Bringing the Consumer Back in

Laermans, Rudi

doi:10.1177/026327693010001008

Cited by 14 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…181) investigated how individuals "define the self and view its functions including those in consumer behavior," which could include traveling to search out their ancestors. The creation of tourism products is ultimately a joint creation of the tourist consumer and the destination provider in a process of co-design and co-delivery of the benefits sought by the consumer conforming to the concept of "bringing the consumer in" (Cutcher, 2010;Learmans, 1993). The legacy tourists exhibit a manifestation of Czarniawska's observations that "the Self is historical, and is both constituted by and constitutive of community."…”

Section: Nostalgia: Yearning For the Pastmentioning

confidence: 99%

Personal Identity And Nostalgia For The Distant Land Of Past: Legacy Tourism

Ray

McCain

2012

IBER

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The past is certainly a distant land and getting there is a difficult and imperfect undertaking (Brown, Hirschman & Maclaran (2006). This paper explores motivations behind how consumers reach that distant land. Over 1,000 respondents of a variety of ethnic groups show very different stories and diaspora timelines, but personal identity and connection with place are always top ranked motivations for interest in ancestors. How might groups, who may suffer from a lack of identity, fit into these findings when personal identity is the number one reason why consumers engage in genealogy and legacy tourism? Whether a group is well defined (e.g., descended from Norwegian ancestors) or not well defined, results are remarkably similar.

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Section: Nostalgia: Yearning For the Pastmentioning

confidence: 99%

Personal Identity And Nostalgia For The Distant Land Of Past: Legacy Tourism

Ray

McCain

2012

IBER

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“…Through the "new existentialism" (Laermans, 1993) consumers can exercise the freedom to create new meanings for goods through their own idiosyncratic performance of everyday life (de Certeau, 1984). This freedom can be used for collective and individual resistance against the imposed meanings of the dominant cultural categories, particularly through the choice of style and the use of bricolage tactics (Fiske, 1987;Hebdige, 1979).…”

Section: Creativity Versus Constraintmentioning

confidence: 99%

Existential consumption and irrational desire

Elliott

1997

European Journal of Marketing

253

149

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If marketing is truly the "ultimate social practice of postmodern consumer culture" (Firat, 1993) then it carries the heavy burden of "determining the conditions and meanings of life for the future" (Firat and Venkatesh, 1993). Certainly, social theory is now focusing on consumption as playing a central role in the way the social world is constructed, and it can be argued that marketing is too important just to be left to marketers as it plays a "key role in giving meaning to life through consumption" (van Raaij, 1993). Marketing has been criticized from within as being a "technique" without moral regard for the consequences of its actions, and there is no shortage of critics of its most public face: advertising. This paper aims at identifying some of the issues raised by postmodern and poststructuralist accounts of consumption. In particular, it is argued that consumption can be conceptualized from cultural, social and psychological perspectives as being a prime site for the negotiation of conflicting themes of freedom and control. It is proposed here that in postmodernity the consumption of symbolic meaning, particularly through the use of advertising as a cultural commodity, provides the individual with the opportunity to construct, maintain and communicate identity and social meanings. This use of consumption as a resource for meaning creation and social transactions is a process that involves the making of choices that are sufficiently important to be considered as existential. This is not an attempt at rehabilitating the practice of marketing, but is intended to demonstrate that the consumer is far from being a passive victim but is an active agent in the construction of meaning. In part this can be seen as a response to Ölander's call for "consumer research for the consumer's sake" (Ölander, 1993), but also as providing theoretical underpinning for concepts such as "advertising literacy" (Ritson and Elliott, 1995a) which attempt to build new socially located and meaning-based-models of advertising. Exploring some consumption dialecticsAs a heuristic device to help unpack some of the complexity of the consumption experience, five dialectics will be explored and their (sometimes polar) tensions used as analytical frames for reviewing competing discourses on the meanings of consumption:

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“…Thus, from a critical theory perspective, capitalism's destructiveness is sustained by creating an excess of demand that is never satisfied by the system, despite expanding production capacity and efficiencies. On the other hand, consumerism represents-even in its excesses-the potential to feel free, to make autonomous choices, to find a modicum of hedonistic enjoyment in what might be an otherwise empty existence, and perhaps even to further socialist human development (Laermans, 1993;Soper et al, 2008;Zick Varul, 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The ideology of the ethical consumption gap

Zwick²,

2015

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The growth of contemporary capitalism is producing a broad sweep of environmental and social ills, such as environmental degradation, exploitative labor conditions, social and economic inequity, and mental and physical illness. A growing awareness of these significant consequences by an ''ethical'' consumer segment has catalyzed a field of research dedicated to investigating ethical consumerism. Of particular academic and practitioner focus is the general failure of this ethical consumer segment to ''walk their talk''-the ethical consumption attitude-behavior 'gap'. In this article, we draw on Althusser and Ž ižek to critically analyze the ideological functioning of the ethical consumption gap. We argue that this focus inadvertently promotes erroneous notions of consumer sovereignty and responsibilization. We conclude with a call to reimagine the gap as a construct that paradoxically preserves-rather than undermines-dominant and destructive consumerist capitalism. We redirect research toward the underlying capitalist structures that predicate and benefit from the gap.

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Bringing the Consumer Back in

Cited by 14 publications

References 1 publication

Personal Identity And Nostalgia For The Distant Land Of Past: Legacy Tourism

Personal Identity And Nostalgia For The Distant Land Of Past: Legacy Tourism

Existential consumption and irrational desire

The ideology of the ethical consumption gap

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