Ashlee Humphreys
Biographic Data
| ID | 85987 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ashlee Humphreys |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ashlee |
| FAMILY NAME | Humphreys |
| SIGNATURE | HUMPHREYS A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Northwestern University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 254 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 10 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 15 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
From Adaptation to Disruption: Structured Ambivalence as a Catalyst for Consumer-Led Institutional Work
This study explores how consumers respond to the ambivalence sparked by conflicting institutional norms in contexts such as the United States market for donor conception (i.e. egg, sperm, embryo). While prior research has framed responses to ambivalence as “coping,” we theorize these responses as consumer-led institutional work—i.e., active efforts to adapt to or challenge institutional norms. Drawing on interviews, archival narratives, and case …
Tournaments of Destruction: Consumers Battling for Visibility
This research introduces tournaments of destruction, defined as staged and ritualized social performances involving entertainment and competitive rivalry in which consumers destroy valued material objects before a focused gathering. The conceptualization of tournaments of destruction is borne from a qualitative, phenomenological-based case study of low-income, low-power Black African male youth, who as members of the Izikhothane subculture in Sow…
From Order to Chaos: How Consumers Lose Control of Risks (and of Themselves)
Consumers are exposed to a growing array of risks in an increasingly complex and uncertain world. Prior research has shown that they can navigate and even benefit from certain risks through edgework. However, the proliferation of credit and debt has led many into over-indebtedness—a dysfunctional condition in which control over risk is lost. This study examines the narratives and lived experiences of over-indebted consumers through the lens of ch…
Moralizing Everyday Consumption: The Case of Self-Care
Morality, appraisals of right and wrong, is central to consumers’ identities and decisions. Even everyday consumption choices can be subject to moral judgments and require moral justifications. When and how do consumers moralize formerly taken-for-granted consumption practices? Considering self-care consumption in the United States, which includes practices that range from bathing to dieting to meditating to vacationing, this article examines the…
How to Sustain Sustainable Practices? The Journey Toward Zero Waste Lifestyle
Sustaining sustainable practices in a market whose infrastructure continues to prioritize unsustainable options is not easy. It becomes even more challenging when living sustainably involves interwoven practices that are deeply embedded and interconnected. We focus on one such system of sustainable practices and explore consumers' journey toward Zero Waste lifestyle-a system of practices that is not yet institutionalized. Using a qualitative mult…
How Algorithms Constrain Consumer Experience
Prior literature is yet to explain how algorithms systematically constrain consumer experience (CX). To address this issue, we conducted a multi-method ethnographic study of consumers using fitness tracking software. We draw on the information science literature to demonstrate that the constitutive properties of information technology (IT) that underlie algorithms result in a set of restrictive fundamental interactional mechanisms imposed through…
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…
Consumption Solidarity: Healing Cultural Trauma Following Marketplace Violence
Targeted acts of violence in the marketplace disrupt the status quo and unravel the very fabric of community and consumption spaces. Despite the growing frequency of these shocking events, they remain underexplored in consumer research, particularly regarding their impact on consumer well-being and collective welfare. This research explores how individual reactions and choices in the face of incomprehensible violence can pave the way for consumer…
Digital Therapy for Negative Consumption Experiences: The Impact of Emotional and Rational Reviews on Review Writers
This research tests a solution for consumers to recover faster from negative experiences. We identify this solution by examining how the manner in which review writers express their emotions and rational thoughts in their reviews causally influences review writers. The results of five studies (field data and experiments) show that, similar to writing about traumatic life events, when review writers express both emotional and rational aspects in r…
The Market Dynamics of Collective Ignorance and Spiraling Risk
In some markets, offerings become riskier over time as producers introduce new versions that are made more affordable by increasing their risk. Existing theories suggest consumers adopt riskier versions either because they become more risk tolerant or they trade higher risk for lower price-both of which presume consumers know the risks. We reveal a third explanation: evolving market dynamics that increasingly encourage consumer inattention to ris…
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…
Social Emotions and the Legitimation of the Fertility Technology Market
Using the sociology of emotions, we investigate the role of social emotions as a legitimating force in the market. In a longitudinal study of the media coverage surrounding US fertility technologies, we find that legitimation involves the establishment of hierarchies among feeling rules, which dictate what social emotions are expressed toward markets, consumers, and technologies. We delineate three mechanisms (polarizing, reifying, and transformi…
The Politicization of Objects: Meaning and Materiality in The U.S. Cannabis Market
In this article, we theorize how marketplace objects and their properties facilitate market legitimacy. Adopting assemblage theory, we examine a politically contested market—the U.S. recreational cannabis market—using retail sales data, public opinion polls and surveys, mainstream media coverage, and interviews with producers and consumers. We find that objects convey meaning in the market by creating sensory or discursive alignment between new o…
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…
One Brand, Many Trajectories: Narrative Navigation in Transmedia
In an era of unprecedented consumer access to media and the tools to control narrative delivery, speed, and exposure to transmedia content, there is no longer the illusion of a cohesive narrative managed by a recognized singular author or unified authorial voice. Instead, consumers carve their own trajectories through brand narratives. Our multimethod inquiry of television series viewing, based on a combination of interviews, diaries, video recor…
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 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…
Automated Text Analysis for Consumer Research
The amount of digital text available for analysis by consumer researchers has risen dramatically. Consumer discussions on the internet, product reviews, and digital archives of news articles and press releases are just a few potential sources for insights about consumer attitudes, interaction, and culture. Drawing from linguistic theory and methods, this article presents an overview of automated text analysis, providing integration of linguistic …
The Sociology of Consumption: A Global Approach
Megamarketing
Megamarketing is the process by which a firm attempts to shape its structural and institutional environment. It can be pursued through attempts to manage regulatory, normative, and cultural‐cognitive legitimacy, often with appeals to a variety of stakeholders including public policy makers, journalists, customers, and the general public.
Branding Disaster: Reestablishing Trust through the Ideological Containment of Systemic Risk Anxieties
Drawing from literary criticism and institutional theory, this article analyzes the public discourse surrounding the Exxon Valdez spill of 1989 and BP Gulf Spill of 2010. While industrial accidents such as oil spills can erode consumers' trust in experts, a macrolevel analysis reveals that media coverage of such events ultimately contains the anxieties that are sparked by initial news coverage. The brandcentric disaster myths generated by media c…
Framing the Game: Assessing the Impact of Cultural Representations on Consumer Perceptions of Legitimacy
The purpose of this article is to understand how media frames affect consumer judgments of legitimacy. Because frames exist on the sociocultural and individual level, our research takes a multimethod approach to this question. On the sociocultural level, we conduct a content analysis of operant media frames for discussing online gambling and perform an event analysis, finding that a shift in consumer judgments follows an abrupt shift in frame. Th…
Semiotic Structure and the Legitimation of Consumption Practices: The Case of Casino Gambling
How do changes in public discourse and regulatory structure affect the acceptance of a consumption practice? Previous research on legitimacy in consumer behavior has focused on the consumer reception of legitimizing discourse rather than on the historical process of legitimation itself. This study examines the influence of changes in the institutional environment over time on the meaning structures that influence consumer perception and practice.…
The Intersecting Roles of Consumer and Producer: A Critical Perspective on Co‐production, Co‐creation and Prosumption
The terms ‘co‐creation’, ‘co‐production’, and ‘prosumption’ refer to situations in which consumers collaborate with companies or with other consumers to produce things of value. These situations sometimes appear to blur the traditional roles of ‘producer’ and ‘consumer’. Building on Marx's distinction between ‘use value’ and ‘exchange value’, we argue that, when consumers perform tasks normally handled by the company, this does not necessarily re…
The Consumer as Foucauldian “Object of Knowledge”
This article adapts and extends Michel Foucault’s theorization of technologies of power, originally formulated with regard to the paradigm of the prisoner, to the paradigm of the consumer. Using examples of marketing practices and Internet technologies employed by Amazon.com, the author explores how sight-based technologies of power—individuation and surveillance—shape consumer agency and, employing the Panopticon metaphor, theorizes the link bet…
Semiotic Structure and the Legitimation of Consumption Practices: The Case of Casino Gambling
How do changes in public discourse and regulatory structure affect the acceptance of a consumption practice? Previous research on legitimacy in consumer behavior has focused on the consumer reception of legitimizing discourse rather than on the historical process of legitimation itself. This study examines the influence of changes in the institutional environment over time on the meaning structures that influence consumer perception and practice.…
The Intersecting Roles of Consumer and Producer: A Critical Perspective on Co‐production, Co‐creation and Prosumption
The terms ‘co‐creation’, ‘co‐production’, and ‘prosumption’ refer to situations in which consumers collaborate with companies or with other consumers to produce things of value. These situations sometimes appear to blur the traditional roles of ‘producer’ and ‘consumer’. Building on Marx's distinction between ‘use value’ and ‘exchange value’, we argue that, when consumers perform tasks normally handled by the company, this does not necessarily re…
Automated Text Analysis for Consumer Research
The amount of digital text available for analysis by consumer researchers has risen dramatically. Consumer discussions on the internet, product reviews, and digital archives of news articles and press releases are just a few potential sources for insights about consumer attitudes, interaction, and culture. Drawing from linguistic theory and methods, this article presents an overview of automated text analysis, providing integration of linguistic …
Framing the Game: Assessing the Impact of Cultural Representations on Consumer Perceptions of Legitimacy
The purpose of this article is to understand how media frames affect consumer judgments of legitimacy. Because frames exist on the sociocultural and individual level, our research takes a multimethod approach to this question. On the sociocultural level, we conduct a content analysis of operant media frames for discussing online gambling and perform an event analysis, finding that a shift in consumer judgments follows an abrupt shift in frame. Th…
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…
Branding Disaster: Reestablishing Trust through the Ideological Containment of Systemic Risk Anxieties
Drawing from literary criticism and institutional theory, this article analyzes the public discourse surrounding the Exxon Valdez spill of 1989 and BP Gulf Spill of 2010. While industrial accidents such as oil spills can erode consumers' trust in experts, a macrolevel analysis reveals that media coverage of such events ultimately contains the anxieties that are sparked by initial news coverage. The brandcentric disaster myths generated by media c…
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…
The Politicization of Objects: Meaning and Materiality in The U.S. Cannabis Market
In this article, we theorize how marketplace objects and their properties facilitate market legitimacy. Adopting assemblage theory, we examine a politically contested market—the U.S. recreational cannabis market—using retail sales data, public opinion polls and surveys, mainstream media coverage, and interviews with producers and consumers. We find that objects convey meaning in the market by creating sensory or discursive alignment between new o…
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…
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…
Social Emotions and the Legitimation of the Fertility Technology Market
Using the sociology of emotions, we investigate the role of social emotions as a legitimating force in the market. In a longitudinal study of the media coverage surrounding US fertility technologies, we find that legitimation involves the establishment of hierarchies among feeling rules, which dictate what social emotions are expressed toward markets, consumers, and technologies. We delineate three mechanisms (polarizing, reifying, and transformi…
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…
The Market Dynamics of Collective Ignorance and Spiraling Risk
In some markets, offerings become riskier over time as producers introduce new versions that are made more affordable by increasing their risk. Existing theories suggest consumers adopt riskier versions either because they become more risk tolerant or they trade higher risk for lower price-both of which presume consumers know the risks. We reveal a third explanation: evolving market dynamics that increasingly encourage consumer inattention to ris…
One Brand, Many Trajectories: Narrative Navigation in Transmedia
In an era of unprecedented consumer access to media and the tools to control narrative delivery, speed, and exposure to transmedia content, there is no longer the illusion of a cohesive narrative managed by a recognized singular author or unified authorial voice. Instead, consumers carve their own trajectories through brand narratives. Our multimethod inquiry of television series viewing, based on a combination of interviews, diaries, video recor…
The Consumer as Foucauldian “Object of Knowledge”
This article adapts and extends Michel Foucault’s theorization of technologies of power, originally formulated with regard to the paradigm of the prisoner, to the paradigm of the consumer. Using examples of marketing practices and Internet technologies employed by Amazon.com, the author explores how sight-based technologies of power—individuation and surveillance—shape consumer agency and, employing the Panopticon metaphor, theorizes the link bet…
How to Sustain Sustainable Practices? The Journey Toward Zero Waste Lifestyle
Sustaining sustainable practices in a market whose infrastructure continues to prioritize unsustainable options is not easy. It becomes even more challenging when living sustainably involves interwoven practices that are deeply embedded and interconnected. We focus on one such system of sustainable practices and explore consumers' journey toward Zero Waste lifestyle-a system of practices that is not yet institutionalized. Using a qualitative mult…
How Algorithms Constrain Consumer Experience
Prior literature is yet to explain how algorithms systematically constrain consumer experience (CX). To address this issue, we conducted a multi-method ethnographic study of consumers using fitness tracking software. We draw on the information science literature to demonstrate that the constitutive properties of information technology (IT) that underlie algorithms result in a set of restrictive fundamental interactional mechanisms imposed through…
Consumption Solidarity: Healing Cultural Trauma Following Marketplace Violence
Targeted acts of violence in the marketplace disrupt the status quo and unravel the very fabric of community and consumption spaces. Despite the growing frequency of these shocking events, they remain underexplored in consumer research, particularly regarding their impact on consumer well-being and collective welfare. This research explores how individual reactions and choices in the face of incomprehensible violence can pave the way for consumer…
Digital Therapy for Negative Consumption Experiences: The Impact of Emotional and Rational Reviews on Review Writers
This research tests a solution for consumers to recover faster from negative experiences. We identify this solution by examining how the manner in which review writers express their emotions and rational thoughts in their reviews causally influences review writers. The results of five studies (field data and experiments) show that, similar to writing about traumatic life events, when review writers express both emotional and rational aspects in r…
The Consumer as Foucauldian “Object of Knowledge”
This article adapts and extends Michel Foucault’s theorization of technologies of power, originally formulated with regard to the paradigm of the prisoner, to the paradigm of the consumer. Using examples of marketing practices and Internet technologies employed by Amazon.com, the author explores how sight-based technologies of power—individuation and surveillance—shape consumer agency and, employing the Panopticon metaphor, theorizes the link bet…
The Intersecting Roles of Consumer and Producer: A Critical Perspective on Co‐production, Co‐creation and Prosumption
The terms ‘co‐creation’, ‘co‐production’, and ‘prosumption’ refer to situations in which consumers collaborate with companies or with other consumers to produce things of value. These situations sometimes appear to blur the traditional roles of ‘producer’ and ‘consumer’. Building on Marx's distinction between ‘use value’ and ‘exchange value’, we argue that, when consumers perform tasks normally handled by the company, this does not necessarily re…
Semiotic Structure and the Legitimation of Consumption Practices: The Case of Casino Gambling
How do changes in public discourse and regulatory structure affect the acceptance of a consumption practice? Previous research on legitimacy in consumer behavior has focused on the consumer reception of legitimizing discourse rather than on the historical process of legitimation itself. This study examines the influence of changes in the institutional environment over time on the meaning structures that influence consumer perception and practice.…
Framing the Game: Assessing the Impact of Cultural Representations on Consumer Perceptions of Legitimacy
The purpose of this article is to understand how media frames affect consumer judgments of legitimacy. Because frames exist on the sociocultural and individual level, our research takes a multimethod approach to this question. On the sociocultural level, we conduct a content analysis of operant media frames for discussing online gambling and perform an event analysis, finding that a shift in consumer judgments follows an abrupt shift in frame. Th…
Branding Disaster: Reestablishing Trust through the Ideological Containment of Systemic Risk Anxieties
Drawing from literary criticism and institutional theory, this article analyzes the public discourse surrounding the Exxon Valdez spill of 1989 and BP Gulf Spill of 2010. While industrial accidents such as oil spills can erode consumers' trust in experts, a macrolevel analysis reveals that media coverage of such events ultimately contains the anxieties that are sparked by initial news coverage. The brandcentric disaster myths generated by media c…
Megamarketing
Megamarketing is the process by which a firm attempts to shape its structural and institutional environment. It can be pursued through attempts to manage regulatory, normative, and cultural‐cognitive legitimacy, often with appeals to a variety of stakeholders including public policy makers, journalists, customers, and the general public.
The Sociology of Consumption: A Global Approach
Automated Text Analysis for Consumer Research
The amount of digital text available for analysis by consumer researchers has risen dramatically. Consumer discussions on the internet, product reviews, and digital archives of news articles and press releases are just a few potential sources for insights about consumer attitudes, interaction, and culture. Drawing from linguistic theory and methods, this article presents an overview of automated text analysis, providing integration of linguistic …
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…
The Politicization of Objects: Meaning and Materiality in The U.S. Cannabis Market
In this article, we theorize how marketplace objects and their properties facilitate market legitimacy. Adopting assemblage theory, we examine a politically contested market—the U.S. recreational cannabis market—using retail sales data, public opinion polls and surveys, mainstream media coverage, and interviews with producers and consumers. We find that objects convey meaning in the market by creating sensory or discursive alignment between new o…
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…
One Brand, Many Trajectories: Narrative Navigation in Transmedia
In an era of unprecedented consumer access to media and the tools to control narrative delivery, speed, and exposure to transmedia content, there is no longer the illusion of a cohesive narrative managed by a recognized singular author or unified authorial voice. Instead, consumers carve their own trajectories through brand narratives. Our multimethod inquiry of television series viewing, based on a combination of interviews, diaries, video recor…
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…
Social Emotions and the Legitimation of the Fertility Technology Market
Using the sociology of emotions, we investigate the role of social emotions as a legitimating force in the market. In a longitudinal study of the media coverage surrounding US fertility technologies, we find that legitimation involves the establishment of hierarchies among feeling rules, which dictate what social emotions are expressed toward markets, consumers, and technologies. We delineate three mechanisms (polarizing, reifying, and transformi…
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…
Digital Therapy for Negative Consumption Experiences: The Impact of Emotional and Rational Reviews on Review Writers
This research tests a solution for consumers to recover faster from negative experiences. We identify this solution by examining how the manner in which review writers express their emotions and rational thoughts in their reviews causally influences review writers. The results of five studies (field data and experiments) show that, similar to writing about traumatic life events, when review writers express both emotional and rational aspects in r…
The Market Dynamics of Collective Ignorance and Spiraling Risk
In some markets, offerings become riskier over time as producers introduce new versions that are made more affordable by increasing their risk. Existing theories suggest consumers adopt riskier versions either because they become more risk tolerant or they trade higher risk for lower price-both of which presume consumers know the risks. We reveal a third explanation: evolving market dynamics that increasingly encourage consumer inattention to ris…
Tournaments of Destruction: Consumers Battling for Visibility
This research introduces tournaments of destruction, defined as staged and ritualized social performances involving entertainment and competitive rivalry in which consumers destroy valued material objects before a focused gathering. The conceptualization of tournaments of destruction is borne from a qualitative, phenomenological-based case study of low-income, low-power Black African male youth, who as members of the Izikhothane subculture in Sow…
From Order to Chaos: How Consumers Lose Control of Risks (and of Themselves)
Consumers are exposed to a growing array of risks in an increasingly complex and uncertain world. Prior research has shown that they can navigate and even benefit from certain risks through edgework. However, the proliferation of credit and debt has led many into over-indebtedness—a dysfunctional condition in which control over risk is lost. This study examines the narratives and lived experiences of over-indebted consumers through the lens of ch…
Moralizing Everyday Consumption: The Case of Self-Care
Morality, appraisals of right and wrong, is central to consumers’ identities and decisions. Even everyday consumption choices can be subject to moral judgments and require moral justifications. When and how do consumers moralize formerly taken-for-granted consumption practices? Considering self-care consumption in the United States, which includes practices that range from bathing to dieting to meditating to vacationing, this article examines the…
How to Sustain Sustainable Practices? The Journey Toward Zero Waste Lifestyle
Sustaining sustainable practices in a market whose infrastructure continues to prioritize unsustainable options is not easy. It becomes even more challenging when living sustainably involves interwoven practices that are deeply embedded and interconnected. We focus on one such system of sustainable practices and explore consumers' journey toward Zero Waste lifestyle-a system of practices that is not yet institutionalized. Using a qualitative mult…
How Algorithms Constrain Consumer Experience
Prior literature is yet to explain how algorithms systematically constrain consumer experience (CX). To address this issue, we conducted a multi-method ethnographic study of consumers using fitness tracking software. We draw on the information science literature to demonstrate that the constitutive properties of information technology (IT) that underlie algorithms result in a set of restrictive fundamental interactional mechanisms imposed through…
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…
Consumption Solidarity: Healing Cultural Trauma Following Marketplace Violence
Targeted acts of violence in the marketplace disrupt the status quo and unravel the very fabric of community and consumption spaces. Despite the growing frequency of these shocking events, they remain underexplored in consumer research, particularly regarding their impact on consumer well-being and collective welfare. This research explores how individual reactions and choices in the face of incomprehensible violence can pave the way for consumer…
From Adaptation to Disruption: Structured Ambivalence as a Catalyst for Consumer-Led Institutional Work
This study explores how consumers respond to the ambivalence sparked by conflicting institutional norms in contexts such as the United States market for donor conception (i.e. egg, sperm, embryo). While prior research has framed responses to ambivalence as “coping,” we theorize these responses as consumer-led institutional work—i.e., active efforts to adapt to or challenge institutional norms. Drawing on interviews, archival narratives, and case …
Psychology (17 works) · Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification (14 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Business (12 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · Social Psychology (9 works) · Law (6 works) · Legitimacy (6 works) · Digital Marketing and Social Media (5 works)