This Season’s Events
April 4th, 2025, 12:00 – 1:30 PM (at Loyola University Chicago)
Radicalizing the Responsibilized Consumer
Sebastián Ordóñez-Giraldo and Julie L. Ozanne
In late modernity, individuals are encouraged to manage their social and economic problems through marketplace interactions, supported by the consolidation of consumer responsibilization and therapeutic consumption culture. However, what happens when access to those marketplaces is restricted by governing authorities and experts? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews, and online observations, this study explains how health-conscious consumers became radically responsibilized when their ability to meet their therapeutic needs through the market was thwarted. We inductively derived a three-stage process to explain radical responsibilization. First, consumers are disenfranchised by authorities and experts restricting their therapeutic routines. Second, consumers retreat from these modern authorities, pursuing retrotopian enchantment as they seek restoration from nature and draw strength from therapeutic tribes. Third, responsibilized consumers defend their therapeutic routines by politically mobilizing and making market adaptations. This research contributes by revealing the unintended consequences of consumer responsibilization, explores the marketplace implications of Bauman’s retrotopia, and explains how disenfranchised consumers mobilize for change.
Julie was selected as our annual “fly-in” speaker–someone who does not live within driving distance of Chicago and whose travel expenses are paid by our generous sponsors. As is true every year, nominations and voting for the “fly-in” speaker were open to everyone on the C4 mailing list. Thanks to all who participated!
March 7th, 2025, 12:00 – 1:30 PM (at Loyola University Chicago)
Citizen-Producers and the Negotiation of Citizenship in the Marketplace
Meredith A. Rhoads, Stacey Menzel Baker and Alexander I. Mitchell
Theories of corporate citizenship and corporate social responsibility are built on studies that focus on large, global for-profit firms and that align with Neoliberal assumptions regarding the roles of businesses in civic life. The exclusion of small, local businesses has restricted scholarship on how businesses negotiate citizenship in their local community contexts, a central feature of influential theories of organizational behavior in social environments. In this project, we investigate the citizenship behaviors of small, local for-profit businesses using theories of subjectivity. Our findings –organized around the themes of sacrifice, participation, and anchoring – offer theory in support of answering the question of how small, local for-profit businesses negotiate their citizenship in their local communities, and what tensions contribute to their processes of negotiation. Our work contributes to discussions of business citizenship, the role of for-profit organizations within civil society, as well as broader socio political discussions of the political economy of citizenship.
December 6th, 2024, 12:00 – 1:30 PM (at Loyola University Chicago)
Analyzing the Performativity of Brand Leadership
Craig Thompson, University of Wisconsin
A number of studies have detailed the dilemmas that leadership crises can pose to a brand, whether due to succession quandaries (Arnould and Dion 2023) or a brand leader becoming embroiled in a scandal (Fournier and Ekhardt 2019). We use the theoretical lens of performativity (Austin 1962; Callon 2007) to analyze the rise and fall of CrossFit’s CEO Greg Glassman and the resilience the brand displayed in the aftermath of his controversy-driven resignation. We provide an alternative explanation to Wieser, Luedicke, and Hemetsberger’s (2021) finding that brand leaders can generate consumer devotion by staging charismatic authority through acts of polarizing risk taking. Our analysis also highlights the ways in which a brand’s socio-technical arrangements (Callon 2007) create a zone of legitimacy which authorizes certain kinds of risk taking actions on the part of brand leaders while problematizing others.
For the most up to date information and links to remote sessions, join our email list.