Alternative Consumption Practices Research Articles

‘You’re in the alcohol Matrix, then you unplug from it, and you’re like ‘Wow’’’: exploring sober women’s management, negotiation and countering of alcohol marketing in the UK

Background Alcohol marketing influences drinking practices, and this helps shape how gender identities are constructed. This paper presents research exploring how women who are sober manage and negotiate their non-drinking and sober identities in neo-liberal contexts that market alcohol products and consumption as a defining feature of feminine identities. Methods Semi-structured in-depth interviews (n = 15) and online content produced by sober women active in the positive sobriety community on the social media platform Instagram were analysed using thematic analysis. Findings Women negotiated marketing messages within their everyday experiences of sobriety, with associations between drinking and motherhood, female friendship and empowerment, discussed as impacting their drinking, lived experience and sense of self. They negotiated such messages, and created alternative ways of ‘doing femininity’ as sober women, through distancing themselves from their previous drinking identities; rejecting, reworking and countering marketing that links alcohol use to femininity; and alternative consumption practices. Conclusion Instagram allowed women to publicly critique and counter marketing messages in ways that unlinked alcohol use, but not consumption more generally, from femininity, in traditional and news ways. Marketing regulation should consider how those experiencing problematic alcohol use may be particularly vulnerable to marketing messages, in ways that are gendered.

Communities of benefit exchange – A new taxonomy of alternative consumption practices

AbstractThe consumer landscape is changing, with traditional behaviours, channels and models of commerce evolving rapidly. This has resulted in an increasingly disruptive landscape for businesses. One example is the growth of communities of consumers who collaborate through diverse and non‐conventional channels (often focused on specific needs or interests) to engage in information seeking and giving, socialisation, resource sharing and trade. This emerging field of research presents challenges due to the diverse and fragmented theory base available to explore, explain and analyse the phenomena we position in alternative consumption literature. In this paper, we address this challenge in the form of a Communities of Benefit Exchange (CoBE) taxonomy of exchange dimensions detailing purpose, nature of gain and benefit, channel and level of interaction and entity structure evident for consumers who participate in this practice.

Fashion consumption during economic crisis: Emerging practices and feelings of consumers

ABSTRACT Economic crisis has a significant impact on consumption practices and the way consumers justify their consumption patterns. Particularly in the field of fashion, consumers face a conflict between desire to consume due to rapidly changing fashion trends and coping with the decrease in purchasing power due to the economic crisis. Semi-structured interviews were carried out to gain a deeper understanding of how the economic crisis affects consumers’ fashion consumption behavior and the alternative consumption practices that emerge. The research further sheds light on the underlying feelings involved due to changes in consumption patterns. Some of the themes that emerge—reuse, reduce, and reject—are in line with earlier findings on anti-consumption but this time the motives of the consumers are non-voluntary. The findings also contribute to anti-consumption literature by introducing three new themes: refind alternative channels, reconsider, and rely on discounts. The study further shows that there are both positive and negative feelings associated with changes in consumption behavior due to economic crisis. Along with understanding the adaptations in consumption behavior, anticipating these conflicting emotions resulting from crisis related anti-consumption is important for marketers and retailers who are concerned about developing appropriate responsive strategies.

The fantasy of authenticity: understanding the paradox of retail gentrification in Seoul from a Lacanian perspective

Gentrification studies have well-documented how gentrifiers’ alternative consumption practices of seeking ‘authenticity’ lead to retail gentrification. However, they pay scant attention to the paradoxical subjects of gentrification who continue to take part in gentrification by consuming authenticity, even as they criticize the gentrification-driven loss of authenticity. Drawing upon Lacanian psychoanalysis and ethnographic research in one of the gentrifying neighborhoods in Seoul, South Korea, this article demonstrates how the fantasy of authenticity sustains this paradox while facilitating the continuing retail gentrification. As part of the process, various subjects of gentrification name the neighborhood differently – Seochon and Sejong Village – and claim that their own name is more authentic than the other. In and beyond this toponym debate, the fantasy of authenticity allows the subjects to constantly cross the borders of authentic/inauthentic and gentrifier/gentrified, and thus, reinvest their endless desire for ‘something more authentic’. Ultimately, by bridging psychoanalysis and gentrification studies, I argue that we, as the subjects of gentrification, should bear responsibility for our compelling desire for and fantasy of authenticity to challenge the cycle of the ongoing retail gentrification.

Running wild in the marketplace: the articulation and negotiation of an alternative food network

ABSTRACTIn this paper, we examine how actors within what we conceptualise as an emerging wild food alternative network are navigating through the foodscape to find alternatives to homogenous and standardised food products. Drawing on data from different research engagements with wild food consumers and producers over the last decade in Canada, we use the context of wild foods to explore how the ‘alternative’ is being articulated and negotiated. Inspired by scholarly work exploring the pedagogical promise of food, we also explore the transformational potential of the ‘alternative’ – how bringing wild foods to the table can both inspire and teach consumers about sustainability and alternative consumption practices. We conclude with directions for future marketing research on alternative food networks.

Med lätt bagage

In the wake of welfare, a number of alternative consumption practices have emerged. Meeting the obligations of the consumer society is an ambivalent practice with moral implications that contain strong elements of both freedom of choice and regulation. Alternative consumer practices is following that discourse and together with the growing interest in ethics and environment, the individual is expected to realize him- or herself through creative, green and sustainable consumption. Recycling and second-hand are important drivers of these processes. Practices of creative self-expression are related to specific considerations and confessions in the context of positioning in consumer society. Taking a starting point in “Shop-stop” or “Stop-buying-acts” as a cultural theme, this article focus on crafting confessions and creativity. By thematising a number of cultural programmes of action, it is my intention to shed light on how these programmes of action have become an important part of how alternative consumption trends acts as self-regulating practices.

Between shaming corporations and promoting alternatives: The politics of an “ethical shopping map”

Ethical consumption can take different forms, some more contentious like boycotts or public campaigns, some aiming at the establishment or promotion of alternative consumption practices (buycotts). This study looks at how these tactics are articulated by analyzing the development of an “ethical shopping map,” an action situated in the latter category of “supportive” actions. In 2007, a Swiss nongovernmental organization published this map as part of its ongoing campaign fighting for the respect of social standards in the global garment industry. A project pursued by a regional group of volunteers of the organization, the map listed stores where ethical clothes can be purchased in a big Swiss city. This article consists of an ethnographic analysis of the process of elaboration of the map and discusses its inclusion into the tactical repertoire of the anti-sweatshop campaign. Based on participant observation and interviews with volunteers and campaign staff, it examines what drives the activists’ concern with alternative forms of consumption. It looks at the rationales and meanings the volunteers put behind the map and the different uses of the map that are suggested, and examines the ultimate “failure” of making it a lasting part of the campaign’s tactical action repertoire. Doing so, the article reveals the inherent tension of “ethical consumption,” between supportive action forms based on buycotts and denunciatory actions of public shaming of firms whose practices are criticized.

Regulating the farmers’ market: Paysan expertise, quality production and local food

This paper considers the meaning of local, quality food in the context of a farmer’s market in Montpellier, France. The focus is on understanding how farmers conceptualize ‘local’, how they perceive and cater to their clients’ demand for quality food, and what mechanisms are deployed to ensure a joint approach to these conventions. With a market association capable of carrying out site inspections to weed out ‘fake-farmers’ and an expectation that each vendor would participate in staged demonstrations of agrarian competency, the market emerges as an exclusive and tightly regulated commercial space that promotes both local protectionism and alternative consumption practices.

Everyday consumption practices as a site for activism? Exploring the motivations of grassroots reuse groups

This paper draws on early findings from a study of grassroots groups and individuals engaged in alternative consumption practices: ways of acquiring, exchanging, using and disposing of goods outside of the formal economy. The study focuses on individuals and groups that take items that would otherwise be classed as waste and try to put them (back) to use. It is especially concerned with ethical and political dimensions of these practices: how small day-to-day acts are associated with trying to live according to a set of values and how they might make a difference to wider problems. Two existing ways of theorising the connection between everyday individual acts and social change are put forward: prefigurative politics and political consumerism. Initial findings suggest ambivalence concerning the political nature of such activities, with participants recognising a politics of consumption, but hesitant to describe their engagement in alternative consumption practices as a political act.

CONSUMING AUTHENTICITY

Alternative consumption practices often lead to the creation of entrepreneurial spaces like restaurants and bars, and to the resurgence of farmers’ markets, offering urban consumers a safe and comfortable place to ‘perform’ difference from mainstream norms. These spaces fabricate an aura of authenticity based on the history of the area or the back story of their products, and capitalize on the tastes of their young, alternative clientele. This vision gradually attracts media attention and a broader consumer base, followed by larger stores and real estate developers, leading to hip neighborhoods with luxury housing, aka gentrification. Whether the specific discourse of consumption is based on distinction or inclusion, alternative consumers are not so innocent agents of change. Their desire for alternative foods, both gourmet and organic, and for ‘middle class’ shopping areas encourages a dynamic of urban redevelopment that displaces working-class and ethnic minority consumers.

Why do households use alternative consumption practices?

In recent years, the emphasis on economic necessity when explaining engagement in alternative consumption practices (i.e. informal and/or second-hand modes of goods acquisition) has been challenged by an agency-oriented reading that views participation to be more a matter of choice, and more recently by a geographically sensitive approach that ascribes agency to affluent populations and economic necessity to deprived populations. To evaluate critically these contrasting explanations, data collected from 120 face-to-face interviews in the city of Leicester are here reported. The finding is that these previous accounts that reduce consumers participation in alternative consumption practices to the mono-causal explanations of either economic necessity or choice obfuscate how both often coexist in people's explanations for participation, albeit in varying ways in different populations. This paper thus displays the need to reconcile the previous reductive either/or explanations through the use of a both/and approach that recognizes and unpacks how both economic necessity and choice are variously entangled in rationales for participation in alternative consumption practices.

The meaning of alternative consumption practices

The view that alternative consumption practices (i.e., informal and/or second-hand modes of goods acquisition) are used by disadvantaged urban consumers out of economic necessity has been recently opposed by cultural theorists who instead view participation in such practices as more a matter of choice. To evaluate these contrasting perspectives, this paper reports data from 120 interviews conducted in Leicester in England. Finding that the agency-orientated view of alternative consumption practices is valid in affluent urban populations but economic necessity remains the principal motive amongst lower-income urban populations, this paper concludes that for a fuller understanding to be achieved, there is a need to reconcile the dualistic either/or debates between those promulgating economic necessity and those emphasizing choice by adopting a both/and approach sensitive to the varying meanings of such practices across the urban landscape.

Fast food/organic food: Reflexive tastes and the making of 'yuppie chow'

Organic food consumption is one of several new trends in eating read as active opposition to industrialized food provision. While fast food consumption is characterized by compulsive gluttony, manifest in fat bodies, alternative consumption practices are seen to be driven by conscious reflexivity, such that consumers monitor, reflect upon and adapt their personal conduct in light of its perceived consequences. The purpose of this paper is two-fold. One is to examine the evolution of organic food from what Belasco called the 'counter-cuisine' to what organic growers call 'yuppie chow', to show how organic salad mix was the carrier of major changes in the organic system of provision, thereby calling into question the notion that organic food is necessarily an antidote to industrialized food. The other is to problematize the facile dichotomies between fast and slow, reflexive and compulsive, fat and thin, and, hence, good and bad eaters, to show where there is slippage and instability in these categories, in addition to a troubling politics of class and gender. To these ends, I showcase the changing provision of a particular organic commodity (salad mix, or mesclun) in California.