Caring Consumers: Gendered Consumption Meanings and the Juggling Lifestyle

Abstract

This article explores the meanings that consumption experiences hold for professional working mothers engaged in the culturally prominent lifestyle known as “juggling.” A discussion is given to prior research documenting the cultural and historical processes that gave rise to this lifestyle pattern. These analyses suggest that “jugglers” of the baby boom generation have been socialized in a common system of conflicting cultural ideals, beliefs, and gender ideologies. A hermeneutic research approach is used to explicate the emic consumer meanings that arise in relation to the participants' salient life concerns and their sense of personal history. An etic framework is then derived that further analyzes these perceptions in the context of issues related to the social construction of feminine identities and cultural conceptions of motherhood. The conceptual and methodological implications of the emic and etic frameworks for consumer research are discussed.