ABSTRACT Synthetic testosterone, is an object born of heteronormative sexual anxiety, invented for use by cisgender men. Today, synthetic testosterone functions, as an element of gender-affirming healthcare for specific segments of the trans population. We approach testosterone, throughout this paper, as a technical object and as such a raw material of gender in South Africa. Providing a close reading

(2021). Letting go: economies of detachment. Consumption Markets & Culture: Vol. 24, Economies of Detachment, pp. 307-312.

ABSTRACT If ever a literary genre were made for consumer research, that literary genre is allegory. The word comes from the Ancient Greek allegoreo, meaning to speak of the other in the marketplace. Building on the pioneering research of Barbara B. Stern, this article considers the character and characteristics of allegorical storytelling. It does so by means of an empirical study of a richly storied

ABSTRACT This article considers the way in which high-end beauty services in Johannesburg use a particular notion of “Africa” to brand themselves. Globally, the beauty industry is designed around an idea of indulgence, with pampering posited as a means of self-care, survival and joy. Marketing for beauty destinations often draws on an Orientalist idea of the “mysterious east,” invoking the stereotyped

ABSTRACT This article synthesizes previous literature on consumption, surrounding matters of aesthetic deliberation to offer a conceptual discussion of consumer-cultural aestheticization processes. Our main argument is twofold. First, we seek to re-orient the discussion of “the aesthetic” (i.e. something that is aesthetic) toward the processes that render something aesthetic (i.e. how something is

ABSTRACT As a result of Covid-19 outbreak, surgical facemasks first emerged as a pandemic icon to then expand into a marketplace icon, with substantial transformations in their meanings, uses, and commercial expressions. This essay contends that facemasks have become a (post-)pandemic marketplace icon by articulating tensions in the socio-cultural, the public media, and the economic sphere. Relying

ABSTRACT This study adds to the growing body of research on consumption in global mobility, illustrating how mobile consumers navigate their economic reality by managing relationships with banks in different countries. Previous research argues that global mobility enables the liquid consumption logic that is access based, ephemeral and dematerialised. Drawing upon insights from 31 in-depth interviews

ABSTRACT Bringing together research from consumption, materiality, and economic sociology, I explain how real estate stagers attempt to construct persuasive spaces. I conceptualize real estate staging as a judgment device that influences economic decision-making in a market of singularities. Using data from the content analysis of nearly 200 staging documents, as well as from interviews and observations

ABSTRACT In line with previous research, we consider financial education to be a form of governmentality in the age of financialization. Applying sociological theory of emotions, we investigate the role emotion play in the attempt to govern citizens in Swedish financial education. The material consists of interviews with organizers of the Swedish Like Your Personal Finance educational network and observations

ABSTRACT We present an invited interview with Professor James Fitchett (University of Leicester) on the idea of dystopia and dystopic tendencies in the historical moment of the Covid-19 pandemic.1 With his wonderfully nuanced background in psychoanalytic theory and a keen interest in understanding market phenomena critically through ideology, paradox, fantasy, simulation, narcissism and sadism among

(2020). Materializing difference: consumer culture, politics, and ethnicity among Romanian Roma. Consumption Markets & Culture. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT Consumer research has posited an ambivalent role of choice in consumer empowerment, from liberating and including to disciplining and totalising. This article provides empirical evidence for this ambivalence and nuances how consumers navigate the liminal space between expert authority and consumer autonomy. We investigate the role of choice in consumer empowerment through an ethnographic study

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to explore how digitally-enabled food provisioning platforms reconfigure households’ food consumption. Taking a market studies approach, and drawing on an ethnographic study of 15 households signing up to meal box schemes, the paper examines how meal box schemes, as market devices, work towards materially-semiotically organising household food consumption. Analysis

ABSTRACT Christmas markets, originating in Germany in the Middle Ages, have transformed from small-scale, local consumption spaces into a global icon for Christmas consumption behaviours. What has facilitated this rise to a global cultural commodity for experiential consumption? Tracing the history of Christmas markets, we highlight two characteristics that have facilitated their iconicity: openness

ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper is to study the place of detachment processes in market innovation. The authors draw on the case of short food supply chains, especially those established to provide local produce for mass catering. They characterise short food supply chains as “market innovations through withdrawal”, i.e. market innovations aiming at detaching farmers and consumers from the middlemen

ABSTRACT Minimalism is a growing consumerist approach based on deliberate detachment from one’s material needs and acquisitions. The aim of this paper is to examine a singular case of minimalism which has developed in the sports sector, based on the stylization by detachment of the practice of hiking: ultralight or lightweight backpacking. While the sports market is traditionally characterized by the

(2021). Taste. Consumption Markets & Culture: Vol. 24, Taste, pp. 1-5.

ABSTRACT Antoine Hennion is a Professor of Sociology at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation (Mines-Paris Tech, PSL/CNRS). He has been researching taste and cultural practices through a pragmatic lens for three decades. He has developed an original and impactful theoretical framework bridging the Actor-Network Theory to Cultural Studies. More precisely, he reconceptualized the notions of mediation

ABSTRACT Decreasing our use of energy resources constitutes a major detachment challenge for contemporary society. This article investigates the involvement in this challenge of a recent public policy instrument, the Energy Savings Certificates (ESC) system. It focuses on a particular application in the impledementation of boiler scrappage schemes, through which consumers are invited to replace an

ABSTRACT Gin is far more than just a juniper-flavored alcoholic beverage distilled or infused with botanicals. This spirit boasts an incredibly rich (albeit tumultuous) cultural and social history, and its identity has shifted considerably over the centuries. Born as a medical treatment in the eleventh century, rising in popularity, especially in the Low Countries and in Germany, between the fourteenth

ABSTRACT This paper considers two cases from the “unpackaged movement” as examples of market detachment: the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s campaign to develop “a new plastics economy” and Source, a chain of zero waste bulk stores in Australia. Despite their differences, both these cases depend on tacit beliefs about material responsibilities, that is: assumptions about what single use plastic packaging

ABSTRACT While studies have described the role of international trade fairs in building new industries, few have analyzed the reverse: that of companies detaching from fairs, and the contexts in which such events disappear. We study the processes of attachment and detachment to trade fairs in the television programming and distribution industry, using two polar cases: a recently created trade fair

ABSTRACT This article explores the paradoxical staging of experiences of “inhospitality,” taking shape as commercialised opportunities for individuals, willing to be voluntarily subjected to kidnapping. Such “extreme” leisure is facilitated by companies specialising in simulated captivities of clients. These simulations, which blend forms of performance with practices of violence, are situated theoretically

ABSTRACT Consumers are increasingly asked to “empty out their closets,” to “de-clutter” or in other ways detach themselves from the textile surplus of their wardrobes. In this article, fashion is examined as a process of detachment. Building on ethnographic wardrobe interviews, wardrobe clearances and group discussions with consumers, detachment is viewed as a fundamental, yet underexamined, process

(2020). Embodied research methods. Consumption Markets & Culture. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT This study investigates the impact of systemic oppression on a marginalized group and their response to it through market-based choices of careers. The marginalized group consists of single, semi-closeted, middle-aged Irish gay men. Their lives have been severely impaired by the Catholic condemnation of homosexuality. Through an oral history approach and by considering the under-theorized

ABSTRACT A growing body of literature discusses consumer responsibilization under neoliberalism. However, after the 2008–9 financial crisis, countertendencies emerged, which have not been sufficiently theorised. Analysing post-crisis mortgage regulatory discourse in the United Kingdom, Hungary and Switzerland, this paper examines these countertendencies and proposes the concept of “consumer de-responsibilization

ABSTRACT The work that market research companies conduct on behalf of their clients is often understood in terms of market intermediaries that help clients identify both marketing strategies and new marketing opportunities. This article challenges this understanding by interpreting market research work in terms of detachment from the market. Drawing on the example of an experimental market research

ABSTRACT Combining the performance theoretical tradition that acknowledges the co-construction of service encounters with the concept of consumer tactics, this study exposes the ways in which the scripted theaters of everyday service interaction turn into micropolitical playing fields in which consumers creatively make use of situational offerings. The dramatistic analysis of service narratives identifies

Abstract The woman’s handbag is an iconic consumer artefact layered with meaning. Ideologies, economics, culture, social statuses, and identities converge in this object. Superfluous but fetishized luxury, essential useful tool, communications device, fashion arbiter, all this and more. To shed light on this fascinating artefact and its journey to a contemporary marketplace icon, we first clarify how

ABSTRACT Experiences are not limited to the apparent. Something absent can invade one’s perception of the world and become heavier and more forceful than what is present. Absent material can feel imposing, even commanding and restricting the consumer’s interaction with the world. In this study, we investigated the cosplayers – consumers at geek conventions who voluntarily dress as a fictional character