John Schouten | Memorial University of Newfoundland (original) (raw)

Books by John Schouten

Papers by John Schouten

Handbook of Research on Marketing and Corporate Social Responsibility, 2014

Consumption Markets & Culture, 2016

Identity construction involves accumulating cultural, social, and symbolic capital, with initial ... more Identity construction involves accumulating cultural, social, and symbolic capital, with initial endowments being accrued through socialization into one’s habitus. This research explores the experiences of individuals that feel a lack of capital, which leads to ambiguity regarding their identities and places in the world. Through in-depth interviews, this interpretive research shows that such individuals may turn to fandom for gaining status and belonging. Fandoms are consumption fields with clear, limited forms of cultural capital. Through serial fandom and engagement with fandom in different ways, individuals were able to learn the skill of identifying and accruing relevant cultural capital. The skill became decontextualized and recontextualized, allowing individuals to transcend fandom and accrue general forms of cultural capital. Learning the skill aids individuals in dealing with the simultaneously debilitating and empowering freedom of contemporary consumer culture. Moreover, gaining cultural capital could be altogether developing into the form of the process we describe.

Journal of Consumer Research, 2014

Certain institutions traditionally have had broad socializing influence over their members, provi... more Certain institutions traditionally have had broad socializing influence over their members, providing templates for identity that comprehend all aspects of life from the existential and moral to the mundanely material. Marketization and detraditionalization undermine that socializing role. This study examines the consequences when, for some members, such an institution loses its authority to structure identity. With a hermeneutical method and a perspective grounded in Bourdieu’s theories of fields and capital, this research investigates the experiences of disaffected members of a religious institution and consumption field. Consumers face severe crises of identity and the need to rebuild their self-understandings in an unfamiliar marketplace of identity resources. Unable to remain comfortably in the field of their primary socialization, they are nevertheless bound to it by investments in field-specific capital. In negotiating this dilemma, they demonstrate the inseparability and co-constitutive nature of ideology and consumption.

In this commentary on Schembri and Boyle (2013) we offer an alternative perspective on the use of... more In this commentary on Schembri and Boyle (2013) we offer an alternative perspective on the use of video in consumer research. The dominant modus operandi for visual research, as recently demonstrated by Schembri and Boyle in the pages of this journal, follows a paradigm typical of anthropological tradition. We propose an alternative approach: an expressive imperative in consumer videography emerging from theory on cinematography and experimental filmmaking, which emphasizes the evocative power of moving images.

Modern man's unsustainable systems of production and consumption are symptoms of underlying probl... more Modern man's unsustainable systems of production and consumption are symptoms of underlying problems in how we understand and relate to the material world. Socially constructed dualities between the social and natural sciences and between meaning and materiality have encouraged societies to indulge in magical thinking about the ability of material goods to deliver nonmaterial wellbeing, which in turn places marketing at the center of the destructive overconsumption of natural capital. This essay calls attention to a growing philosophical countertrend, neomaterialism, that is reshaping research in such a way as to collapse such false dualities. The new materialism, carried over to marketing practice, demands a meticulous, if not obsessive, attention to material things, their provenance, their agency and their downstream destinations, thus forming the basis of a more sustainable society.

Consumer ethnographers by virtue of their craft develop levels of knowledge and understanding abo... more Consumer ethnographers by virtue of their craft develop levels of knowledge and understanding about people that run deeper than what they report to corporate clients or in the pages of academic journals. It may be knowledge that does not tell a particular brand story or serve a popular theoretical framework, and yet it matters. This story plays in the realm of that surplus understanding. It is a work of fiction. All characters and incidents are the author's creations.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

New market development is well theorized from a firm-centered perspective, but research has paid ... more New market development is well theorized from a firm-centered perspective, but research has paid scant attention to the emergence of markets from consumption activity. The exceptions conceptualize market emergence as a product of consumer struggle against prevailing market logics. This study develops a model of consumption-driven market emergence in harmony with existing market offerings. Using ethnographic methods and actor-network theory the authors chronicle the emergence of a new market within the motorcycle industry that develops with neither active participation nor interference from mainstream industry players. Findings reveal a process of multiple translations wherein consumers mobilize human and nonhuman actors to co-constitute products, practices, and infrastructures. These drive the growth of interlinked communities of practice, which ultimately are translated into a fully functioning market. The study highlights the roles of distributed innovation and diffusion, embedded entrepreneurship, and market catalysts in processes of market change and development.

This feminist re-examination of an ethnography of Harley-Davidson motorcycle owners uncovers a wo... more This feminist re-examination of an ethnography of Harley-Davidson motorcycle owners uncovers a world of motivations, behaviors, and experiences undiscovered in the original work. The structure and ethos of subculture are understood differently when examined through the lens of feminist theory. Through the voices of women riders in a hyper-masculine consumption context we discover perspectives that cannot easily be explained by extant theory of gender and consumer behavior. We find women engaging, resisting, and co-opting hyper-masculinity as part of identity projects wherein they expand and redefine their own personal femininities. This study reveals invisible assumptions limiting the original ethnography and thus reiterates the problems of hegemonic masculinity in the social science project.

Journal of Consumer Research, 1991

Journal of The Academy of Marketing Science, 2007

Transcendent customer experiences (TCEs), which have aspects of flow and/or peak experience, can ... more Transcendent customer experiences (TCEs), which have aspects of flow and/or peak experience, can generate lasting shifts in beliefs and attitudes, including subjective self-transformation. With data from a pre-test/post-test quasi-experimental field experiment we examine the impact of TCEs on customers’ integration in a brand community. Because TCEs are highly desirable and valued for their own sake, customers value marketing activities they perceive as instrumental to them. This study demonstrates that a TCE in the context of a marketer-facilitated consumption activity can strengthen a person’s ties to a brand community, delivering a particularly strong form of brand loyalty.

Journal of Marketing, 2002