Consumer Movements and Value Regimes: Fighting Food Waste in Germany by Building Alternative Object Pathways

Abstract

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.

Let’s Make a “Deal”: How Deal Collectives Coproduce Unintended Value from Sales Promotions

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A Theories-in-Use Approach to Building Marketing Theory

“…Case studies are in-depth studies of one or a few comparative cases (e.g., Chase and Murtha 2019; Gebhardt, Carpenter, and Sherry 2006). Ethnographies are in-depth studies of a phenomenon aimed at describing its meaning/significance to a group’s members and the reasons underlying the meaning/significance (e.g., Gollnhofer, Weijo, and Schouten 2019). 1 Importantly, researchers can use these approaches in tandem; for example, a researcher using the case study method can fruitfully include a TIU approach for making comparisons across cases.…”

Catering to Otherness: Levinasian Consumer Ethics at Restaurant Day

“…Studies focusing on the moral dimensions of communities have shown how morality can structure social relations (Muñiz and O'Guinn 2001;Weinberger and Wallendorf 2011) and how community members negotiate a sense of moral high ground (Luedicke et al 2009;Muñiz and Schau 2005). It has also been shown that consumer movements can be mobilized to resist practices that contradict participants' values related to ethicality and sustainability (Gollnhofer et al 2019), and that community participants' behaviors can change to conform to social norms that drive 'ethical consumption' (Moraes et al 2012). Taken in its entirety, the literature generally focuses on moral dispositions that community membership imparts on its participants.…”