Marketing and consumer behaviour research has conceptualised time as a resource that affords gift giving, rather than as a gift in its own right. This study advances the idea of time as a gift and examines how meaning is produced through the gifting of time and how such meaning contributes to the well-being of the self and others. We theorise time as an effortful enactment that materialises across three dimensions of meaning: purpose, mattering, and comprehension. Our analysis shows how the gift of time generates meaning for the self (purpose) and for others (mattering and comprehension), unfolding through unidirectional, bidirectional, and circular temporal orientations. Findings reveal the autotelic nature of gift giving of time within mundane consumption practices, enacted as self-time, social time, and committed time across multiple roles in Western societies. We contribute to marketing theory by conceptualising time as a meaningful and transformative gift that sustains well-being.
Digital dating platforms have become the primary architects of modern intimacy, deploying algorithmic infrastructures that actively colonize the emotional landscape. While scholarship often interrogates dominant dating logics, it frequently neglects the fraught tension that users experience as they are forced to reconcile their private desires with prescriptive, data-driven frameworks. Utilizing consumer interviews, social media observations, and discourse analysis, we apply institutional theory to investigate how users exercise agency under the shadow of competing logics. We identify these logics and elucidate how consumers perform institutional work—adapting to, resisting, or negotiating platform norms—as a means of reclaiming psychological sovereignty from the digital apparatus. Our findings advance the critique of platformization and algorithmic governance by revealing how individuals navigate a landscape where intimacy is engineered, thereby sustaining the very markets that commodify their personal lives.
Interpretive consumer research has championed alternative qualitative methods to advance marketing theory. This canon of research has provided alternative expressions of various consumption experiences and new ways of fostering knowledge in a well-established tradition of methodological emancipation. In this paper we advance this canon by introducing exhibition as method to consumer research. To do so we discuss our use of exhibition as method in a project entitled ‘The Marketplace & I’. Our offering of exhibition as method invokes curation theory and structurally guides consumer researchers who wish to draw on exhibitions as an alternative mode of qualitative research. We subsequently demonstrate how the utility of exhibition as method can move consumer research more readily from methodological emancipation towards ‘emancipatory praxis’ where our research efforts are made more accessible to broader audiences outside of academia.
This article adopts an Indigenous-informed perspective to understand how the energy from more-than-human entities (e.g. plants, animals, and spirits) shapes atmospheres of consumption. Drawing on ethnographic research undertaken with members of the Shipibo-Konibo Indigenous group of the Peruvian Amazon, we introduce the concept of koshi , a form of energy generated through relations between humans, plants, animals, and spirits that permeates place and space. We show that more-than-human entities produce affective energies that shape atmospheres through (1) the emanation of koshi to the environment to signal power and presence, (2) the storage of koshi within their bodies for later ritual activation, and (3) the transfer of koshi to humans in healing processes. These processes reveal atmospheres as manifestations of the relations among all beings with positive and negative effects on humans’ health and well-being. By centring Indigenous relationality, this article challenges human-centric and Western theorisations of affect and atmospheres. In doing so, our study contributes to our current understanding of how more-than-human entities, like plants, animals, and spirits, shape and experience consumption.
This commentary describes the evolution and prospects for further development of the marketing subarea within Constructivist Market Studies (CMS).
The essay reflects on management/business scholarship's failure to acknowledge their complicity in, and to engage with major ethical crises of our time. We build on our attempt as critical accounting academics to garner action against the genocide in Palestine by four leading critical/interdisciplinary accounting journals. Accounting is deeply entangled in the political and economic organisation of occupation, and violence perpetrated by the state of Israel against Palestinians. Unlike Marketing Theory and Organization, who adopted stances against genocide, including boycotting Israeli academic institutions, most management and critical/interdisciplinary accounting journals remained silent, contradicting their long-standing claims to critical and theoretical positions against oppression. In response to our community mobilisation, the four journals desisted from taking meaningful actions, using their publisher's 'neutrality requirements' and/or DEI as justifications for their (in)action. This reflective piece details our efforts, the journal's responses, and our rebuttals to their inaction. We further reflect on the implication of corporate takeover of academic journals and marketisation of universities, and their (in)-capacity to engage with major ethical crises of our times.
This commentary reflects on 25 years of Marketing Theory as a key site for critique. Work on consumer wellbeing, marketing history, research methodology and theory has established a tradition that is both persistent in its scepticism and adaptive to changing conditions of capitalism. Marketing systems today are marked by precarity, exclusion and digital disruption, and the categories of consumer, market and brand are increasingly unstable. Against this backdrop, Marketing Theory remains a primary forum for critique that sustains the possibility of an intellectual imagination and keeping open the possibility to imagine and contemplate alternatives.
This commentary explores the gap between the conceptual evolution of brand communities and their treatment within Marketing Theory since 2001. We begin by synthesizing key contributions from marketing research on brand communities, emphasizing the work of leading scholars in the field. Next, we reposition the notion of brand communities within the broader landscape of consumption collectives. We then reconsider the assumption that brand communities exist independently of geographical constraints. Finally, we critically examine the social implications of centering research on brand communities and related commercial phenomena.
Market System Dynamics (MSD) scholarship has established markets as institutionally embedded systems through which societies coordinate value, morality, and power. This article extends that perspective by examining how contemporary market transformations strain key assumptions underlying existing theorization. We identify four domains in which new forms of market dynamics are particularly salient: artificial intelligence and machine market systems, climate and energy in the Anthropocene, financialization and consumer risk, and biopolitical markets. Each domain is organized around a constitutive tension (human and machine, nature and capitalism, calculation and trust, and life and economy) that reveals how markets increasingly operate as hybrid moral infrastructures. Across these contexts, markets redistribute agency, reorganize time, and sustain participation under conditions of profound uncertainty by structuring trust, affect, delegation, and hope. The article positions these domains as developmental vectors for market system dynamics research and highlights their implications for understanding markets as evolving moral and institutional arrangements.
This paper investigates the relationship between place, space and the rise and settling of controversies in market agencements. While work has been done to understand how controversies shape markets, their spatiality is yet to be conceptualised. Specifically, we explore how controversies are materially and spatially (re)organised, (re)negotiated, and (temporarily) settled. Methodologically, we conducted a marketography of two tourism markets, namely, the favela tourism market in Brazil, and the Christmas tourism market in Finland. Drawing on secondary data, we make three key contributions. First, the two distinct tourism markets provide the basis for the theorisation of how space is embroiled in market agencements and controversies. Second, we conceptualise how market controversies arise through colliding treatments of Boundaries and Uses of space, and identify Resistance and Recognition as bundles of spatial frames, devices, practices and representations that reframe a market that respects local communities and temporarily settle controversies. Finally, we conceptualise the role of indigenous communities who become active actors in the marketization process as Temporary Shapeshifting. The favela and the Christmas tourism markets are exemplary of how space is embroiled in market controversies, in how they are managed and in how alternative market agencements are reconfigured.
This paper examines how valuation practices shape place branding through the case of a city bidding to become European Capital of Culture (ECoC). While place branding research has emphasised stakeholder involvement and identity construction, less attention has been paid to how valuation practices shape what is considered valuable in branding processes. Drawing on valuation studies and orders of worth, we analyse how valuation devices such as bid books, scoring systems, and consultations mediate competing value claims during the bidding process. We introduce the concept of branding as valuation to show how place brands emerge through the negotiation and operationalisation of competing orders of worth within valuation assemblages. The study contributes to marketing theory by conceptualising branding as a constitutive valuation process and by showing how competitions function as valuation assemblages that organise and stabilise place brand value.
In this commentary, we discuss the concepts of place and space, and the development of a ‘spatial sensibility’ in the marketing discipline. Reviewing the way(s) in which place and space have been used in marketing (particularly in Marketing Theory ), we identify two interrelated approaches: as (1) subject/object of research and as (2) context for research, and go on to discuss the main advancements in the field, key scholars to consider, and conclude by articulating a future research agenda—topics and questions requiring further understanding and development.
This work develops a vision for purposively using pronoun-poetry in qualitative consumer research. While debates regarding knowledge hierarchies continue, poetic inquiry remains underexplored as a means to advance theorisation in this area. Drawing upon our own research experiences, we discuss how these methods can stimulate new ways of thinking, feeling, analysing, and amplifying consumer voices. We contribute to these conversations by developing pronoun-poetry practice, building on Voice-Centred Relational Method (VCRM) derived I-poems and unpacking a few of the many ways that different pronouns can be combined with other concepts (e.g., emotions) to create new pronoun-emotion variants. We also reinvigorate VCRM through what we term Voice-Centred Relational Poetry, a vision for using pronoun-poetry across all VCRM reading stages. These contributions significantly progress alternative methods through creative experimentation and originality, counterbalancing knowledge hierarchies and generating novel, co-created insights, and modes of representation about consumers’ socio-affective experiences and power struggles in the marketplace.
This commentary reviews the use of psychoanalysis in marketing theory. It breaks this application into three epochs. The first was driven by commercial interests in marketing practice. The second saw psychoanalysis as a critical and cultural theory to understand the symbolic aspects of consumer society. The most recent deploys psychoanalysis to explore the perversions, pathologies and secret pleasures of contemporary consumption. From here, the commentary briefly identifies the institutional, theoretical, methodological and political challenges posed by psychoanalysis as a marketing theory and proposes paths for the future development of marketing and consumer psychoanalysis.
This commentary uses Gary Gerstle’s concept of political orders to reinterpret the rise of consumer resistance as a signature scholarly preoccupation during the neoliberal era. It further assesses how neoliberalism’s ongoing crisis unsettles the field’s inherited frameworks, reshapes the conditions under which resistance becomes meaningful, and opens space for alternative political imaginaries. The commentary concludes with speculation on where consumer resistance scholarship might be heading in the post-neoliberal order and what conceptual tools and sensibilities the new order might require.
This commentary discusses feminist research that has contributed to marketing theory, highlighting three levels of understanding: the representational, the socio-economic, and the embodied-affective. After exploring the contributions of each level we continue by focussing on key theorists before also pointing to future developments.
This paper develops an integrative conceptual model of firm responses to the emergence of inclusionary forces in markets that have historically evolved as exclusionary. Drawing on institutional and sensemaking theories, we illustrate how marketing practices reproduce exclusionary norms that become institutionalized as markets mature, and how demographic, moral, regulatory, and competitive forces disrupt these logics to create opportunities for inclusion. We conceptualize firms' sensemaking of turbulence along two dimensions: external appraisals of inclusion as consensual versus controversial and internal appraisals of adaptation as seamless versus burdensome, yielding four patterned responses: segregation, stealth inclusion, compliant inclusion, and transformative inclusion. Our model contributes to inclusive marketing scholarship by: integrating fragmented research into a unified framework that explains why and how firms adopt divergent responses to inclusionary pressures; expanding theorization of inclusion and exclusion as dynamic and mutually constitutive processes; and linking micro-level marketing practices to macro-level institutional dynamics of exclusion and inclusion.
The development of marketing theory continues to rest on the assumption that services and goods have distinct value creation implications. To further advance such theorizing and enhance the practical applications of marketing knowledge, this paper applies practice theory and the emerging Services-as-Practices framework to conceptualize goods, distinguish them from services, and integrate both within a common practice-based framework. The paper contributes by: (1) identifying a practice-based goods construct that captures how they cocreate and codestroy value, (2) differentiating the practice-based conceptualizations of goods and services in separate frameworks, and (3) relating these conceptualizations within a common framework that explains their mutual value cocreation and codestruction.
How are public organizations subjected to institutional work that reduces barriers to marketization within public decision-making while undermining procedural safeguards and democratic accountability? Drawing on a critical hermeneutic analysis, we examine the procurement of a multibillion hospital project in Sweden, where a public-private partnership gained legitimacy despite established safeguards for procedural fairness and public accountability that weighed against it. We show how liminality, as a state of being neither fully inside nor outside organizations, enables interventions in bureaucratic procedures without equivalent formal accountability. We conceptualize this as liminal market-shaping, expressed through management consultants' efforts to destabilize decision paths, moral foundations, and sanctioning mechanisms in public procurement. The study contributes to marketing theory by extending market-shaping research to public organizations, introducing liminal market-shaping as a form of disruptive institutional work, and conceptualizing public de-responsibilization to explain how marketization erodes rather than activates agency in markets and beyond, within democratic governance.
