Suchergebnisse

With the radical growth in the ubiquity of digital platforms, the sharing economy is here to stay. This Handbook explores the nature and direction of the sharing economy, interrogating its key dynamics and evolution over the past decade and critiquing its effect on society.

The chapters in this volume are selected from the best papers presented at the 11th Annual Consumer Culture Theory Conference held in Lille, France in July 2016. The diverse interpretive research and theory represented in this volume provides the reader with intellectually stimulating opportunities to examine the intersections between a variety of topics that represent the cutting edge in consumer research. These studies draw on an array of qualitative methodologies and the substantive topics represent crucial issues for our times.

This volume presents selected papers from the 7th Annual Consumer Culture Theory Conference held at Oxford University in August, 2012. The 18 papers in the volume together capture the latest research within this qualitative paradigm of consumer studies. Topics addressed cover a wide gamut including immigrant consumption experiences, gift-giving, sharing, transgressive gender roles, attachments to special possessions in online games and real life, the homeless consumer experience, disposition of possessions, privacy, metaphor analysis, sustainable consumption, alcohol consumption, cosmetics usage, and the negative consequences of sponsoring children in the less affluent world.

This ethnographic study in Qatar and United Arab Emirates addresses a particular Islamic consumptionscape as well as a related commodified practice: that of Arab hospitality. This much vaunted Arab virtue is examined in three contexts: home hospitality, commercial hospitality, and hospitality toward foreign guest workers and visitors. We find that home hospitality is largely extended inward and involves sharing in with close same-sex friends and family in a tournament of status, while hospitality toward foreigners is largely either nonexistent or outsourced to other foreigners. These patterns are explained in terms of hyper-ritualization of that which is most in doubt, namely, multiculturalism and patriarchal authority. We argue that this same pattern of hyper-ritualization may apply in other ritual contexts like American Thanksgiving celebrations.

Based on an ethnographic study of American garages, we develop a model of the roles that liminal spaces perform in the management of possessions and their meanings. We find that the garage serves as a transitional space that links the useful and useless, female and male, clean and dirty, sacred and profane, and past, present, and future. We also propose that the garage can be a de facto museum and prosthetic memory device, as well as a link across generations of the family. Based on these findings, we offer a model of liminal household spaces and their dynamic role in making and managing meanings of everyday life.

The chapters in this volume are selected from the best papers presented at the 10th Annual consumer culture theory conference held at the University of Arkansas, USA in June 2015. The diverse interpretive research and theory represented in this volume provides the reader with intellectually stimulating opportunities to examine the intersections between a variety of topics that represent the cutting edge in consumer research. These studies draw on an array of qualitative methodologies and the substantive topics represent crucial issues for our times.