Clicking Our Way to Conscious Consumption (original) (raw)
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The study challenges the conventional view of online communities of consumption as relatively linear constructs in terms of how cultural capital is accumulated and how social order is negotiated within such contexts by investigating the plurality and seriality of consumption interests and practices. We pay special attention to how speaking in online communities of consumption becomes an act of "uttering in series" by combining discursive resources from several consumption discourses and other online contexts. We investigate the evolutionary consequences of the introduction of new consumption interests within an online electronic music community. We illustrate how these introductions manifest themselves through colliding and competing discourses.
Consumer resistance, coherent inconsistencies, and new consumption communities
2008
This study examines and problematizes what has been conceptualised as attitude-behaviour gaps (Boulstridge and Carrigan 2000), and explores how groups of resistant consumers have re-construed such practices and their meanings through the formation of New Consumption Communities (NCCs). Ethnographic findings stress the importance of normative and habitual reframing through 'ethical spaces' (Barnett et al. 2005) in establishing and maintaining increased consistency in participants' consumption meanings, behaviours and goals. We suggest that such communities' discourses are coherent and can only be viewed as inconsistent in relation to their consumption practices if the communities are theorised as anti-market and/or anti-consumption. Thus we re-frame attitude-behaviour gaps as coherent inconsistencies.
Webactivism and the dynamics of consumerist resistance : Analytical framework and experimental study
RIMHE : Revue Interdisciplinaire Management, Homme & Entreprise, 2016
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ONLINE COMMUNITIES AS REFERENCE GROUPS IN CONSUMER DECISION-MAKING
Persuasive messages are central to interpersonal influence in online communities, where consumers interact mainly through text. We employed a combination of netnography and computer-mediated discourse analysis to investigate how consumers exchange information related to products and brands in an online community. We identified a set of rhetorical strategies used by community members, including setting expectations, claiming expertise, prescribing, and celebrating acquiescence. Consumers employ these rhetorical strategies to influence each other's consumption decisions, report consumption decisions back to the community, and to gauge their influence on each other's choices. We compare this process to traditional types of interpersonal influence and discuss how our findings contribute to advancing the burgeoning literature on interpersonal influence in online contexts.
Consumption, Prosumption and Participatory Web Cultures
Journal of Consumer Culture, 2010
IN A RECENT article published in this journal, Colin Campbell (2005) described the emergence of what he refers to as the 'craft consumer'. In this important contribution Campbell juxtaposes this new category of consumer against the existing visions of the 'dupe', the 'rational hero' and the 'postmodern identity seeker'. As Campbell explains, this type of consumer is different from these three established notions of consumer types in that it: rejects any suggestion that the contemporary consumer is simply the helpless puppet of external forces. On the other hand, it does not foreground rational self-interested conduct, nor does it presume as is the case with the postmodern model, that the consumer has an overwhelming concern with image, lifestyle or identity. Rather, the assumption here is that individuals consume principally out of a desire to engage in creative acts of self-expression. .. these consumers already have a clear and stable sense of identity. (Campbell, 2005: 24) Campbell's craft consumer takes an active part in producing and crafting the things they consume, with this participation forming a key part of the
The Virtuous Consumer: Using Social Network Technologies to Foster the Public Space of Markets
2006
Key to this thesis are questions of individual versus collective action, digital versus traditional media and the overriding instance that such actions and tools are being employed not in the traditional political spheres of governments and civil society, but in the non-state space of the market. Noting key circumstances of market-based actions mediated by information and communication technology (case-studies include an examination of mobile phone philanthropy and Wal-Mart reform), this paper asks broadly: under what conditions does the market become a space for political participation? Specifically, how does consumption relate to citizenship and civicengagement? And how does technology affect collective action and efforts by consumer activists working to advance social changes within the digital economy? In response, this thesis argues that the ascent of virtuous consumption (the predication of purchase preferences on political concerns) as an increasingly viable agent for social change along with the simultaneous rise of digital social-network devices as a tool for collective action has enabled the shift of the public, political space from the state iii to markets. That the growth of responsible consumption occurs with the increase in adoption of user-driven social-software is not seen as a coincidence, but a significant, deliberate correlation. Virtuous consumption in its modern form draws its power from the information and network-inclusion that digital social-networking devices provide. The thesis synthesizes a cross-disciplinary portfolio of theoretical concerns such as citizenship and consumer behavior, information technology and collective action along with network theory, social capital and civic virtue. From this, the paper defines key conditions to virtuous consumption which include a) consumer concerns with the production, distribution and marketing of consumer goods and services; b) common distrust with government and corporate organizations along with declining reliance on civil society and other traditional forms of participation to express the virtues of citizenship; and c) emerging preference for mechanisms which imbed individualized actions in broad, informal networks. The consequent conditions to the proposed marketas-political-space draws primarily from the assertion that the market is a political space and, armed with choice and unprecedented access to information, consumers are also political actors-able to "vote" for changes in corporate policies and practices through their shopping behavior.