in the moment but also changes underlying consumer preferences. We show that the preference restructuring that occurs when coping with a budget loss also leads to stabilization of preferences. Specifically, a consumer who …
Understanding Difficult Consumer Transitions: The In/Dividual Consumer in Permanent Liminality
Some life transitions are difficult and prolonged, such as becoming an independent adult, forming a family, or adopting healthy consumption habits. Permanent liminality describes transitions that can span years and even a lifetime with no anticipated end. To understand how consumers are caught in permanent liminality, we examine how Pentecostal converts consume religious services in their difficult transition from the secular "world" to Pentecost…
A Framework of Brand Contestation: Toward Brand Antifragility
The consumer literature on branding to date coalesces around the notion that brands are constantly contested. Brand contestation arises where the actions of consumer brand actors meet, and sometimes confront, those of the brands’ legal owners. This article integrates the extant branding research, a qualitative prestudy, and two complementary empirical studies to advance a theoretical process model of brand contestation. First, an in-depth analysi…
Hiding from the Truth: When and How Cover Enables Information Avoidance
More information is available today than ever before, yet at times consumers choose to avoid it. Even with useful information (I should find out), people may prefer ignorance (But I don’t want to). Seven studies (N = 4,271) and five supplemental studies (N = 3,013) apply the concept of “cover” to information avoidance for consumer choices with real financial consequences. More consumers avoid information with cover—that is, when they can attribut…
Three Themes for the Future of Brands in a Changing Consumer Marketplace
The purpose of our conceptual introduction is to theorize how brands will continue to be relevant in the future marketplace. We identify three themes that emerge in this special issue that offer intriguing directions for future exploration and managerial action. The first theme is that because of brands' pervasiveness, consumers have developed a meta concept of 'brands' that shapes how consumers think about the market, themselves, and others. Whi…
Charismatic Entrainment: How Brand Leaders and Consumers Co-Create Charismatic Authority in the Marketplace
How do CEOs, entrepreneurs, managers, celebrity bloggers, and other brand leaders acquire charismatic authority in the marketplace? Grounded in a multi-perspective, in-depth case study of the charismatic CEO of an Austrian shoe manufacturer, this article introduces a sociocultural mechanism called charismatic entrainment. Charismatic entrainment involves brand leaders staging charismatic authority by promoting polarized worldviews and taking pers…
Doing Relationship Work: A Theory of Change in Consumer-Brand Relationships
This article proposes a novel theory, based on relational paradoxes, to explain how consumers enable or disable their relationships with brands over time. Analysis of data from in-depth, longitudinal interviews with 26 consumers reveals four relational tensions and seven actions that consumers take in response to these tensions, thus affecting the course and character of their brand relationships. Four consumer actions enable the consumer-brand r…
Creating Responsible Subjects: The Role of Mediated Affective Encounters
Why do people willingly bestow upon themselves the responsibility to tackle social problems such as poverty? Consumer research has provided valuable insight into how individuals are created as responsible subjects but has yet to account for the crucial role of affective dynamics in subject formation. We draw upon affect theorizing and nascent research on 'affective governmentality' in organization and policy studies to theorize the formation of r…
Sociology (53 works) · Psychology (51 works) · Business (39 works) · Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification (37 works) · Social Psychology (36 works) · Political science (30 works) · Marketing (29 works) · Computer Science (23 works) · Social science (23 works) · Advertising (20 works)