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Offering a novel view on morality in consumption, this book creatively examines how the seven deadly sins - pride, greed, lust, gluttony, envy, wrath, and sloth - are embodied in contemporary consumer society. Each of the seven chapters summarizes previous literature of the sins across disciplinary boundaries, and explores how consumption is likely to change in the future

Purpose
– This paper aims to show how social needs – the need for integration and need for distinctiveness – guide Finnish young adults' mundane consumption behaviors.


Design/methodology/approach
– The study draws on literature on the fundamental importance of social needs for people's social well-being and the healthy development of the young. The research uses qualitative methods, leaning on an interpretive approach that regards social needs as subjectively experienced and socially constructed phenomena. The empirical data were sourced from 56 Finnish university students' narratives on their daily consumption behaviors.


Findings
– The findings present five categories: "Socializing through consumption", "Consuming to affiliate", "Uniqueness through consumption", "Consuming to show off" and "Obedient consumption", which are further linked to social needs.


Social implications
– The study opens up the ways social needs are connected to consumption behaviors, for example showing how quotidian consumption objects, such as branded clothes, may be used to satisfy social needs in a way that enables young adults to make independent and distinctive consumption choices. On the other hand, in regard to young consumers' psychological and social well-being, the study finds that striving to satisfy social needs could also lead to destructive behaviors, such as alcohol consumption.


Originality/value
– The current research highlights the unavoidable importance of social needs in young adults' mundane consumption and how they strive to satisfy them. Thereby, it yields implications for social well-being by shedding light on the pressures and possibilities faced by young adults in their everyday life.

This study presents a novel conceptual illustration of the non-voluntary anti-consumption practices that evolve in poor circumstances. The study brings a complementary and contrasting perspective to current discussions on anti-consumption by clarifying the understanding of non-voluntary anti-consumption practices and market resistance. Three conceptual elements—hidden, repressed and innovative—are identified to characterize non-voluntary anti-consumption practices; these elements are different from those of voluntary anti-consumption, which are collective, active and/or self-expressive. Applying the social constructivist practice-based approach, the analysis shows how the three types of non-voluntary anti-consumption practices—engaging in simple life, mastering consumerism and exploiting systems—are intertwined with other social practices and how they enable the poor to hold agency.

AbstractIn this paper, we revise the concept of neolocalism by showing how companies that sex up rural places update and add novel nuances to neolocalist marketing. As the positive aspects drawn from tradition, stories and history are at the center of neolocalism, we aim to highlight how the usually negatively perceived images of the rural may be turned into something positive, trendy, desirable, and eventually sexy in the marketing of rural areas and businesses. The data of this study consists of nine company interviews and four consumer focus groups (n = 17). Our findings show how three features—namely, the hybridization of rural and urban, generational experience of millennials, and minimalist visualization—combined construct ideas for new image creation for rural areas. The concept of sexing up places ushers in new possibilities for rural actors and regions by reducing the distinction between rural and urban via visual imagery that is a particularly good match for the generational experience of the millennials. In this way, the study offers a novel way to tackle the challenges faced by rural areas, such as depopulation and image loss.

In this study, we theorise the pluri-temporality of market-mediated spaces. By taking the Finnish sauna as an empirical context, we analyse the sauna as a pluri-temporal space whose momentary existences are actualised by slow and fast spatio-temporal movements flowing simultaneously at different speeds. In so doing, we advance the concept of the saunascape as a tool to grasp the temporal and spatial dynamics that continuously reproduce the space. The empirical data include interviews conducted in sauna departments at five different hotels, focus group discussions generated at a commercial sauna restaurant, and online articles published in the Finnish Sauna-Magazine between 2018 and 2021. The findings show that slow spatio-temporal flows produce saunascapes that are characterised by rituals and authentic spirit. Fast spatio-temporal flows create saunascapes characterised by meaningful experiences and future envisioning. The momentary actualisation of a saunascape is always unique and ephemeral, varying according to whether the slow or fast flows are more pronounced. The study ends with a conceptual discussion of the potential of the concept of (sauna)scape to illustrate the pluri-temporal and multifaceted space.