Current Issue Highlights
July 7, 2015

June Issue           

Pursuing Attainment versus Maintenance Goals: The Interplay of Self-Construal and Goal Type on Consumer Motivation

Haiyang Yang 
Antonios Stamatogiannakis 
Amitava Chattopadhyay

 
This research examines how self-construal (independent vs. interdependent) and goal type (attainment vs. maintenance) are conceptually linked and jointly impact consumer behavior. Attainment (maintenance) goals can be more motivating for consumers with a more independent (interdependent) self-construal. Differences in salient knowledge about pursuing the goals are one potential mechanism underlying this effect. This interaction effect was found within a single culture, between cultures, when self-construal was experimentally manipulated or measured, and when potential confounding factors like regulatory focus were controlled for. The effect was also found to impact consumer behavior in real life -- self-construal, as reflected by the number of social ties consumers had, impacted the likelihood that they opted to reduce versus maintain their bodyweight. Further, after setting their goal, consumers who were more independent exhibited more (less) motivation, as measured by the amount of money they put at stake, when their goal was weight reduction (maintenance). These findings shed light on the relationship between self-construal and goal type, and offer insights, to both consumers and managers, on how to increase motivation for goal pursuit.
 

Tonya Williams Bradford

John F. Sherry Jr.  


Using a semiotic square to study placeway rituals, the authors theorize one particular sanctuary, a secular ritual they term vestaval -- and specifically, its manifestation in the form of tailgating -- as a site of popular communion. Vestaval demonstrates the power of consumption to stimulate social and civic engagement. The authors employ an ethnographic team methodology to describe and analyze the phenomenon and theorize the eversion mechanism that animates vestaval and sets it apart from other social forms including spectacle, festival, and carnival well known to consumer research. They explore how vestaval turns the domestic world inside out and offers a template both for the temporary suspension and potential remaking of the social relations of market and polity. The authors detail a set of practices within four themes -- location, construction, customization, and inhabitation -- that enables the conversion of private space to public place and the creation of community from a confederacy of consumption encampments. These dynamics are presented as a Mobius strip to emphasize not only the simultaneity of stages, but also the constant sharing of energy. By examining how midwestern American tailgaters in a collegiate setting personalize public place and publicize personal place, this article demonstrates how individuals negotiate two of the fundamental consumption ideologies of public space.
 
Volume 42, Number 1, June 2015
DOI: 10.1093/jcr/ucv001
 

Selling, Sharing, and Everything In Between: The Hybrid Economies of Collaborative Networks

Daiane Scaraboto

Recent consumer research has examined contexts where market-based exchange, gift-giving, sharing, and other modes of exchange occur simultaneously and obey several intersecting logics, but consumer research has not conceptualized these so-called hybrid economic forms nor explained how these hybrids are shaped and sustained. Using ethnographic and netnographic data from the collaborative network of geocaching, this study explains the emergence of hybrid economies. Performativity theory is mobilized to demonstrate that the hybrid status of these economies is constantly under threat of destabilization by the struggle between competing performativities of market and nonmarket modes of exchange. Despite latent tension between competing performativities, the hybrid economy is sustained through consumer-producer engagements in collaborative consumption and production, the creation of zones of indeterminacy, and the enactment of tournaments of value that dissipate controversies around hybrid transactions. Implications are drawn for consumer research on the interplay between market and nonmarket economies.

Volume 42, Number 1, June 2015
DOI: 10.1093/jcr/ucv004
 
Indigenes' Responses to Immigrants' Consumer Acculturation: A Relational Configuration Analysis
Marius K. Luedicke

Consumer research commonly conceptualizes consumer acculturation as a project that immigrants pursue when adjusting their consumer identities and practices to unfamiliar sociocultural environments. This article broadens this prevailing view by conceptualizing consumer acculturation as a relational, interactive adaptation process that involves not only immigrant consumption practices but also indigenes who interpret and adjust to these practices, thereby shaping the paths of possibility for mutual adaptation. Based on a Fiskenian relational configuration analysis, the study shows how indigenes in a rural European town interpret certain immigrant consumption practices as manifestations of a gradual sell-out of the indigenous community, a crumbling of their authority, a violation of equality rules, and of indigenes being torn between contradictory micro- and macro-social morals. The article contributes a broader conceptualization of consumer acculturation, highlights four sources of ethnic group conflict in a consumer acculturation context, and demonstrates the epistemic value of Fiskenian relational configuration analysis for consumer culture theory.

Volume 42, Number 1, June 2015
DOI: 10.1093/jcr/ucv002
 

Transformative Consumer Research

(Spring/Summer 2015)

Curator: Julie L. Ozanne

Products as Signals

(Winter 2014/2015)

Curator: Page Moreau

Meaningful Choice

(Autumn 2014)

Curator: Jennifer Aaker

Morality and the Marketplace

(Summer 2014)

Curator: Kent Grayson

      
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