Consumption Markets & Culture
Special Issue on Shaping Exchanges, Building Markets, June 2012
Guest Editors: Susi Geiger, Hans Kjellberg & Robert Spencer
From the introduction:
“It is a great pleasure to introduce, via this article, this Consumption Markets & Culture (CMC) special issue on “Shaping exchanges, building markets,” arisen from an initiative that parallels this journal’s ambitions and aims in many ways: in representing a crossroads for many social science disciplines, in bringing together elements and layers of market activities that all too often remain segregated in academic writing, and in embracing a multitude of empirical sites and areas of inquiry. In doing so, CMC is a unique outlet for a community that recognizes that all three constituent elements of its title are highly interrelated and that social science inquiry across disciplines should give equal focus to each. Somewhat surprisingly, then, while there has been a solid tradition of CMC papers on markets and market-making (see, for instance, Cook, Smith, and Searle 2009; Joy and Sherry 2003, 2004; Keating and McLoughlin 2005; Kjellberg 2008; Morcom 2008; Visconti 2008; Wong 2007), no less than three former editors of this journal have not too long ago noted that “Paradoxically, the term market is everywhere and nowhere in our literature” (Venkatesh, Peñaloza, and Firat 2006, 252). If this is so, and if the two “Cs” this journal is dedicated to have received somewhat more attention from our academic community in the past, this special issue is an attempt to redress this balance. Our aim is to draw attention to the “M” that is the market; an “M” we believe is particularly suited to cross-disciplinary and cross-area inquiry; an “M” that cannot be studied in isolation but that requires close attention to its siblings consumption and culture; an “M” that is nonetheless worthy of special emphasis.”
Contents
Introduction – Shaping exchanges, building markets
Susi Geiger, Hans Kjellberg & Robert Spencer
On the road to prosumption: marketing discourse and the development of consumer competencies
Bernard Cova & Véronique Cova
Technologies of ironic revelation: enacting consumers in neuromarkets
Tanja Schneider & Steve Woolgar
Developing uses, qualifying goods: on the construction of market exchange for Internet access services
Alexandre Mallard
The dynamic signification of product qualities: on the possibility of “greening” markets
Satu Reijonen & Kjell Tryggestad
Market formation in subsistence contexts: a study of informal waste trade practices in Tanzania and Brazil
Sara Lindeman
