Marketplace myths are commonly conceptualized as cultural resources that attract consumers to a consumption activity or brand. This theoretical orientation is prone to overstating the extent to which consumers' identity investments in a field of consumption are motivated by an associated...

Taste has been conceptualized as a boundary-making mechanism, yet there is limited theory on how it enters into daily practice. In this article, the authors develop a practice-based framework of taste through qualitative and quantitative analysis of a popular home design blog, interviews with...

Place attachment is one’s strong emotional bond with a specific location. While there are numerous studies on the topic, the literature pays little attention to commercial settings. This is because they are seen as too insipid to rouse attachment. Consumer research, however, suggests...

Prior research has shown that television viewing cultivates perceptions of the prevalence of societal affluence through a memory-based process that relies on the application of judgmental heuristics. This article extends this research by examining (1) whether cultivation effects generalize to...

Despite the rapid and dramatic changes in the structure of the American family over the past thirty years (e.g., divorce, single parenting), consumer researchers have largely neglected the issue of how alternative family forms influence consumer behavior. The authors' initial inquiry into this...

Over the past decade, materialism has emerged as an important research topic. Materialism is generally viewed as the value placed on the acquisition of material objects. Previous research finds that high levels of material values are negatively associated with subjective well-being. However,...

Most measures of consumer behavior have been developed and employed in the United States. Thus, relatively little is known about the cross-cultural applicability of these measures. Using Richins and Dawson's (1992) Material Values Scale (MVS) as an exemplar, this article focuses on the problems...

Over the past 2 decades, a large body of research has examined how materialism is formed and how this value influences well-being. Although these studies have substantially contributed to our understanding of materialism, they shed little light on this value's relationship to consumer behavior....

Consumer researchers have commonly analyzed marketplace performances as liminal events structured by context-specific role playing, norms of reciprocity, and cocreative collaborations. As a consequence, this literature remains theoretically mute on questions related to the sociological...

Consumer researchers have tended to equate consumer moralism with normative condemnations of mainstream consumer culture. Consequently, little research has investigated the multifaceted forms of identity work that consumers can undertake through more diverse ideological forms of consumer...