Russell Belk is one of the most distinguished thought leaders in marketing and consumer research. He is also one of its most distinctive. This paper examines the distinctiveness of Russell Belk's remarkable writing style, arguing that it exemplifies the `academic gothic'. Five characteristically gothic traits are found in his published corpus — excess, monstrosity, irony, supernaturalism, doubling — and the implications for writing marketing research are considered.
AbstractLocal food systems (LFSs) are complex and diverse social structures. The processes that influence the formation and evolution of LFSs are obscure, relatively uncoordinated, and somewhat mysterious. This study develops a stronger understanding of such processes through a qualitative exploration of the influence of routine practice work at the organization level on the entrepreneurial development of two distinct LFSs in the Southwest region of the United States: southeastern Arizona and Albuquerque−Santa Fe. We gathered data between August 2014 and September 2017 through semistructured interviews with and direct observations of 53 local food practitioners operating in one of the two LFSs. Theoretical principles of institutional entrepreneurship, embedded agency, and practice work guided the study. The findings reveal three forms of ingenuity (technological, organizational, policy) that regularly emerge through the day‐to‐day organization‐level work of local food practitioners. We argue that the system‐level influence of these forms, whether intentional or not, are indicators of the embedded agency of the practitioners and their capacities to serve as institutional entrepreneurs. We discuss implications for both practice and future research.
AbstractEntrepreneurial activities are sometimes framed as market‐based strategies that compromise the integrity of the movement against the global agrifood system. Other times, scholars have argued that entrepreneurship is a critical component of local food system viability. This study helps reconcile these conflicting views through a qualitative exploration of the variations in the commercially and socially oriented features of local food entrepreneurship in the southeastern Arizona local food system. Researchers gathered data between August 2014 and December 2016 through semistructured interviews with and direct observations of 36 southeastern Arizona local food entrepreneurs. A conceptual continuum that articulates the variations between commercial and social entrepreneurship according to market condition, mission, resource mobilization, and performance measurement guides the exploration. The findings reveal commercial and social variations in local food entrepreneurship to be assorted, yet synergistic enactments of the economic, environmental, and social conditions and principles that characterize the southeastern Arizona local food system. The findings push the local food entrepreneurship narrative beyond the limitations of a rigid activist‐market dichotomy by illuminating the synergistic complexities that influence the form and function of local food systems. The article discusses implications for both local food practitioners and scholars.
AbstractThis research directs our attention to the dynamics surrounding the changing cultural understanding of the place we call home. Traditionally, the home is regarded as a place of singularization that is to be aligned with the homeowner's unique identity. This traditional meaning has come to be confronted with a contradictory understanding of the home as a marketplace asset. Homeowners come to experience a market-reflected gaze that shuns singularization while driving homeowners to exhibit expertise in aligning their homes with marketplace standards. Professionalization of the home, through marketplace expertise and standardization, discourages personalization, leading to an experience of disorientation with the place of home. In this ethnography of the home renovation marketplace, we build on the concept of 'dysplacement' whereby this contradictory cultural understanding of the home disrupts the homeowner's ability to achieve implacement. The concept of dysplacement and the corresponding place disorientation experience has the potential to enrich our theoretical understanding of place by integrating the cultural meaning of place as a domain with marketplace dynamics and individual consumer practices surrounding place.
Abstract 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 relationship by creating patterns of relationship change based on equilibrium or transformation; three actions disable the relationship via patterns of vicious cycles or conflict. Overall, consumers do relationship work as they act to navigate tensions, thereby creating, maintaining, changing, and terminating their brand relationships. This research has implications for current theory on brand relationship templates, dysfunctional brand relationships, and customer relationship management.
Abstract 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 this tension spurs consumers to pursue self-authorization—the reflexive reconfiguration of the self in relation to the social world—through which consumers grant themselves permission to continue consuming cultural difference. Four consumer self-authorization strategies are identified: reforming, restraining, recontextualizing, and rationalizing. Each strategy relies upon an amalgam of countervailing moral interpretations about acts of consuming difference, informing ideologies about the power relationships between cultures, and emergent subject positions that situate the consuming self in relation to others whose differences are packaged for consumption. Findings show notable conditions under which each self-authorization strategy is deployed, alongside consumers' capacity to adjust and recombine different strategies as they navigate changing sociocultural and idiographic conditions. Overall, this study advances understanding of how consumers navigate the resurgent politics of marketized cultural diversity in an era of woke capitalism.
AbstractDiffusion is traditionally examined at a macro level, measured by adoption (e.g., sales), or at a micro level, assessed by consumer characteristics (e.g., adopter types). We address diffusion at a meso level focusing on how a practice disseminates across extended time and cross-cultural and cross-national space. We conduct an historical analysis and ethnographic inquiry of the dispersion of an indigenous practice, surfing, and the consequences of practice diffusion on practice reproduction. Our data suggest practice diffusion is not the wholesale adoption of a practice. Rather, a practice emerges across diverse cultural and national contexts through adaptation, fueled by processes of codification and transposition. We find that the movement of practice elements (meanings, materials, and competences) and their dynamic linkages (transposition, codification, and adaptation) enable a practice to (re)emerge across broad historic epochs and complex sociocultural landscapes. This study reveals how a practice evolves through shifts in power between practice carriers and noncarriers and results in distinct forms of reproduction (demarcation, imitation, acculturation, and innovation) that can mask the cultural genealogy of a practice. The continual maintenance and evolution of a practice depend on its strength of alignment and embeddedness within systems of practices that make up the social fabric of everyday life.
AbstractIn 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 recordings followed by member-check interviews and online forum analyses, identifies two key forces that guide narrative navigation: how consumers manage a text's gravitational pull and its permeability to transmedia content. We find that consumers shape their own trajectories by adopting and/or moving between nine documented narrative positions. This more nuanced understanding of narrative consumption in a transmedia environment offers new insights for the study of narrative brand spaces and brand storytelling.
