Papers by Janice Denegri-Knott
Journal of Promotional Communications, Jul 15, 2020
Where previous research into second-hand commodities has focused on dispossession, commodity sphe... more Where previous research into second-hand commodities has focused on dispossession, commodity spheres, and negative contamination, we consider the post-purchase resingularisation and rituals that consumers undertake to preserve invested meaning. Drawing on data gathered from phenomenological interviews with vintage clothing enthusiasts in England and Wales we provide an account of different types of contamination and resingularisation processes. These include new forms of positive and negative contamination where the self becomes a potential pollutant detracting from a good's ability to actualise displaced meanings.
Teaching note – Critical pedagogies: practical examples from the marketing classroom
Journal of Marketing Management
Journal of Consumer Research
The objects we consume increasingly exist in digital form, from audiobooks and digital photograph... more The objects we consume increasingly exist in digital form, from audiobooks and digital photographs to social media profiles and avatars. Digital objects are often argued to be less valued, personally meaningful, and self-relevant than their physical counterparts and are consequently dismissed as poor candidates for possession. Yet, studies have identified highly meaningful, even irreplaceable, digital possessions. In this article, we account for these contradictory narratives surrounding digital possessions, arguing that digital objects are not inherently unsuited to possession, but rather their affordances may not align with consumers’ imagined affordances (i.e., the object affordances that consumers anticipate). Drawing from a qualitative study of 25 consumers and their digital possessions, we identify three recurring types of affordance misalignment—missing affordances, covert affordances, and deficient affordances—that mediate how consumers and digital objects interact (pragmati...
ARTICLE Manufacturing Customers
The fundamental question we pose in this article is how should we understand marketing in the age... more The fundamental question we pose in this article is how should we understand marketing in the age of increasingly integrated and networked customer databases? This article argues that new forms of database marketing are best described as customer production processes that rely on the exploitation of the multitude of consumer life. We suggest that the recent increase in available consumer data, computational power and analytical skills leads to a reorganization of the gaze of marketers and increasingly reverses the Fordist articulation of production and consumption. More specifically, instead of flexibly adjusting production regimes to shifting consumption patterns, database marketers collapse the production–consumption dichotomy by manufacturing customers as commodities. Hence, theories about the role of surveillance and simulation technologies for strategies of economic value creation need to be updated in order to acknowledge the evolution of database marketing into a central site...
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
In this article, we introduce an affordance-orientated approach for the study of digital possessi... more In this article, we introduce an affordance-orientated approach for the study of digital possessions. We identify affordances as a source of value for digital possessions and argue that dominant meaning-orientated approaches do not enable us to fully appreciate these sources of value. Our work recognizes that value is released and experienced in “the doing”—people must do things with digital objects to locate and obtain value in and from them. We distinguish three levels of affordance for digital possessions—low, mid, and high—and introduce the concept of digital incorporation to explain how the three levels of affordances come together, with the individual’s own intentionality to enable the achievement of goals. We draw from postphenomenological interviews with 47 individuals in the UK to provide a possession-based and lived experience approach to affordances that sheds new light on their vital role in everyday life and goals.
Digital practices tracing: studying consumer lurking in digital environments
Journal of Marketing Management
The Routledge Companion to Critical Marketing, 2018
Marketing for the purpose of redefining boundaries in the study of power for marketing and consum... more Marketing for the purpose of redefining boundaries in the study of power for marketing and consumer research, surveying the state of research to date and suggest new directions for research. The chapter offers an entrée for those new to the study of power and for the more familiarised reader, it provides a hopefully useful point of reference and departure. Drawing from political and social theory, the original map focused on sovereign, cultural and discursive models of power and was used to establish familial relationships between power concepts and consumer and marketing research. It based its delimitation of sovereign type approaches to power on a Dahlian conception of RE-MAPPING POWER FOR CRITICAL MARKETING AND CONSUMER RESEARCH 3 power as a zero sum, quantitative capacity, where market agents with the most individual or collective resources and skills were deemed powerful. The map also located cultural power at the level of strategic operations carried out by resource rich businesses that have the most say in how market and consumer reality are to be ordered. Making a break with these negative conceptualisations of power as both destructive and repressive, discursive power, was introduced, defining power as productive, relational and exercised across all members of a field. Like its predecessor, the new proposed cartography described in this chapter also reflects the term's complex theoretical roots, not in the spirit of forcing convergences, but rather to help critical marketing and consumer researchers, engage with the study of power more rigorously. Cognizant that power is variously defined according to its theoretical roots (Dowding, 2012; Clegg, 1989; Haugaard, 2002), the formulation of an exact definition of power is omitted in favour of carrying out a comparative analysis of theories of power and discussing their implications for critical marketing and consumer research. The result of this exercise is a conceptual map that provides a contextualized and applied understanding of power. The framework is updated in two significant ways. To begin with, the power territories mapped out in the original cartography have been repopulated to reflect research carried out since the first map was published. Secondly, in order to achieve greater distinction between cultural and discursive models of power and be consistent with theories of power in use in our field, cultural power is now replaced by hegemonic power. This provides a clearer demarcation between the theoretical traditions that inform these two models and RE-MAPPING POWER FOR CRITICAL MARKETING AND CONSUMER RESEARCH 4 enables a more precise articulation and differentiation of agendas, including a clearer identification of steering concepts and preferred methodological approaches. Reading the Map There are still only a handful of comprehensive studies of power in consumer and marketing research (e.g. Denegri-Knott et al. 2006; Desmond, 2003; Hopkinson & Blois, 2013). More generally, the term appears tangentially linked to other related concepts such as consumer resistance, empowerment, sovereignty or agency. In revisiting the map, Haugaard's (2002) conceptual map to power is once again borrowed. The starting point is the partitioning of two broad territories depending of their theoretical origins either in social and political theory. In the social theory tradition, definitions of power are dependent on broader explanations of how society works. Historically, social theories of power have dealt with structural inequalities embedded in society, and sought to expose the ways in which these are reproduced and how they may be subverted. Political theory, in turn has pursued the development of more precise and scientifically grounded way to measuring power. From these two branches, and in order to provide a more useful guide to critical marketing and consumer researchers, three further distinct models have been identified. 1. Sovereign power (political theory) 2. Hegemonic power (social theory) 3. Discursive power (social theory) This revised map, as its precursor did, provides a necessarily selective overview of some key literature. The map is not a comprehensive survey of all work that alludes to the study of power in marketing and consumer research, nor does it provide a synthesis of all power theories. Instead, it offers an impression of what the field looks RE-MAPPING POWER FOR CRITICAL MARKETING AND CONSUMER RESEARCH 5 like, and draws on some illustrative examples to indicate how concepts have been used. Thus, the relationships that are presented for each stream are selective and by no means complete. The filial bonds are of first degree, for example between de Certeau and wide range of consumer researchers who have found his distinctions between strategy and tactics of important analytical and theoretical value when approaching consumer power and resistance. A bold arrow links such first order affiliations. Dotted lines are used to show weaker relationships. This is the case for many marketing studies located in the sovereign power model, where power, whilst not defined, appears to adhere to a quantitative definition of power typical of the political tradition (see figure 1).
Re-mapping Power for Critical Marketing and Consumer Research, inTadajewski, M, Higgins, M., Denegri-Knott, J. and Varman, R. (forthcoming, 2018) The Routledge Companion to Critical Marketing
Videogames now enable players to spend virtual fortunes on exotic virtual goods and even create a... more Videogames now enable players to spend virtual fortunes on exotic virtual goods and even create and sell virtual artefacts. Online consumers may also browse endlessly through virtual marketplaces and create and display virtual goods. These virtual commodities are desired and enjoyed as if they were real, but are not actually bought, or owned in a material sense – often resulting in frustration amongst marketers. In this paper we account for virtualised consumption by highlighting its pleasures. We start by historicising the trend towards imaginary consumption practices, depicting virtual consumption as the latest stage in an ongoing transformation of consumption from a focus on utility through to emotional value, sign value and finally playful experience. Viewed from this perspective, we consider the role of emerging virtual consumption spaces as liminoid, transformational play-spaces and explore examples of consumer practices found in these spaces. Ultimately we argue that virtual ...
Introducing and advancing Critical Marketing Studies
The Routledge Companion to Critical Marketing
Cyberdelinquency
The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology
The database as new means of production
The fundamental question we pose in this article is how should we understand marketing in the age... more The fundamental question we pose in this article is how should we understand marketing in the age of increasingly integrated and networked customer databases? This article argues that new forms of database marketing are best described as customer production processes that rely on the exploitation of the multitude of consumer life. We suggest that the recent increase in available consumer data, computational power and analytical skills leads to a reorganization of the gaze of marketers and increasingly reverses the Fordist articulation of production and consumption. More specifically, instead of flexibly adjusting production regimes to shifting consumption patterns, database marketers collapse the production‐consumption dichotomy by manufacturing customers as commodities. Hence, theories about the role of surveillance and simulation technologies for strategies of economic value creation need to be updated in order to acknowledge the evolution of database marketing into a central site...
A relational ontology of objects & possession
The SAGE Handbook of Consumer Culture
Introduction to Digital Virtual Consumption
Digital Virtual Consumption
The digital virtual dimension of the meal
In a not so distant future 3D food printers are poised to take over the preparation of our meals,... more In a not so distant future 3D food printers are poised to take over the preparation of our meals, lightening the load of meal preparation by taking on ‘the difficult parts of making food that is hard and/or time consuming to make fully by hand’ (Foodini, 2014). Similarly, food photocopiers that reproduce the molecular structure of food hold the promise of repurposing leftovers into brand new meals (Electrolux, 2009). This future may be unpalatable to some because it supposes a corrosion of human knowledge and a brutal displacement and reduction of human competence by ever-increasing automation of domestic practices within the home kitchen (see for example Firat and Dholakia, 1998). A less extreme, but more present infiltration of technology within the kitchen is that of devices like tablets, smartphones and laptops that are routinely used in preparing meals. Based on a global survey of 7,000 cooks, Allrecipes.com (2013) found that nearly half of respondents used smartphones while sh...
ACR European Advances, 2011
Consumers behaving badly : deviation or innovation ? A conceptual exploration of empowered communications online-The case of consumer-producer relationships on the web
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Papers by Janice Denegri-Knott