Epp, and George Ritzer for their helpful comments at different stages of the preparation of this manuscript. Last, we thank JCR's insightful reviewers, tireless associate editor, and extremely supportive editor. Their dedication and participation throughout the review process proved truly invaluable. Contribution Statement Our research provides new insights into how consumers maintain ludic communal consumption engagements when faced with temporal, economic, emotional, and competencerelated obstacles. We present a set of practices that consumers use to stabilize performances and remain engaged in communities. Our work further extends previous literature on play and ludic experiences, consumption community engagement, identity costs, and consumption practices. Lastly, our findings extend understanding of boundary management among leisure and other practice circuits, communal hybrid economies, value, as well as the use of social media in consumption communities.
Consumer movements are resolute and persistent efforts by organized consumer collectives to reimagine elements of consumer culture. Such movements often use creative public performances to promote their causes and to make movement participation more ludic and fun. Yet collective creativity within consumer movements has rarely been an explicit focus of research. Using ethnographic methods and assemblage theory, this study elaborates how collective creativity organizes a consumer movement and facilitates its quest for market change. Findings show how the Restaurant Day movement initially emerged as a resistant response to market tensions relating to constraining food culture regulation in a Nordic market context. Findings then illuminate the movement's appropriation of collective creativity as its chief mode of organization and participation. Collective creativity builds on iterative and co-constituting deterritorializing and territorializing processes of consumer production that fuel transformative and explorative creativity, respectively, within the market context. The study provides new insights to consumer movement mobilization, organization, member recruitment, and market legitimacy. The study also provides novel theoretical insights to the study of consumer creativity.
Consumer movements strive to change markets when those markets produce value outcomes that conflict with consumers’ higher-order values. Prior studies argue that consumer movements primarily seek to challenge these value outcomes by championing alternative higher-order values or by pressuring institutions to change market governance mechanisms. Building on and refining theorization on value regimes, this study illuminates a new type of consumer movement strategy where consumers collaborate to construct alternative object pathways. The study draws from ethnographic fieldwork in the German retail food sector and shows how building alternative object pathways allowed a consumer movement to mitigate the value regime’s excessive production of food waste. The revised value regime theorization offers a new and more holistic way of understanding and contextualizing how and where consumer movements mobilize for change. It also provides a new tool for understanding systemic value creation and the role of consumers in such processes.
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