The consumption of aesthetic plastic surgery is examined within the broader context of daily life in an investigation of the motives and the self-concept dynamics underlying this symbolic consumer behavior. Data were collected in multiple, in-depth, ethnographic interviews, and analyzed by a constant comparative method revealing insights into both a priori and emergent themes. A priori themes regarding body image, impression management, symbolic self-completion, and possible selves are developed through a literature review and discussed briefly in light of the findings. Emergent themes, including role transitions, sexual selves and romantic fantasies, control and efficacy, and identity play are developed and embedded in a discussion of identity reconstruction and personal rites of passage. It is concluded that consumption activities are imprtant to both the maintenance and the development of a stable, harmonious self-concept. Directions for future research are discussed.

This article introduces the subculture of consumption as an analytic category through which to better understand consumers and the manner in which they organize their lives and identities. Recognizing that consumption activities, product categories, or even brands may serve as the basis for interaction and social cohesion, the concept of the subculture of consumption solves many problems inherent in the use of ascribed social categories as devices for understanding consumer behavior. This article is based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork with Harley-Davidson motorcycle owners. A key feature of the fieldwork was a process of progressive contextualization of the researchers from outsiders to insiders situated within the subculture. Analysis of the social structure, dominant values, and revealing symbolic behaviors of this distinct, consumption-oriented subculture have led to the advancement of a theoretical framework that situates subcultures of consumption in the context of modern consumer culture and discusses, among other implications, a symbiosis between such subcultures and marketing institutions. Transferability of the principal findings of this research to other subcultures of consumption is established through comparisons with ethnographies of other self-selecting, consumption-oriented subcultures.

New market development is well theorized from a firm-centered perspective, but research has paid scant attention to the emergence of markets from consumption activity. The exceptions conceptualize market emergence as a product of consumer struggle against prevailing market logics. This study develops a model of consumption-driven market emergence in harmony with existing market offerings. Using ethnographic methods and actor-network theory the authors chronicle the emergence of a new market within the motorcycle industry that develops with neither active participation nor interference from mainstream industry players. Findings reveal a process of multiple translations wherein consumers mobilize human and nonhuman actors to co-constitute products, practices, and infrastructures. These drive the growth of interlinked communities of practice, which ultimately are translated into a fully functioning market. The study highlights the roles of distributed innovation and diffusion, embedded entrepreneurship, and market catalysts in processes of market change and development.

Consumer researchers are wrestling with the crisis of representation that has challenged contiguous disciplines over the past decade. Traditional or conventional prose articles seem increasingly insufficient as vessels for representing our understandings and experiences. In this article, we demonstrate how poetry contributes to the research enterprise. We use our own experiences as researcher-poets to illustrate how the writing and close reading of poetry can take us directly to the heart of consumption. Our essay is intended to provide a philosophical basis for the inclusion of poetry between the covers of this journal.

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.

Certain institutions traditionally have had broad socializing influence over their members, providing templates for identity that comprehend all aspects of life from the existential and moral to the mundanely material. Marketization and detraditionalization undermine that socializing role. This study examines the consequences when, for some members, such an institution loses its authority to structure identity. With a hermeneutical method and a perspective grounded in Bourdieu's theories of fields and capital, this research investigates the experiences of disaffected members of a religious institution and consumption field. Consumers face severe crises of identity and the need to rebuild their self-understandings in an unfamiliar marketplace of identity resources. Unable to remain comfortably in the field of their primary socialization, they are nevertheless bound to it by investments in field-specific capital. In negotiating this dilemma, they demonstrate the inseparability and co-constitutive nature of ideology and consumption.