Marketing Group Research Seminar

Speakers: Dr Robin Canniford, University of Melbourne, and Dr Timothy Hill, University of Bath

Venue: Bedford Square, Room 1-02

Abstract

This paper explains factors that empower consumer activism. Through archival and ethnographic data charting twenty-five years of protests in the English Premier League, we show that necessary reforms in this market framed soccer fans as unnecessary for market productivity, enabling their displacement and alienation. Over decades, these frames have also acted as barriers to frame alignment and resource mobilization thereby weakening activism against firms. We find that consumers have overcome these barriers through events that create modular movements, fluid and mobile organizations that gather a multiplicity of heterogeneous groups with capacities for translocal action. In contrast to theories of consumer movements as adversarial competitions with firms, the power of these organizations hinges on consumers demonstrating value to other market stakeholders. We discuss how this alteration of status enables consumers to participate in power practices that reframe market assemblages.

You are invited to attend a local pub for further conversation after the talk.