A conversational approach to consumer vulnerability: performativity,representations, and storytelling

ABSTRACT

This conceptual article provides a conversational analysis of consumer vulnerability, which unveils how vulnerability is made through conversations and interactions among actors holding different market power positions. Three types of conversations prove fruitful to pursue a transformative research agenda improving vulnerable consumers’ well-being: (1) performativity, which unpacks agency and finalism in conversations; (2) social representations, which reveal uneven power positions and normativity expressed by participants in a conversation; and (3) storytelling, which reveals alternative and more powerful persuasive mechanisms of conversations framed as stories. Illustration for these types of conversations comes from extensive review of the literature on consumer vulnerability and from a critical consideration of my life-as-researcher with consumers as varied as gays, homeless people, migrants, second-generation immigrants, and subcultures of consumption.     

Persona-fied brands: managing branded persons through persona

We investigate how the concept of persona can be used in managing brand persona-fication. Based on interviews with informants working across the gastronomy sector, we examine the characteristics of the chef persona, and the role that chef persona plays in restaurant management. We differentiate persona-fied brands from other human brands, we dimensionalise the chef persona, and we identify two possible models of brand management through persona: (1) the distributed or fragmented persona-fication of the brand, which is based on a disjunction of different facets of the brand persona, each embodied in different persons; and (2) the unified persona-fication of the brand, which is based on the conjunction of the different facets of the brand persona. Here, the persona is embodied in a single person who embodies the different facets of the brand persona. Our analysis surfaces theoretical resonance with the performative turn in marketing scholarship.     

Wild Dragons in the City: Urban Political Economy,Affordable Housing Development and the Performative World‐making of Economic Models

This article explores the potential to mobilize in an urban context the key insights of the burgeoning literature on the performativity of economics. It argues that our understanding of contemporary urban political‐economic transformation needs to explicitly recognize the active role of economics in making and remaking the urban world, as opposed to merely describing and analysing it in some kind of passive, detached fashion. It develops this argument through the elaboration of a case study of just such world‐making in action: the growing use in the United Kingdom, since the early 2000s, of economic models for assessing the viability of affordable housing provision in new residential developments. The world of urban redevelopment that such models attempt to describe formulaically has, the article submits, increasingly come to act according to the model and the assumptions it contains; the model, in this sense, has been progressively actualized in the urban landscape. The article conceptualizes such performative economic models as examples of what Michel Callon calls economics ‘in the wild’, and it focuses on the work of the leading commercial developer and marketer of such models in the affordable housing planning environment over the last decade — a consulting company called Three Dragons.     

Translation Mechanisms of International Market Shaping: The Transformation of the St. Petersburg Bread Market from 1997–2007

There is a need to understand how indigenous markets transform following foreign entry. We refer to this transformation as international market shaping—the progression of a set of cross-border activities that contribute to changes in economic exchange. Building on the markets-as-practice literature and an explorative longitudinal single-case study conducted in the St. Petersburg bread market (1997–2007), we study international market-shaping mechanisms that translate a foreign company’s idea of a market into market practices. We contribute to the literature by identifying four translation mechanisms of international market shaping: advice, demonstration, requirements, and management mobility.     

Economics is not always performative: some limits for performativity

The phenomenon of performativity has recently sparked debates about the status of the economic discourse. This paper aims to discuss the subjectivist idea that if economics ‘performs’ (shapes) social reality, rather than merely reflects it, then every theory can be considered ‘true.’ My main goal is to point out three limits of performativity. First, not all theories can be performative since some do not produce empirical landmarks for agents. Second, social institutions restrict performativity. Third, I emphasize the necessity that a theory to be self-fulfilling. This article is a prelude to a new kind of performative studies based on an original definition: a theory performs the world if it implies a behavioral regularity which leads to a general coordination between agents. That is to say, if it becomes a convention à la David Lewis.     

Tourism and transformation: negotiating metaphors,experiencing change

The article introduces this special issue on tourism and transformation. After offering a brief review of the place and significance of ‘transformation’ in social sciences studies of tourism – from ‘impact studies’ to ethnographies of tourists and, more recently, ‘tourist media studies’ – we propose to take one step further and focus our attention on the performativity and reflexivity of ‘transformation’. Our main argument is that much may be gained analytically by considering how notions and experiences of transformation are addressed, negotiated and purposefully deployed in tourism contexts. We conclude with an outline of each of the contributions to this special issue, stressing that the collection re-opens the issue of transformation in tourism and provides new insights into how experiences-turned-metaphors and metaphors-turned-experiences influence both the travel experience and the development of theory.