Discussion Of Consumption Research Articles

Broadening the Scope of Ethical Consumer Behaviour

Consumption is an essential everyday process. By very nature, it is a means of expressing our moral identities and an outlet for ethical obligations. In more recent years, ethical aspects of consumption have come under greater scrutiny with the emergence of ethical consumption discourses, and are currently associated with a range of consumer behaviours and responsible business practices. To this end, religion is an undeniably powerful and concurrently the most successful marketing force that can shape the ethical behaviour, yet under-investigated in consumption practices despite Corporate Socially Responsibility provoked ethical behaviour. Ethical consumption practices are regularly characterised as consumption activities that avoid harm to other people, animals or the environment where basic Buddhist teachings become more pertinent and practiced in Buddhist communities. This study conceptualises the importance of religious beliefs in ethical consumer behaviour and through researcher introspection methodology, the study empirically explore whether and how ethical consumerism is reflected through Five Precepts of Buddhism [i.e. (1) abstain from taking life, (2) abstain from stealing, (3) abstain from sexual misconduct, (4) abstain from false speech, and (5) abstain from intoxicants that cloud the mind]. The study contributes to the theory and teaching in the marketing discipline by linking how religious beliefs enhance ethical consumerism that remains largely unexplored.

Designing an explanatory practice framework: Local food systems as a case

This article elaborates an explanatory framework for the role of consumption practices in transitions to (enhanced) sustainability in the food system. To develop an applied practice approach we combine the concept of ‘practice’ with that of ‘niche/regime’, adopted from contemporary sociology and transitions theory, respectively. This re-combination adds to the field of applied consumption research and describes consumption beyond the boundaries of individualist and structuralist models, as well as integrates a conceptualization of the a-linear reproduction of aligning and competing consumer practices. We illustrate the methodology by showing its application drawing on data of a niche in the Belgian food system. Elaborating on the social practice model based on Giddens ((1984) The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press), Bourdieu (( 1976 ) Outline of a Theory of Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press) and Spaargaren and Van Vliet (( 2000 ) Lifestyles, consumption and the environment: The ecological modernisation of domestic consumption. Environmental Politics 9(1): 50–76), we designate a three-tiered framework that endeavours to describe consumption practices in terms of everyday routines and habits, integrating an agency perspective with a dual perspective on structure. Consumer interviews and focus groups combined with a system analysis of the context of the alternative food practice allowed a schematization of what it implies to be a carrier of the niche practice. The practice schematizations of this niche are then considered vis-à-vis a schematization of the regime practice. The comparison shows two essential aspects: it points out that (1) although qualitative and systemic differences are found between niche and mainstream practices, in both cases the perception of the carriers (i.e. consumers) on what they need to do is to an equal extent normalized, and (2) empirical results indicate that central conceptions in the contemporary food consumption discourse, such as convenience, can in real life be redrawn by entirely different sets of interconnected routines. We reflect on the methodology and give suggestions as to how consumption governance could orientate towards practices as complementary to the traditional focus on individual consumer behaviour and consumer norm targets.

A “Post-Gay” Era? Media Gaystreaming, Homonormativity, and the Politics of LGBT Integration

Logo, a U.S. network that launched in 2005 as an explicitly lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) channel, has been implementing a rebranding strategy that it labels gaystreaming. Drawing from Logo's internal documents and interviews with Logo staff, I situate the development, discourses, and effects of gaystreaming against LGBT content elsewhere, shifts toward multiplatform programming, and LGBT mainstreaming. Alongside industrial changes in media production, the goal of attracting heterosexual women, imagined to share particular affinities with gay men, has been the key to driving Logo toward taste- and style-based reality programming. Although Logo's Web sites currently offer broader content than the channel, overall gaystreaming has remarginalized queer subjects whom Logo's earlier programming partially addressed, comprising a homonormativity predicated on discourses of consumerism, progress, and integration.

Investigating second-hand fashion trade and consumption in the Philippines: Expanding existing discourses

By investigating the second hand clothing trade and consumption discourse in the Philippines, this paper enlarges existing global knowledge and serves as an initial attempt to map this phenomenon in South East Asia. It argues that regional and national opinions could be located in a continuum. At one end is a noticeably modern and functional outlook, and on the other is a distinctly postmodern and constructionist perspective. It shows that a nation’s particular discourse is an expression of its socio-economic context. However, since the used clothing trade is a global phenomenon that transcends national boundaries, used clothing traders, retailers, and consumers unite in challenging the beliefs driven by institutions that regulate and compete with this trade. The response of these institutions has blurred the boundaries separating the formal and informal, the legal and illegal, and the Philippines exemplifies this.

White Drugs in Interwar Egypt

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, British and Egyptian officials, medical doctors, and the Egyptian press reiterated that country was plagued by “white drugs”: cocaine and heroin. Kozma’s article demonstrates how, in addition to presenting drug consumption as a social problem, discourse on the topic voiced social concerns about class, gender, colonialism, and social change. It explores both medical and popular discourses of drug consumption, focusing on notions of nation, gender, and class. Kozma’s article thus examines how a global phenomenon, namely the increased consumption of and trade in drugs and the attempt to curb the former, was experienced and represented in the Egyptian local case.

Constructing luxury brands: exploring the role of consumer discourse

PurposeThe aim of this paper is to offer a discursive perspective on luxury brand consumption.Design/methodology/approachDiscourse analysis is used to examine how consumers construct their luxury brand consumption amidst countervailing cultural discourses in the market (Thompson and Haytko). Consumer discourse is generated through in‐depth, semi‐structured interviews.FindingsIn the context of countervailing discourses that challenge the notion of luxury (e.g. “masstige”, “chav” and “bling”), respondents construct an ostensibly distinct and stable version of luxury expressing its subjective, experiential, moral and artistic constructs. Analysis demonstrates how these four themes operate at a linguistic‐textual level to delineate important cultural categories and boundaries around luxury. Luxury brand discourse operates strategic juxtapositions between normatively positive (ideal) and normatively negative (problematic) categories, which are paradoxically interdependent.Research limitations/implicationsA qualitative study of high‐income residents from an affluent UK region is reported upon. The study is exploratory, focussing on interrelations between discourse, content and context. This invites future studies to consider contextual elements of luxury branding.Originality/valueThe paper proposes a new way of thinking about luxury brands as a socially constructed concept. The paper concludes by arguing that luxury brand management necessitates a deeper appreciation of the mechanics of consumers' luxury discourses.

Challenging images of women in the media: reinventing women's lives

Introduction Part 1. Reinscribing Women's Roles Chapter 1. Feeling Good Never Looked Better: Examining Representations of Women in Special K Advertisements By Vanessa Reimer and Rukhsana Ahmed Chapter 2. Tales from the Oh-Oku: The Shogun's Inner Palace and The Outer (Mediated) World By Kimiko Akita Chapter 3. Pakistani Media and Disempowerment of Women By Saman Talib and Zara Idrees Chapter 4. Women in Film ... Treading Water but fit for the Marathon By Lisa French Part 2. Political Issues Chapter 5. Mass Media Explain the Global Sex Trade By Anne Johnston, Barbara Friedman, and Autumn Shafer Chapter 6. Gendered Construction of Illness: A Post-Structuralist Critique of Gardasil By Nicole Defenbaugh and Kimberly Kline Chapter 7. Who's Afraid of the Pink Chaddi?: New Media, Hindutva, and Feminist Agency in India By Saayan Chattopadhyay Part 3. Westernizing Women Chapter 8. Representation of the Modern Chinese Woman in a Discourse of Consumerism By Wei Luo Chapter 9. From Babushki to Sexy Babes: The Sexing-up of Women in Bulgarian Advertising By Elza Ibroscheva Part 4. Political Individuals Chapter 10. Dorothy Jurney, Fran Harris, and Professional Journalist Networks By Steven Carl Smith Chapter 11. The Media Manipulation of Angela Merkel By Lynn Kutch Chapter 12. All Hail the Queen: The Metamorphosis or Selling out of Queen Latifah By Elizabeth Johnson Chapter 13. 18,000,000 Cracks or How Hillary Almost Became President By Lori Montalbano Part 5. Reflective Essays Chapter 14. Big, Black, Boisterous Badasses: Why Queen-Sized African American Women are Never Really Royalty By Deatra Sullivan-Morgan Chapter 15. Lesbian Comics: Negotiating Queer Visibility By Theresa Carilli

"What Do Eva and Anna Have to Do with Cervical Cancer?" Constructing Adolescent Girl Subjectivities in Swedish Gardasil Advertisements

This article investigates direct-to-consumer advertising in Sweden for Gardasil, the HPV vaccine, as a contemporary gendered technology of the adolescent girl body. It explores how, by constructing girls as ideal users of the vaccine, advertising campaigns encourage adolescent girls to vaccinate themselves. Using a feminist visual discourse analysis, the article examines how different girl subjectivities are constructed through advertising, and presented as fit for Gardasil use and consumption. It highlights how, along with their parents, adolescent girls in Sweden are encouraged to assume responsibility for managing the risks of cervical cancer in order to help secure their future health, sexuality and normality. It argues that the Gardasil campaign, in being addressed to individual members of the population, serves to articulate global and national discourses of girlhood, sexuality, (sexual) health responsibility, risk management and consumption.

Communal Consumption of VCD/DVD and Social Change in the Urban Kampung Community Indonesia

This study looks at the consumption of video disc among the viewers in such urban middle-lower class community settlement in Surabaya, Indonesia. The entertainment consumers in urban Indonesia have been spoiled with cheap of abundance piracy productions of foreign and national films, TV soaps, dramas, and other audio visual materials in the form of VCD and/or DVD in the market. Apart from this feature, the consumption of sexual scenes and pornographic materials has become the so-called ‘common secret’ among those social class communities in their everyday of media consumption. They do not just buy the discs, but also rent and swap each other within the kampung neighbourhood environment. Applying an ethnography method, this study observes the discourse of cultural consumption of the middle-lower class community toward the audio-visual productions of VCD and/or DVD in such neighbourhood alley and the practice of communal consumption. The result shows how those kampung communal viewers have experienced as spectators of a “dish of entertainment” in their particular class context, as well as practicing the mode of communal imaginative experience in the contemporary cultural liberalisation in Indonesia post-authoritarian era. Keywords: urban kampung community, cultural consumption, communal consumption, spectatorship

Eating from the Bin: Salmon Heads, Waste and the Markets That Make Them

Recent scholarship in the social sciences has begun to question the cultural contingencies that demarcate waste from ‘stuff worth keeping’ (Watson and Meah, this volume). This scholarship has problematized linear discourses of production, consumption and disposal, and interrogated the relationships between objects, commodities and value but has yet to investigate the ways in which place and place-making are complicit in constituting these relationships. This paper explores where and how the lines between foodstuff and food waste are drawn, as well as the role of place and processes of place-making in contesting and reproducing them. Focusing on salmon heads and salmon, this paper examines not only how food becomes waste, but also on the issue of how waste becomes food. Specifically, we analyse the geographical processes through which salmon heads are valued as foodstuffs in some places but waste in others. We argue further that these valuations extend beyond the place of one market to encompass an assembled geography of markets. Further, we suggest that by tracing out the geographies of salmon heads and salmon – and the markets where each can be found – we can better articulate where as well as how it is that waste can become food. Ultimately, we argue that questions of food and waste are not just questions of materiality, but questions of the ways in which the material intersects relations of place, place-making and geography. Salmon heads, we argue, become a matter of geography.

Between Citizen Image and Consumer Discourse: Talk-Shows on French Television — Issues, History, Analysis

Between Citizen Image and Consumer Discourse: Talk-Shows on French Television — Issues, History, Analysis

YouTube, ‘drug videos’ and drugs education

Aims: This article reports on findings to emerge from a project examining YouTube ‘drug videos’ in the light of an emerging literature on the relationship between YouTube and health education. The aim of this article is to describe the variety of discourses circulated by the ‘drug videos’ available on YouTube and to consider the implications of these for mediated drugs education.Method: The method used is a content analysis of a sample of 750 ‘drug videos’ in which both video text and loader comments are used to code ‘drug discourses’.Findings: The findings point to the circulation of a variety of ‘drug videos’ of which official drugs education materials represent only a small proportion. The ‘drug videos’ created by YouTube users circulate a variety of ‘drug discourses’ including the ‘celebratory’ or hedonistic but also ‘cautionary’ videos intended to ‘warn’ or ‘discipline’ but others offer an ‘amateur’ or ‘vernacular drugs education’ while still others develop ‘consumer discourses’ which evaluate substances and technologies of intoxication as commodities.Conclusions: The findings suggest that in the symbolic environment of YouTube drugs education strategies based upon ‘old media’ assumptions become highly problematic. This is firstly, because official drugs education material now has to compete with a variety of alternative discourses circulated in the ‘drug videos’ created by YouTube users. Secondly, some of these videos offer an alternative ‘vernacular drugs education’, or offer alternative understandings of drug use. But thirdly, in the era of Web 2.0 technologies such as YouTube, lines of communication are no longer characterized by simple linearity but multiple directionality, which mean that official drugs agencies are now even less assured of communicative control than in the past.

Silencing The Shriver Report: Postfeminist Citizenship and News Discourse

In 2009, the Center for American Progress and Maria Shriver published a 442-page report calling for institutional-level changes to deal with the types of systemic sexism plaguing U.S. women and families. NBC devoted a week of coverage but replaced the study's content with postfeminist content that privileges a White, middle-class, heterosexual citizen that is especially appealing to advertisers. The discourse surrounding the report symbolizes a new form of postfeminist citizenship that links women's individualized activism with commodification and consumer discourses.

Consumer scapegoatism and limits to green consumerism

An axiom that has shaped policy approaches to sustainable consumption has been that if more consumers understand the environmental consequences of their consumption patterns, through their market choices they would inevitably put pressure on retailers and manufacturers to move towards sustainable production. The result is the proliferation of consumption of “green” products, eco-labels, consumer awareness campaigns, etc. This paper, however, argues that the dominant focus on green consumerism as against the need for structural changes towards a broader systemic shift is unrealistic. Furthermore, promoting green consumerism at once lays responsibility on consumers to undertake the function of maintaining economic growth while simultaneously, even if contradictorily, bearing the burden to drive the system towards sustainability. Given the scope of the sustainability challenge and the urgency with which it must be addressed, this paper argues that the consumer is not the most salient agent in the production–consumption system; expecting the consumer through green consumerism to shift society towards SCP patterns is consumer scapegoatism. This paper draws on the discursive confusion over discourse and practice of sustainable consumption. It attempts to clarify the differences between green consumerism and sustainable consumption, looking at each concept's historical development, its perspective on the consumer, and the main approaches to achieving sustainability. It then introduces the Attitudes-Facilitators-Infrastructure (AFI) framework – a framework for sustainable consumption policy design that goes beyond green consumerism, and that enables wellbeing and ecological sustainability without propagating the economic-growth dogma that has a stranglehold on contemporary policy-making.

Happy Festivus! Parody as playful consumer resistance

Drawing upon literary theory, play and consumer resistance literature, we conceptualize consumer parodic resistance – a resistant form of play that critically refunctions dominant consumption discourses and marketplace ideologies. We explore parodic resistance empirically by analyzing Festivus, a parody of Christmas. Festivus is found to be primarily constructed as a playful rejection of the established grand narratives and conventions of Christmas. In contrast to dominant Christmas ideology, Festivus promotes a grand narrative of “meaningful nothingness,” wherein Festivus celebration is presented a viable means of circumventing the oppressiveness of Christmas (i.e. “meaningful”) through erasing the higher goals and conventions if Christmas (i.e. “nothingness”). Our contribution is threefold: (i) we demonstrate the role of parody in consumer resistance; (ii) we outline the subversively playful nature of parodic consumer resistance; and (iii) we empirically demonstrate how parodic holiday celebration unsettles dominant discourses and conventions.

Sustainability and the human/nature connection: a critical discourse analysis of being “symbolically” sustainable

Environmental sustainability as a social and marketing discourse has gathered momentum since the 1990s, forcing companies and consumers to consider how to apprehend this shift. However, this has proved to be challenging, given that sustainability itself remains a fuzzy concept. This paper argues that this fuzziness resides in the impetus for sustainability itself, suggesting that our concern for the environment is driven by an existing, historically embedded sense of human/nature connection rather than a concern for future decimation as typically thought. This paper performs a critical discourse analysis of Toyota's hybrid car website, showing how their discourses of human/nature connectedness and technological innovation draw from, and build, their participation in the sustainability conversation. It is argued here that Toyota's technology/ethical consumption discourse constructions are underpinned by the mobilisation of a “human/nature connection” that offers explanatory purpose as to why we should care about sustainability in the first place. The discourse analysis offers details on how Toyota has created an evocative campaign that tacitly connects with the broader social concern for sustainability while eliding the complications of its own position in this concern. The paper concludes that Toyota's marketing campaign provides an example of how the human/nature connection underpins or provides motivation for sustainability but also works to obfuscate sustainability as actionable agenda as a result.

Exploring news media representations of women’s exercise and subjectivity through critical discourse analysis

Despite the importance of media work from a critical perspective being established, much is to be learned about how women’s exercise is (re)presented within news media discourses and the implications for women’s health promotion. Health promotion researchers need to further consider the media environment in which health-related meanings are constructed and compete. Building on media research from a critical perspective, the current paper used critical discourse analysis to explore the construction of exercise narratives in 40 stories within a ‘women’s health’ section of a Midwestern US newspaper. Analysis of this media feature offers researchers the opportunity to explore taken for granted assumptions and prevailing meanings about women’s exercise and health and the implications for self and subjectivity. Two primary discourses were identified: a discourse of exercise and appearance and a discourse of consumerism. Subject positions identified included: the unfit woman, the ignorant/irrational woman, the expert and the responsible consumer. The implications for women’s health and exercise promotion are discussed in light of these findings.

Unravelling the Threads: Discourses of Sustainability and Consumption in an Online Forum

This article analyzes an online discussion that followed an article published by UK environmental activist and journalist George Monbiot in The Guardian online newspaper. The analysis addresses the ways in which participants in an online forum debate responded to the tensions and contradictions between lifestyle, consumption, and sustainability highlighted in the original article. The discursive construction of class, green political orientations, and identities; visions of “the good life”; and appeals to religion and science are highlighted throughout the analysis—as are the discursive strategies for positioning self, other, and audience in the debate. The argument emphasizes the heterogeneity of discursive positioning and reflects on the role of social media in the politics of consumption and sustainability, especially given the inherent reflexivity of web forums as online communicative forms.

Rhetoric of ‘Buy Irish Food’ campaigns: speaking to consumer values to valorise the ‘local’ and exclude ‘others’?

Abstract Drives to (re-)localise the system of food provisioning have arisen and proliferated in recent times, chiefly in response to the negative consequences of the prevailing global food system. Due to this, but also since Ireland has begun to experience economic difficulties, many ‘Buy Irish Food’ campaigns have emerged and although not a new phenomenon, their recent (re-)emergence and abundance are notable. Drawing on discourses of sustainability, sustainable consumption and geographical scales, this paper aims to critically analyse the nature of these campaigns and the persuasive arguments upon which these promotions are based. Following a review of the literature on values of consumers in Ireland towards Irish and local food, a thematic analysis is employed to determine the key rhetorical discourses which are common to three case study ‘Buy Irish Food’ campaigns. The research revealed instances of conflating ‘Irish’ and ‘local’ by consumers and more commonly by those involved in the promotion of Ir...

THINKING OBJECTIVELY: AN OVERVIEW OF “THING THEORY” IN VICTORIAN STUDIES

For those of us whose life's work consists of the study of the Victorian Era, nothing is plainer than the fact that one cannot escape from “things.” Indeed, for many of us the wealth of detail and artefact available is one of the attractions of the era: who could resist the hats, coaches, buttons, newspapers, lengths of ribbon, packets of tea, bits of old lace, sugared plums, ink pots, keys, and pocket watches that clutter the pages of Dickens, overflow from Gaskell, and crowd in amongst the characters of Collins, Thackeray, Trollope, Eliot, and Brontë? The Victorians had a preoccupation with and predilection for the careful and considered acquisition and utilisation of objects, and this preoccupation has become a focus for critical trends in this area. In 2003, Lynn Pykett wrote that “The Victorians were fascinated with objects and things – but recent scholarship has proved equally fascinated with this Victorian obsession” (1). This obsession can be traced back to a turn in Victorianist criticism in the 1980s, beginning with Brigg's Victorian Things and based on theories of commodity culture in writers such as Jean Baudrillard, Roland Barthes, and Walter Benjamin, towards an interdisciplinary interest in material culture and particularly in consumer culture and theories of consumption and commodification. More recently critics have moved away from Marxist explorations of objects as commodities, to explore the possibilities of the object in contexts other than those generated by discourses of exchange value, production, and consumption, adopting cultural materialist and new historicist approaches to the objects of Victorian culture and literature. This movement has become known as “Thing Theory.” Starting with Bill Brown's seminal work, A Sense of Things, in 2003, critics have sought for ways of explaining the relationship between the subject and the object in terms other than those of the capitalist market system, in order to take account of the complexities of the object as a signifier. This review seeks to give an overview of these two critical perspectives on the objects of Victorian studies, from the roots of “thing theory” in consumer culture and commodity studies, to the key texts and indicative readings which have shaped “thing theory” as a discipline. Starting with a look at some key texts on consumer culture in the nineteenth century, I then move on to look at those “thing theory” works which have moved away from a focus on the object as commodity, towards cultural materialism and an understanding of the Victorian “object” beyond its role in consumer culture. Finally, I look at some readings indicative of the work currently being published in the field.