Reimagining Society Through Retail Practice

Catering to Otherness: Levinasian Consumer Ethics at Restaurant Day

“…This body of work has provided numerous conceptualizations such as brand communities (e.g., McAlexander et al 2002;Muñiz and O'Guinn 2001), subcultures of consumption (e.g., Kates 2002;Schouten and McAlexander 1995), and brand publics (Arvidsson and Caliandro 2015), that generally vary in terms of the extent of their collective dedication to market symbols, levels of consumer resistance, and the cohesion and the temporality of the collective. Attention has also been paid to highly ephemeral consumer gatherings that have the propensity to suspend conventional social orders in outbursts of carnivalesque sociality, only to then swiftly disperse and reconvene again at a later time (e.g., Bradford and Sherry 2015;Hietanen et al 2016;Kozinets 2002).…”

“…Such gatherings also manifest in more mundane settings, as the recent study on 'tailgating' suggests (Bradford and Sherry 2015), where city space "is temporarily remade into a living place of intimate, playful, humane, personal, and informal modes of organized solidarity" (p. 147) through a "public performance of domesticity" (p. 135). While group cohesion has already been noted to come into being in RD due to a unifying 'moral outrage' (Weijo et al 2018) or a temporarily binding affective 'mood' (Hietanen et al 2016), these tendencies themselves have not been developed theoretically in terms of their ethicality.…”

“…However, due to significant media coverage and changes in Finnish food consumption habits that RD satiates, it rapidly gained popularity, first in Finland and then abroad (also Weijo et al 2018). Simultaneously, the overtones of protest were superseded by a carnivalesque mood of self-expression that turned common retailing practices towards the creation of urban sociality (Hietanen et al 2016).…”

“…From its foundational Finnish perspective and as a consequence of its ascendant popularity, RD has also had a striking impact on restaurant legislation and public policy. As Hietanen et al (2016) have already noted, RD has led to changes in Finnish food regulations with the result that popups no longer have to report their activities to food safety authorities. Some of the founding members of RD have also assumed positions in public authorities that promote food culture in Helsinki.…”

“…Entire cities become energized as people take to the streets to participate in various ways. The events unfold as grass-roots mobilizations of citizens and manifest in street-level face-to-face interactions that are driven by a shared sense of a carnivalesque mood and collective creativity (Hietanen et al 2016;Weijo et al 2018).…”