Ride-hailing platforms are expanding globally, making inroads into developing markets. However, the technological affordances of many ride-hailing platforms were built in response to conditions in developed markets. Unlike developed markets, developing markets are characterized by infrastructural deficiencies, informality, and regulatory voids, which influence how consumers in these markets experience and use ride-hailing platforms. How do the affordances of ride-hailing platforms from developed markets shape the platforms' performance in developing markets? The authors explore this question using a qualitative ethnographic approach to examine Uber's operation in Ghana, engaging with drivers, riders, investors, Uber executives, and government officials. The findings show that Uber's platform performance in Ghana is shaped by three platform-market interaction outcomes: platform infrastructural deficiencies, (in)formalization, and affordance-based regulation. These interaction outcomes affect the platform's performance and manifest platform-market tensions. Market actors respond to the resulting platform performance with acceptance, avoidance, adaptation, substitution, resistance, brand responsibilization, and subversion. These insights contribute to research on the sharing economy, marketing in developing markets, and affordance theory. They also help ride-hailing managers understand how their platforms' affordances work in other developing markets with similar characteristics and how they can manage the resulting platform performance and tensions to succeed in these markets.

While consumers increasingly turn to the marketplace seeking meaning and happiness, others search for experiential opportunities to escape the dull existence of everyday life. Yet these experiences are often temporary, and consumers return to their "everyday" after engaging in the transformative experience. We know little about those who decide to escape more permanently by turning their pursuit of deeper meanings and fulfillment (eudaimonia) through consumption into a career. We conceptualize this pursuit as eudaimonic consumption careers (ECCs). In a 10.5-year ethnographic study of snowsports instructors across Canada and New Zealand, we examine the key stages and experiences of ECCs over time. We conceptualize ECCs by first noting the integrative triggers that encourage people to embark on the career. We discuss two aspects of the ECC stage that begins with undergoing a eudaimonic transition followed by developing capabilities and skills to manage the career demands of an ECC. Finally, we discuss the disintegrative triggers that lead to people's exit. We contribute to literature on extraordinary consumption, consumer work and serious leisure, and critical research on the limits of modern life and work. We achieve this by explaining a corpus of consumption careers and extraordinary consumer experiences that has been overlooked and undertheorized. This research offers implications for managing consumers and employees in multiple ECCs to understand how to best support people in ECCs, and promote service jobs with the promise of fulfillment, personal growth, and greater life purpose. (c) 2025 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY

This paper contributes to the research on the symbiotic relationship between religion and the market by examining the nature and implications of the marketization of religion in a contemporary Christendom in which religion and the market are hegemonic. Based on our analysis of 3741 church advertisements in Ghana over a 6-year period, we conceptualize three symbiotic relationships that coexist between the market and religion-commensalism, mutualism, and competition. We argue that these symbiotic relationships mirror how religion hegemonizes popular imagination and members' consumption through marketization in contemporary Christendom. This study extends our understanding of the dialectical relationship between religion and the market by showing that religion can use marketization to perpetuate its hegemony within and beyond the market.

Many sharing economy business models claim to be circular economy (CE) allies. They claim to create platforms for enabling need-based access to–instead of ownership of–underused goods in ways that facilitate the realization of CE goals, including waste avoidance and efficient (re)-use of existing products. While private cars offer more flexible services, they are parked most of the time and carry very few people when moving. Private cars are also widely criticized for their significant negative externalities, including congestion, pollution, and road crashes. Ride-hailing is often presented as a new car-sharing business model that can alter consumer behavior toward possessing fewer private cars and an overall reduction in the number of cars on roads. This, in turn, will lead to increased public health and environmental benefits, including reduced congestion, energy consumption, vehicular pollution, and car crashes while stimulating job creation including opportunities for people to commercialize private cars. This chapter questions ride-hailing potential to enable a CE transition in Africa’s transport sector through a case study of Ghana. It argues that not only does ride-hailing put more private cars on the roads, but it also undermines existing shared modes of transport that have the potential to reduce private car use. Overall, ride-hailing in Ghana encourages the commercialization of private cars in ways that benefit a minority while socializing the negative externalities for all in the form of increased risky driving practices, shifts from shared public transport, and inundation of the roads with more highly polluting and crash-prone used cars. The chapter contributes to the growing calls for increased scrutiny of the sustainability transition claims of so-called CE-based sharing business models. This is necessary for reducing the risks of tying sustainability transition financing and other opportunities to linear economy business wolves dressed in CE sheep clothing.

In this article we use actor-network theory to advance understandings of how nature-dependent “prosumers” adopt climate change solutions. Based on interviews with members from two subsistence farming communities in Colombia, we illustrate how knowledge about climate change and climate change solutions flows across intervention and response networks, formed by human and nonhuman actors, in a dialectical way—sometimes supporting and other times resulting in contradictions/betrayals that limit prosumers’ adoption of sustainable practices. These findings contribute to theories about the diffusion of innovations related to climate change, capturing how knowledge translations processes involves bureaucratic and grassroots knowledge from intervention networks that interacts with reflected knowledge from response networks. It also highlights the key role of nonhuman actors. Our findings offer insights for practitioners by illuminating multiple sources of knowledge and how their interaction can result in supportive versus detracting conditions that can affect whether consumers adopt climate change solutions.

During a roundtable discussion at the 2022 GENMAC Conference, a group of researchers specializing in religiosity and spiritual consumption, using examples from their own fieldwork, reflected on how (i) researchers’ subject positioning—including their gender and sexuality—shape fieldwork in multifaceted manners; (ii) investigations of religious/spiritual fields would benefit from a heightened sensitivity to issues of gender and sexuality; and (iii) greater sensitivity to aspects of religion and/or spirituality can help gender and sexuality scholars better understand consumers and markets. Based on the above, in this commentary paper, we call for intersectional reflexivity, attention to vulnerability and discomfort during fieldwork, and critical sensitivity to the religious “context of context” during theorization. Furthermore, we argue that specific spiritual/religious imaginaries can foster new research approaches that can contribute to more nuanced fieldwork and theorization in marketing and consumer research.

In some cultures, migrants bear an obligation to bring gifts from the foreign country for their relations when returning to their homeland. Why, and to what end? We examine the reasons for these transnational gift obligations in a multisite study of Ghanaian migrants in the United States and Australia, as well as people in Ghana with migrant relations living overseas. We adopt a wealth-centered perspective that problematizes the underexplored mutual impact of migrants and their gifts on social hierarchies within societies and transnational spatial hierarchies between societies. We show how the concepts of wealth in people and wealth in place connect with local gift economies to explain transnational gifting obligations. Specifically, informants use transnational gifts that embody wealth in place to acknowledge “being wealth” to people and to acquire wealth in others. We highlight the wealth in things that are exchanged as gift objects and the wealth in people who are exchanged as gift subjects between here and there. Our findings implicate a “glocal” gift economy that results from the global flows of things and people as gifts within transnational places of differing statuses. We discuss how this glocal gift economy (re)produces transnational spatial hierarchies and local (national) status hierarchies.

Purpose Once the domain of theologians, sociologists and (religion) anthropologists, we have seen more recently how consumer researchers have enriched the study of spirituality and religion. Researching the sacred can be fraught with challenges, in and out of the field. Russell Belk, Samuelson Appau and Diego Rinallo address key questions, issues and conceptualisations in the scholarship on sacred consumption, contemplating the past and mapping future research avenues. A reading list is also included for those interested in joining the authors in this collective discovery of the sacred. Design/methodology/approach Contributors answered the following four questions: How has the study of sacred consumption evolved since you started researching the field? What would be the critical methodological issues that researchers need to consider when approaching the “sacred”? What are some of the key authors that have influenced your thinking? What do you think will be the key questions that researchers will need to focus on? Findings Rinallo, Belk and Appau’s reflections on studying the sacred provide food for thought for both novice and weathered researchers alike. Researching the sacred both shapes and is shaped by our positionality: by our insider/outsider status, our gender and race and our cosmovisions as believers or sceptics. Researchers should be mindful and reflective of their subject positionings as they approach, enter and leave the field. Researching the sacred requires an open mind as we broaden our vision of what constitutes the sacred. Such research calls for scholarly as well as phenomenological curiosity. Reading widely and across disciplines to better familiarise ourselves with our sacred context helps to craft novel and meaningful research. Originality/value This paper provides a multivocal genealogy of consumer culture work on religion and spirituality, methodological advice and reading resources for researchers.

We examine the effects of temperature on general health and subjective wellbeing. We combine daily temperature data with 19 waves of panel data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey. We find evidence of an inverted U-shaped relationship between temperature and general health. However, the effect of temperature on subjective wellbeing is less robust. We examine whether the adoption of air conditioning technology moderates the observed relationship between temperature and health. Our results show that there is no robust evidence for the role of air conditioning in moderating the relationship between temperature and health/wellbeing. Further, we conducted a mediation analysis to examine whether sleep quality serves as a channel through which the effect of temperature transmits to health. We find little evidence in support of sleep quality as a mechanism.

This commentary section presents a dialogical discussion on Appau's (2021) 'Toward a divine economic system', an article in which he explores religious exchanges in the context of a Pentecostal Church in Ghana and proposes 'the divine economy' as an alternative economic system to interrogate and extend scholarship on the relationship between the market and religion. In a thought-provoking conversation, four commentators (including Appau) engage in a critical discussion aimed at generating new ideas on theorizing the complex relationship between the market, consumption, and religion.

Governments in Africa are licensing major global ride-hailing firms to launch operations in the continent. This is often presented as a refreshing development for the continent to leverage technology to address its twin problems of inefficient urban transport and rising youth unemployment. Interviews with ride-hailing adopters (drivers, riders, and car owners) and researchers in Ghana suggest, however, that whereas the technology is driving up the standards of road transport experience, the benefits are accessible to a select few (largely, the younger, highly educated and relatively high income-earning class). The lopsided power relations underlying the ride-hailing industry have also meant that the economic opportunities it avails disproportionately benefit a few powerful players (e.g. ride-hailing firms and car owners) while stimulating 'turf wars' among online and traditional taxi drivers; deepening existing gender inequalities in access to income-earning opportunities in the commercial passenger transport sector; encouraging unhealthy driving practices, shifts from shared public transport, and inundation of the roads with more private cars. While it will be imprecise to say that the private gains of ride-hailing outstrip the public costs and, therefore, the technology is detrimental to Ghana's development, the considered evidence raises the need for sustained scrutiny of the hailing of technological interventions as though they are the magic bullets for socio-economic transformation in Africa. Overall, the paper argues that dismantling the power structures underlying Africa's urban challenges will require more than splashing 'smart' apps and other tech wizardries around. Indeed, the lessons from Ghana's ride-hailing industry suggest that such exclusively technical solutions could easily take root and pattern after existing strictures of unjust power structures in ways that could exacerbate the social and environmental problems they are supposed to address.

In response to growing calls for racial diversity and inclusion in academia, this article offers a framework for decolonisation of the Australasian Marketing Academy. The purpose of our framework is to help shape the adoption of diversity and inclusion practices in a way that promotes knowledge democracy and amplification of underrepresented voices within the Australian and New Zealand Marketing Academy. This article is thus both a reflective piece and a roadmap to guide the Academy’s journey to decolonisation and representation of its minority members. First, our article highlights experiences of marginalisation in the Australasian context, and the reported barriers to diversity and inclusion of minority voices. Next, we propose our framework which aims to collapse these barriers in favour of a more equitable, cultural, and intellectual convergence, wherein the invisibility of minority scholarship can become as visible and as legitimate as the majority.

Climate change threatens sustainable development by influencing myriad of outcomes. We examine if temperature shocks contribute to the gambling, which is a major public health concern globally. We use longitudinal data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey coupled with satellite data capturing neighbourhood temperature shocks. Our results suggest that temperature shocks increase the prevalence of gambling, and that psychological distress and social capital are channels through which temperature shocks transmit to gambling behaviour. Our results point to the need for policies that promote mental health and encourage social capital amidst extreme weather events in order to offset the effects of weather shocks on gambling behaviour.

Using longitudinal data from the China Family Panel Studies, this study provides insights on comparative wellbeing outcomes for older people who are institutionally segregated into clusters that produce uneven social capital. We present the first study that examines how institutionalized social capital inequality, measured by the social capital gap generated by hukou (household registration) status in China, affects the wellbeing of older people. Our results show that high levels of social capital inequality are associated with lower subjective wellbeing, measured by life satisfaction. This general conclusion is robust to a number of sensitivity checks including alternative ways of measuring subjective wellbeing and inequality. We also find that the negative relationship between social capital inequality and subjective wellbeing is strongest for people with a non-urban hukou living in urban areas. Our findings highlight the need for policies aimed at narrowing the social capital gap and the dismantling of institutional structures that hinder upward social capital mobility.

Digital financial platforms have become an integral part of consumers' lives-resulting in the datafication of everyday life and potential for uniquely impacting financial well-being. Extending previous transformative consumer research, we suggest financial well-being must center the ways digital financial platforms and their resulting data are increasingly enmeshed with financial decision making and consumption. Drawing on a theoretical lens of platformization, we propose the Platformed Money Ecosystem, which accounts for increased embeddedness of digital financial platforms within consumers' lives and the subtlety of how everyday life is transformed into data: producing data at the micro-level, monetizing data at the meso-level, and regulating data at the macro-level. In conceptualizing the Platformed Money Ecosystem, we identify three data-informed considerations for scholars and policymakers to reimagine financial well-being: protecting consumer data, limiting data biases, and supporting data literacy.