Markets are sites of collaboration as well as contestation between their various actors, including firms and consumers. In this respect, a narrative that consumers are more empowered than ever has been in vogue. Drawing from Kafka’s literature and philosophy and the paradigm of critical marketing, this paper argues for a broadened perspective.

Current calls for deep societal transformation stress the need to go beyond green consumption and aim for the reduction of material consumption. Such a shift is enacted by grassroots initiatives around reuse, repair and sharing. However, the possibility of postconsumerist perspectives and practices to reach a broader audience is affected by discursive opportunity structures (DOS) formed in public debate. To understand the DOS it is relevant to pay attention both to the continuous normalisation of consumption and to the ways in which alternatives are represented. To develop new analytical tools for examining what postconsumerist initiatives are up against, we introduce the concept of banal consumerism: mundane, habitual expressions that reproduce consumer culture. Through an empirical study of Swedish daily newspapers, we construct the basis for a typology of different expressions of banal consumerism. We find several expressions, of which the massive advertising of consumer goods is the most common but editorial material also plays an important role. This largely disabling DOS is then put in relation to the potentially enabling opportunities entailed in the existing media coverage of postconsumerist initiatives, practices and perspectives. The results show that postconsumerist initiatives and practices are newsworthy and presented as commendable. The fact that high levels of material consumption negatively impact the environment and life on the planet is widely accepted. To argue for degrowth or criticise consumerism is, however, controversial. Thus, support for postconsumerist practices coexist with massive expressions of banal consumerism, creating a complex set of DOS for the postconsumerist initiatives to navigate.

This paper proposes a comparative historical analysis of shopping environments, focusing on the aesthetic experience they offer to the consumer and underscoring their nature as phantasmagorias. At a time when digital disruption, exacerbated by the recent pandemic, has dramatically changed social habits and the cityscape, this research aims to investigate the impact of technological and social transformations on the buyosphere and the practice of shopping. The approach's original perspective looks at the close correlation between the flâneur and the consumer, examining how retail spaces in the modern metropolis have developed. The shopping experience is shown as a social ritual with complex facets, where the urban walker and the cityscape have gradually transformed, giving symbolic meaning to architectural forms and human identities. The findings of this study call for considering the opportunities and threats of the present scenario. The shift to the virtual realm has created new forms of phantasmagoria, such as the immersive experience in the brand's universe combined with omnichannel strategies. At the same time, the “retail apocalypse” and the reduction of spaces for wandering may risk limiting social encounters, the freedom of movement, and the individual's ability to interpret urban reality, elements that once defined the practice of flânerie.

As social media use rises, the impact of social media influencers on customer buying decisions increases, due to customers viewing influencers as ideal role models who they try to imitate. Nevertheless, this phenomenon is still under-researched. This study examined the impact of the imitation of influencers on customer buying intention toward endorsed products, which is mediated by social comparison, materialism and the fear of missing out (FOMO).

Psychoanalysis opens a variety of windows into understanding contemporary consumption and consumerism. The psychoanalytic theory of defence and the unconscious enables us to understand why commodities, from fast cars to luxury chocolate, so readily stand in to offer substitute gratification for deeper repressed desires and why the meaning of such commodities is liable to become mobile and unstable (Baudrillard, 1988 [1970]). The psychoanalytic concepts of narcissism (Freud, 1914) and the mirror stage (Lacan, 2006) provide powerful entry points into understanding our culture’s obsession with image (Cluley and Dunne, 2012), whilst the theory of neurosis offers significant insights into the addictive and deeply irrational qualities of contemporary consumption (Lasch, 1980). Object relations theory (Winnicott, 1964) enables us to understand how material objects, from early childhood attachments to teddy bears, act as bridges between our sense of self and what we come to view as an external world deeply indifferent to our desires. Several other psychoanalytic concepts and ideas have proven particularly helpful in contemporary discourses on consumption. This essay draws its inspiration from Freud’s theory of religion (Freud,1927, 1930) to test the view that the consumer’s freedom to choose and construct an identity is an illusion in the technical sense – a fantasy that discloses deeper desires and offers substitute gratifications for the discontents inflicted on us by contemporary consumer culture. Like earlier illusions, the illusion of freedom and the derivative illusions of choice and identity may provide some consolation, but, arguably, then deepen the discontents for which they purport to offer comfort.

How is consumer desire transformed by contemporary technology? Most extant theory holds that technology rationalizes and reduces passion. In our investigation of networks of desire—complex open systems of machines, consumers, energy, and objects—we find technology increasing the passion to consume. Effects depend upon participation in the network, which can be private, public, or professional. Private participation tends to discipline passion into interests reflecting established cultural categories. Public and professional participation build new connections between extant desires and a wider network, decentering ties and deterritorializing flows that limit hungers to emplaced bodies. Public and professional participation drive consumption passion to transgressive extremes. We use ethnography and netnography to study online food image sharing, a broad field that includes everything from friend networks to food bloggers. Using and extending Deleuze and Guattari’s desire theory, we conceptualize desire as energetic, connective, systemic, and innovative. Critically examining the role of technocapitalism in the realm of consumption passion, we question the emancipatory possibilities of unfettered desire. Networks of desire create a passionate new universe of technologically enhanced desire, one that challenges the way we think about consumer collectives, capitalism, emancipation, and posthuman consumption.

This paper draws on data collected during ethnographic fieldwork in a factory in south-east China to describe the significance of a group of activities colloquially known as “pulling the sheep’s wool” ( haoyangmao). This wide-ranging set of thrift-oriented practices involves gaining rewards and discounts by collecting various credits and points, most often through activities conducted on online shopping, news and payment platforms. Recent studies have sought to reposition thrift as a morally-infused consumptive practice for the creation of value, through which the concept of the house is enacted. However, this paper demonstrates how thrift is viewed by labourers as a kind of “work”. As such, it is able to act in a factory environment largely unmoored from notions of domesticity, instead delineating social boundaries between production line workers and managers, fostering communal behaviours amongst labourers and—through a process of earmarking—allowing for workers to direct a greater share of their wages toward household economies. We argue that this conception of thrift as labour actually reworks the way that consumption conjoins with production, challenging our received understandings of consumption, while also providing new possibilities for the creation of both value and personhood.

While the spatial dimensions of augmented reality (AR) have received significant attention in the marketing literature, to date, there has been less consideration of its temporal dimensions. This paper aims to theorise digital timework through AR to understand a new form of consumption experience that offers short-lived, immersive forms of mundane, marketer-led escape from everyday life.

This interview examines the relations between production and consumption and the significance of what Bauman calls ‘the consumerist syndrome’. The latter is defined by the desire for instant satisfaction. The article distinguishes the consumerist syndrome from Veblen’s concept of conspicuous consumption. It breaks with the 20th century practice of regarding consumer preoccupations and activities as derivative of needs and suggests that consumption is now driven by infinite desire. Bauman sets the consumer syndrome in relation to his concept of liquid modernity. The choices of the modern consumer are set against unfulfilled options. The notion of using consumption as a form of resistance is examined and criticized. The article concludes with some reflections on the condition of sociological activity today.

We evaluate how features of the digital environment free or constrain the self. Based on the current empirical literature, we argue that modern technological features, such as predictive algorithms and tracking tools, pose four potential obstacles to the freedom of the self: lack of privacy and anonymity, (dis)embodiment and entrenchment of social hierarchy, changes to memory and cognition, and behavioral reinforcement coupled with reduced randomness. Comparing these constraints on the self to the freedom promised by earlier digital environments suggests that digital reality can be designed in more freeing ways. We describe how people reassert personal agency in the face of the digital environment’s constraints and provide avenues for future research regarding technology’s influence on the self.