Craig J. Thompson

Countervailing Market Responses to Corporate Co‐optation and the Ideological Recruitment of Consumption Communities

From a conventional theoretical standpoint, the corporatization of the organic food movement is an example of co-optation. Co-optation theory conceptualizes the commercial marketplace as an ideological force that assimilates the symbols and practices of a counterculture into dominant norms. Our alternative argument is that co-optation can generate a countervailing market response that actively promotes the oppositional aspects of a counterculture attenuated by the process of commercial mainstreaming. To develop this theoretical argument, we analyze community-supported agriculture, which has emerged in response to the corporate co-optation of the organic food movement. We conclude by discussing how tacit political ideologies structure consumption communities. (c) 2007 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

Consumer Identity Work as Moral Protagonism: How Myth and Ideology Animate a Brand-Mediated Moral Conflict

Consumer researchers have tended to equate consumer moralism with normative condemnations of mainstream consumer culture. Consequently, little research has investigated the multifaceted forms of identity work that consumers can undertake through more diverse ideological forms of consumer moralism. To redress this theoretical gap, we analyze the adversarial consumer narratives through which a brand‐mediated moral conflict is enacted. We show that consumers’ moralistic identity work is culturally framed by the myth of the moral protagonist and further illuminate how consumers use this mythic structure to transform their ideological beliefs into dramatic narratives of identity. Our resulting theoretical framework explicates identity‐value–enhancing relationships among mythic structure, ideological meanings, and marketplace resources that have not been recognized by prior studies of consumer identity work.

Enchanting Ethical Consumerism The case of Community Supported Agriculture

This article analyzes Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) as a form of ethical consumerism organized by a nexus of ideological discourses, romantic idealizations, and unconventional marketplace practices and relationships. Our analysis explicates the aspects of CSA that enable consumers to experience its pragmatic inconveniences and choice restrictions as enchanting moral virtues. We conclude by assessing the societal implications that follow from these localized marketplace relationships and their ideological distinctions to the modes of enchantment that are constituted in postmodern cathedrals of consumption.

Reconstructing the South : How Commercial Myths Compete for Identity Value through the Ideological Shaping of Popular Memories and Countermemories

This study explicates the coconstitutive relationships between commercial mythmaking and popular memory that arise through myth market competitions for identity value. We develop a genealogical analysis of the representational strategies and ideological rationales that two prominent New South mythmakers use to shape popular memories in relation to their competitive goals and to efface countermemories that contradict their mythologized representations. We then derive a conceptual model that highlights competitive, historical, and ideological influences on commercial mythmaking and their transformative effects on popular memory, which have not been addressed by prior theorizations of the meaning transfer process.

The Status Costs of Subordinate Cultural Capital: At-Home Fathers' Collective Pursuit of Cultural Legitimacy through Capitalizing Consumption Practices

Consumer researchers have primarily conceptualized cultural capital either as an endowed stock of resources that tend to reproduce socioeconomic hierarchies among consumer collectivities or as constellations of knowledge and skill that consumers acquire by making identity investments in a given consumption field. These studies, however, have given scant attention to the theoretical distinction between dominant and subordinate forms of cultural capital, with the latter affording comparatively lower conversion rates for economic, social, and symbolic capital. To redress this oversight, this article presents a multimethod investigation of middle-class men who are performing the emergent gender role of at-home fatherhood. Our analysis profiles and theoretically elaborates upon a set of capitalizing consumption practices through which at-home fathers seek to enhance the conversion rates of their acquisitions of domesticated (and subordinate) cultural capital and to build greater cultural legitimacy for their marginalized gender identity.

How Marketplace Performances Produce Interdependent Status Games and Contested Forms of Symbolic Capital

Consumer researchers have commonly analyzed marketplace performances as liminal events structured by context-specific role playing, norms of reciprocity, and cocreative collaborations. As a consequence, this literature remains theoretically mute on questions related to the sociological disparities that arise when marketplace performances forge relationships between affluent consumers and underclass service workers: a circumstance becoming increasingly commonplace owing to trends in the service-oriented global economy. To redress this gap, we analyze how such sociocultural differences are manifested and mediated in the provisions of skilled marketplace performances. Building upon Bourdieus logic of field analysis, our resulting theoretical framework illuminates a network of structural relations that reconfigures the asymmetrical distribution of class-based resources between these class factions. Rather than being cooperative endeavors conducive to the formation of commercial friendships, we show that these class-stratified marketplace performances produce interdependent status games, subtly manifested power struggles, and contested forms of symbolic capital.

The Politics of Consumer Identity Work

From a conventional standpoint, work is a domain of labor and economic production whereas consumption is a sphere of leisure and expenditure. The cultural turn in consumer research, however, has shown that practices of consumption are indeed productive ones. Through these practices, consumers deploy a gamut of marketplace resources to construct personal and collective identities that, in many cases, challenge social stigmas and limitations that emanate from ascribed categories of gender, class, ethnicity, religiosity, and nationality. And at this point, consumer identity work becomes a mode of identity politics. The term “identity politics” is most closely associated with the second wave feminist movement of the 1960s and its clarion call of the personal is the political, an aphorism which asserted that genderbased inequities of political power and socioeconomic opportunity were routinely manifested in conventional social roles, norms, mores, and status quo expectations (Bristor and Fischer 1993). Thus, challenges to and subversions of the conventional gender order were seen as a means of disrupting broader power structures. Long before the social tumult of the 1960s feminist movement, however, consumers who had little recourse through conventional political channels used consumption (and marketplace resources) as tools for socioeconomic mobilization, such as African Americans “don’t buy where you can’t work” boycotts of segregated stores and restaurants or the multi-ethnic coalition of working-class women who agitated for price controls on staple items during World War II (Cohen 2003). In all these cases, the construction of a collectively shared identity provides an ideological vehicle for organized political action. Within the interdisciplinary field of cultural studies, the politics of identity has emerged as a significant sphere of inquiry, as a plethora of articles and books have traced out how specific subaltern and socioeconomically marginalized groups seek to combat forces of stigmatization, discrimination, and disempowerment through the production of a collective identity (Kellner 2003). As McNay (2010) discusses, analyses of identity politics have tended to emphasize goals oriented toward recognition or redistribution. In the former case, consumers place their societally defining differences at the symbolic center of a collective identity—often enacted through fashion, music, art—and pursue social recognition and/or political legitimization from the broader society (Hebdige 1979; Kates 2004; Kjeldgaard and Askegaard 2006; Ustuner and Holt 2007). The second analytic path—redistribution—emphasizes marginalized groups’ struggles for more equitable distributions of cultural and economic resources and access to opportunities foreclosed by discriminatory constraints and institutional barriers (Adkins and Ozanne 2005; Dolan and Scott 2009; Penaloza 1994; Ustuner and Thompson 2012). In the cultural studies field, this analytic distinction between the identity politics of recognition and that of redistribution has also lent itself to a theoretical polemic, as theorists debate the respective realpolitik consequences and limitations of each orientation (Fraser 1998). In contrast, the consumer culture theory tradition of consumer research has shown that the goals of recognition and redistribution are often dialectically linked, most particularly when consumers’ identity work is directed toward transforming marketplace structures in ways that serve their collective interests (Barnhart and Penaloza 2013; Coskuner-Balli and Thompson 2013; Crockett and Wallendorf 2004; Giesler 2008; Holt 2002; Kozinets and Handelmann 2004; Varman and Belk 2009). This research curation profiles five JCR articles of recent vintage that advance this research stream on the intersections among consumer identity work, identity politics, and marketplace structures. These