Suchergebnisse

This article explores advocative work of third-sector community food providers in Scotland. The article argues these organisations can contribute to tackling household food insecurity through their advocative work, recognising that state-led policy on household income is needed. Capturing the advocacy of these organisations, rather than focussing solely on their service provision can provide insight that is largely missing from existing community food scholarships. The research adopts a quasi-ethnographic qualitative approach with 16 grassroots community food providers and 5 meso-level support organisations. The findings identify advocacy practices undertaken, targeted at political and public audiences and national and local institutional layers. It highlights the tensions of this work, including fears of exacerbating a failing system. The findings also evidence a complementary, symbiotic, and reciprocally strengthening relationship between service provision and advocacy by third-sector organisations. These contributions demonstrate the potential of this sector to contribute to social change required to address the root causes of household food insecurity.

This article develops understanding of consumer work at the primary level of sociality in the context of social networking sites. Drawing on ethnographic interviews and netnography, we reveal these sites as distinctive spaces of consumer-to-consumer work. To explain this work in consumption, we introduce the concept of social labour which we define as the means by which consumers add value to their identities and social relationships through producing and sharing cultural and affective content. This is driven by observational vigilance and conspicuous presence, and is rewarded by social value. This draws attention to the variety of work consumers enact within their social lives, indicating that consumer work is broader than previously acknowledged.

Abstract