John Schouten

Memorial University of Newfoundland · Faculty of Business Administration

Consumer movements strive to change markets when those markets produce value outcomes that conflict with consumers' higher-order values. Prior studies argue that consumer movements primarily seek to challenge these value outcomes by championing alternative higher-order values or by pressuring institutions to change market governance mechanisms. Bui...

Purpose: Market logics have increasingly dominated consumer life worlds. Consumers may embrace marketization, or they may resist it, try to escape it, rebel against it, or actively manage its effects. This paper examines the marketization of elderly care (in the form of transactional service provider relationships) and how consumers apply humanizin...

This study delivers a clearer understanding of the constitution of the datapreneurial consumer, the role of the market in that construction, and the implications for consumer identity projects in the age of Big Data and an increasingly data- and surveillance-driven society. The study uses a theoretical framework of the “quantified self” (QS) to exa...

Businesses and consumers frequently exploit differences in laws and policies across jurisdictions to circumvent local laws, regulations, or restrictions. This practice, known as regulatory arbitrage, can have negative consequences for both business and social welfare. Although previous research examines regulatory arbitrage in specific contexts suc...

The dominant social paradigm (DSP) defines the basic belief structures and practices of marketplace actors and is manifested in existing exchange structures. Sustainability – a so-called megatrend – challenges the DSP by questioning its underlying assumptions, resulting in tensions or conflicts for different marketplace actors. This study examines...

Identity construction involves accumulating cultural, social, and symbolic capital, with initial endowments being accrued through socialization into one’s habitus. This research explores the experiences of individuals that feel a lack of capital, which leads to ambiguity regarding their identities and places in the world. Through in-depth interview...

Marketing scholars with sociological and anthropological leanings have made great strides in uncovering strategic and theoretical implications of consumer collectives and consumption-driven market phenomena. It has not been very common that their perspectives have been brought to bear on retailing practice or theory. This ethnographic study examine...

Consumer ethnographers by virtue of their craft develop levels of knowledge and understanding about people that run deeper than what they report to corporate clients or in the pages of academic journals. It may be knowledge that does not tell a particular brand story or serve a popular theoretical framework, and yet it matters. This story plays in...

Certain institutions traditionally have had broad socializing influence over their members, providing templates for identity that comprehend all aspects of life from the existential and moral to the mundanely material. Marketization and detraditionalization undermine that socializing role. This study examines the consequences when, for some members...

Criticizing marketing is easy, and its detractors are doing a good job of it. But going beyond and proposing an approach, tools and a vision for change is another matter altogether. Diane Martin and John Schouten have embraced the task. They explore the path of sustainable marketing with a view to transforming consumption practices and, more broadl...

Modern man’s unsustainable systems of production and consumption are symptoms of underlying problems in how we understand and relate to the material world. Socially constructed dualities between the social and natural sciences and between meaning and materiality have encouraged societies to indulge in magical thinking about the ability of material...

This research tests a theory of consumption-driven market emergence (CDME): a process wherein embedded entrepreneurs, multiple and dispersed actors from a particular habitus, innovate products outside of mainstream market logics leading to the distributed development of communities of practice around the innovations. A key feature of CDME is the in...

Critiquer le marketing, l’exercice est facile et bien mené par ses détracteurs. Mais aller au-delà et proposer une démarche, des outils, une vision, n’est pas simple. C’est à cet exercice que se sont attelé Diane Martin et John Schouten. Ils proposent d’explorer la voie d’un marketing durable au service d’une transformation des pratiques de consomm...

New market development is well theorized from a firm-centered perspective, but research has paid scant attention to the emergence of markets from consumption activity. The exceptions conceptualize market emergence as a product of consumer struggle against prevailing market logics. This study develops a model of consumption-driven market emergence i...

In recent years the ecological and humanitarian reasons for businesses to become environmentally and socially sustainable have become clearer than ever. With less fanfare, the business rationale for sustainable prac. tices has also begun to clarify. Many marketing companies, including some of the world’s largest and most successful (e.g., Walmart,...

This ethnographic actor-network and translation-theoretic study explores the creation and implementation of a municipal program for the curbside collection and composting of household food waste. Implications of the study include the need to recognize and manage the agency of non-human actors in efforts to bring about a more sustainable society.

A nascent body of literature that explores how markets are created and shaped captures the imagination of many researchers. This roundtable provides a first opportunity to discuss the nature of market system dynamics, its relation to other areas of study, and its future research agenda.

The dividing line between researcher and poet is imaginary. In vice versa form, these consumer researcher offer new scholarly insights that only the freer voice of verse could make. Celebrating, lamenting, loving, and detesting -they challenge us to learn more about consumption's lure through the full wealth of artistic language. David Mick / Univ...

Transcendent customer experiences (TCEs), which have aspects of flow and/or peak experience, can generate lasting shifts in beliefs and attitudes, including subjective self-transformation. With data from a pre-test/post-test quasi-experimental field experiment we examine the impact of TCEs on customers’ integration in a brand community. Because TCE...

This feminist re‐examination of an ethnography of Harley‐Davidson motorcycle owners uncovers a world of motivations, behaviors, and experiences undiscovered in the original work. The structure and ethos of subculture are understood differently when examined through the lens of feminist theory. Through the voices of women riders in a hyper‐masculine...

Loyal alumni are a mainstay of financial support for many universities. This empirical study of university alumni situates the emerging theory of brand community within the world of university development and advancement. The study measures key relationships that one would expect to find in a healthy university brand community. Most importantly, th...

Relationship marketing has made its way into the practices of university administrations. With it have also arrived many problems associated with the aggressive use of CRM technologies. One particularly effective and healthy approach to relationship marketing in higher education is to treat the university, with all of its stakeholders, as a brand c...

Consumer researchers are wrestling with the crisis of representation that has challenged contiguous disciplines over the past decade. Traditional or conventional prose articles seem increasingly insufficient as vessels for representing our understandings and experiences. In this article, we demonstrate how poetry contributes to the research enterpr...

A brand community from a customer-experiential perspective is a fabric of relationships in which the customer is situated. Crucial relationships include those between the customer and the brand, between the customer and the firm, between the customer and the product in use, and among fellow customers. This paper delves ethnographically into a brand...

This paper presents an ethnography of the brandfest, a brand centered event that is strategically important to the cultivation of customer loyalty. The paper discusses specifically the mechanisms and processes that appear to be integral to building such relationships as those between consumers and the products that they own, and among consumers the...

This article introduces the subculture of consumption as an analytic category through which to better understand consumers and the manner in which they organize their lives and identities. Recognizing that consumption activities, product categories, or even brands may serve as the basis for interaction and social cohesion, the concept of the subcul...

In this study we use depth interviews and interpretive analysis to examine the experience of divorce from a consumer behavior perspective, and in so doing, we extend recent consumer research on role transitions and add a new and formerly neglected dimension to extant scholarship on divorce. We begin with a discussion of prior research on divorce an...

The consumption of aesthetic plastic surgery is examined within the broader context of daily life in an investigation of the motives and the self-concept dynamics underlying this symbolic consumer behavior. Data were collected in multiple, in-depth, ethnographic interviews, and analyzed by a constant comparative method revealing insights into both...

Market segmentation and positioning allow marketers to differentiate themselves from competitors in a manner that is valued by customers and results in competitive advantage. Through an analysis of the financial services market this study develops a segmentation and positioning strategy based on the proposition that consumers employ many kinds of p...

Examines the concept of differentiating product offerings, including consumer services, and positioning them in relation to customer needs and perceptions. Approaches the subject of service positioning via an interesting case study. Concludes with recommended guidelines for the positioning of consumer services, but notes that a case study, whilst a...

Integrating notions of involvement and work gratification this paper explores the experiences of craftsmen deeply involved in their occupations. A model of production as consumption is proposed in which the craftsman consumes both inputs and outputs in the process of production. Depth interviews explore with informants the satisfactions they receiv...