James Cronin’s research while affiliated with Lancaster University and other places

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Publications (16)


The interrupted world: Surrealist disruption and altered escapes from reality
  • Article

March 2020

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55 Reads

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16 Citations

Marketing Theory

Scott Jones

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James Cronin

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Following Breton’s writings on surreality, we outline how unexpected challenges to consumers’ assumptive worlds have the potential to alter how their escape from reality is experienced. We introduce the concept of ‘surrealist disruption’ to describe ontological discontinuities that disrupt the common-sense frameworks normally used by consumers and that impact upon their ability to suspend their disbeliefs and experience self-loss. To facilitate our theorization, we draw upon interviews with consumers about their changing experiences as viewers of the realist political TV drama House of Cards against a backdrop of disruptive real-world political events. Our analyses reveal that, when faced with a radically altered external environment, escape from reality changes from a restorative, playful experience to an uneasy, earnest one characterized by hysteretic angst, intersubjective sense-making and epistemological community-building. This reconceptualizes escapism as more emotionally multivalenced than previously considered in marketing theory and reveals consumers’ subject position to an aggregative social fabric beyond their control.


Lifeway Alibis: The biographical bases for unruly bricolage

July 2018

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33 Reads

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6 Citations

Marketing Theory

The function of marketplace ideology to provide a framework that guides individuals' conduct as consumers is well recognized, though less is known about how individuals address, resist or reconcile themselves to such ideology. Drawing upon 'lifeway alibis', assembled from a life course reading of de Certeauean tactics, this article deepens our understanding of how the ideology of nutritionism is renegotiated in the context of dietary health to better accommodate individuals' life events, circumstances and timing in lives. Based on the interpretations of interview data, we argue that biographical matrices must be observed as principal facilitators for critical reflexivity beyond antagonistic and politico-collective motivations. Here, we consider critically reflexive behaviour-or unruly bricolage-to be organized around dynamic life experiences and circumstances rather than statically against marketplace ideology itself. This outlook prompts us to recognize biography as a catalyst for circumventing certain ideological mandates while the overall ideology remains perpetuated throughout circumvention.


Managing collective effervescence: ‘Zomsumption’ and postemotional fandom

July 2018

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76 Reads

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20 Citations

Marketing Theory

Based on an analysis of the YouTuber–fan community, we theorize the ‘living dead’ nature of collective effervescence under postemotional conditions. We introduce the concept of zomsumption, whereby ‘dead’ emotions are carefully synthesized, governed and presented as ‘living’ throughout the communal consumption of a totem. Here, we explore fans’ efforts to ensure the stability and longevity of their community through the lifelessness of their emotional behaviour. By forfeiting genuine and unfiltered emotions in favour of their rationalization and governance, fans access the illusory potential for more manageable forms of sociability and totemic worship. This outlook prompts us to reconsider the nature of the relationship between consumption communities and dominant structures of feeling. We suggest that consumption communities should not be presumed liberatory retreats from such structures as, contrarily, some may function as microcosms for reflecting and even incubating the wider postemotional order.


Mapping the extended frontiers of escapism: binge-watching and hyperdiegetic exploration

March 2018

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184 Reads

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46 Citations

Through a micro-ethnographic engagement with consumers’ binge-watching experiences of the web-TV series House of Cards, this videography explores what we consider to be the ‘extended frontiers’ of escapism. In contrast to passive/active classifications of escapism which risk reducing escapist fare to a textual resource which can be categorised discretely at the point of consumption, we consider ‘sustained encounters’ with escapist fare as appropriable textures characterised by ongoing and less immediately discernible processes. Drawing upon the concept of hyperdiegesis, we consider potentially ‘projective’ forms of narrative transportation in binge-watching; heterochronic breaks from normal patterns of time; and post-object behaviours. In doing so, we outline how forms of escapism traditionally considered passive may under certain conditions represent much richer and more complex enterprises than previously imagined.


Bodysnatching in the marketplace: Market-focused health activism and compelling narratives of dys-appearance

November 2017

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54 Reads

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15 Citations

Marketing Theory

This article theorizes how market-focused health activism catalyses market change through revealing the ill-effects that consumers’ conformity with market-shaped expectations and ideals has on their bodies and embodied lives. An understanding of this activism is developed by analysing a vicarious form of ‘bodily dys-appearance’ which is used in Jamie Oliver’s televised documentary, Sugar Rush (2015), to narratively provoke corporeal anxieties among audiences. In our analysis, we borrow tropes from the science fiction film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, to interpret themes centred on a threat, a victim and a hero. We argue that market-focused health activism problematizes the neo-liberal logic of personal responsibility and promotes market intervention as the only means to insulate and safeguard the body from harm. Where extant theorization of consumers’ antagonism towards the market hinges mostly on politically or intellectually motivated resistance, this article demonstrates how somatically oriented concerns operate alternatively to invoke activism.


‘When people take action ….’ Mainstreaming malcontent and the role of the celebrity institutional entrepreneur

September 2015

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64 Reads

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30 Citations

As the challenges of sustainability intensify at a global level, it is becoming increasingly more important to encourage, support and promote the mainstream adoption of mindful and ecologically-viable consumption. Drawing on institutional theory and an interpretive investigation of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Fish Fight, we explore a relatively widespread phenomenon, the celebrity campaign. We consider how such campaigns galvanise mainstream malcontent by creating mythic plots; personalising adversaries; and framing issues to encourage articulation of malcontent. Though malcontent may be fleeting, we argue that this can set in motion institutional change towards sustainable production and consumption. Celebrity campaigns demonstrate the dynamic and interrelated character of consumer and industry groups in a way that might inform other change efforts.


Citations (13)


... None of the theories has been excessively utilized, indicating an absence of consistent dependency on a particular set of theories in this field of AC. Below, we explain the theories Hoang, Cronin, and Skandalis (2023) Futureless Vicissitudes: Gestural Anti-Consumption and the Reflexively Impotent (Anti-)Consumer ...

Reference:

Anti‐Consumption Research: A Systematic Literature Review and Research Agenda
Futureless vicissitudes: Gestural anti-consumption and the reflexively impotent (anti-)consumer
  • Citing Article
  • Full-text available
  • January 2023

Marketing Theory

... 3). Thus, consumption practices are deeply intertwined with a country's economic and social systems, and the consumer culture is determined by the commodification of the everyday life of a country through advertising and marketing (Fitchett & Cronin, 2022). One example is the Mexican beer Corona, which associates the brand with the lifestyle of sunny Mexican beaches in its promotional activities in other countries. ...

De-romanticising the market: advances in Consumer Culture Theory
  • Citing Article
  • January 2022

... Social experiences involve interactions with others that foster the development of communication and social skills (Jones et al., 2022). In an educational context, as is the context of this study, teachers engage with colleagues, subject advisors, and learners. ...

Celebrity brand break-up: Fan experiences of para-loveshock
  • Citing Article
  • June 2022

Journal of Business Research

... Today plastic materials are offering numerous advantages such as lightweight, easy processing, and reasonable cost, making them indispensable in various sectors such as transport (automotive, aeronautics, railways), sports, textiles, and construction [1]. However, these materials also present significant environmental challenges due to the origin of the raw materials required for their production and related end-of-life aspects. ...

Plastic: a passengerial marketplace icon

Consumption Markets & Culture

... The same can be said for the recent business and engineering texts (Dincelli & Yayla, 2022;Dwivedi et al., 2022;Lee et al., 2021): they are typically earnest, wholesome, and sanitised (Baudrillard, 2003(Baudrillard, [2000). The mysterious "inhumanity of desire" is omitted (Hietanen et al., 2020); the homo demens-in-between fiction and rationality-is not acknowledged (Cronin & Fitchett, 2022); "the border between games and adult play" is not inspected or interrogated (Harviainen & Frank, 2018). ...

Consumer culture theory and its contented discontent: an interview with Søren Askegaard

... We have noted how the power of videography stems from its movement, its overwhelming immediacy and immanence, that which can bring about 'shocks to thought'. But similarly, with people increasingly falling into uninterrupted online experiences and concomitant social isolation, ever-decreasing attention spans, and the rise of filter bubbles and outrage culture (Boler and Davis 2018;Hoang et al. 2022;Munster 2011;Turkle 2011;Ulver 2021), do we not also see the negative side effects of how social technologies demand our experiences in full bloom? Is one grammatization process of videography the gradual withering away of writing and reading, and in some sense also the patience of thought and abstraction, if all mediation moves towards the 'real' of transparent experience? ...

Reference:

Videography
High-fidelity consumption and the claustropolitan structure of feeling

Marketing Theory

... Some consumer groups seem to accept the nihilistic baseline assumption that values do not exist and that the only claim to meaning an individual can make is to manifest their own will and desires embodied through consumption (Eckhardt and Bardhi, 2020). As Cronin and Fitchett (2021) argue, this is a logical conclusion to neo-liberal society where consumption is seen as an emancipatory realisation of one's true and unique potential. In more concrete terms, Dion and Borraz (2017) point towards a new wave of nihilism in luxury consumption. ...

Lunch of the last human: Nutritionally complete food and the fantasies of market-based progress

Marketing Theory

... The concept of experience marketing is explored by [29] emphasizing building loyalty and relationships with consumers. [30] The idea of changing the escapist experience for consumers was developed [31] by placing the escapist experience as the primary dimension [32] and underlining the importance of understanding the role of the escapist experience in the consumer experience. ...

The interrupted world: Surrealist disruption and altered escapes from reality
  • Citing Article
  • March 2020

Marketing Theory

... Binge watching has increasingly been recognized as a form of escapism and emotional regulation. Individuals who struggle with intense emotional distress may use binge watching to disengage from their real-world problems by immersing themselves in fictional narratives [15]. This form of media consumption allows them to temporarily avoid confronting painful emotions, creating a sense of emotional relief and control [16]. ...

Mapping the extended frontiers of escapism: binge-watching and hyperdiegetic exploration
  • Citing Article
  • March 2018

... Conservation of Resources (COR) Theory proposes that individuals are motivated by the level of resources they have at any given time and have goals of protecting current resources and gaining new ones (Hobfoll, 1989;Hobfoll et al., 2018). Consumers are resourceful bricoleurs in selecting, discarding, and assimilating available resources to negotiate states of liminality (Cronin and Malone, 2018;Hester, 2005;Tonner, 2016;Kerrane et al. 2020). Consumer resource categories may include marketplace systems, expert advice, financial, cultural and social support networks (i.e., family and friends), community resources, and personal knowledge or past experiences. ...

Lifeway Alibis: The biographical bases for unruly bricolage
  • Citing Article
  • July 2018

Marketing Theory